You’re Probably Wrong About Everything: A Friendly Argument Against Certainty

It’s never been easier to be loudly, confidently wrong – and never more dangerous to admit you’re not sure.

Photo by Mateusz Wacławek on Unsplash

A father and daughter in Texas stop speaking. Not because of a tragic family rift or long-held grudge, but because of a Facebook post. He shared an article questioning vaccine mandates; she accused him of spreading dangerous misinformation. The comment thread spiraled into mutual accusations of ignorance and harm. 

She unfriended him. Thanksgiving was cancelled. And their bond collapsed – not under the weight of disagreement – but under the force of certainty. Both believed they were absolutely, morally right, and that the other had joined the wrong tribe.

This isn’t an outlier. It’s the atmosphere we all breathe now. We live in a world where certainty has become a weapon, where people aren’t just wrong – they’re dangerous, disloyal, or irredeemable. It has become a toxic climate where certainty is the cost of admission into your chosen tribe, and pointing out complexity risks punishment by the exile of cancel culture.  

So in a world where everyone is a walking podcast, certainty has become a cultural currency. People speak about politics, identity, economics, science, and morality with supreme confidence, even when the evidence is thin and the topic is vast and layered.

When someone says, “I believe in free markets” or “I believe in universal healthcare” or “I believe gender is a spectrum”, they’re not just sharing a policy position. In today’s cultural climate, they’re often announcing who they are and, just as importantly, who they are not. 

Left or right. Anti-vax or pro-vax. Climate-conscious or climate-denial. These aren’t just groups with different perspectives. They’re warring camps, and loyalty to the camp is increasingly defined by how certain you are – and how vocally you denounce the other side. Nuance, doubt, or a willingness to consider the opposition can look like weakness, or betrayal. 

The false comfort of certainty

The pressure to have instant, certain answers has turned discourse into theatre. And in theatre, the show must go on, even if the script is nonsense.

George Orwell once warned that political language is designed “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” But this wind blows across every field now. Social media thrives on certainty. Algorithms reward conviction over nuance, and volume over depth. Admit uncertainty, and you vanish from the feed.

But uncertainty is human. It's honest. It's useful. And it's necessary.

We live in a time when saying “I’m not sure” is confused with being uninformed or indecisive. But it’s a form of intellectual humility, and humility is the birthplace of growth. When you admit you don’t have certainty, you create space to learn, to listen, and to change.

There’s also an emotional danger to certainty. It breeds tribalism. If I’m right, you must be wrong. If my view is absolute, yours must be dangerous. Political certainty has become a kind of moral purity test, and failing it makes you an enemy, not a human. This isn’t discourse – it’s dogma. And it shrinks us.

This kind of tribalism is ancient. Evolutionarily speaking, aligning with a tribe was the difference between survival and isolation. Once a belief becomes part of our tribe’s shared reality, challenging its certainty feels like an attack on the tribe itself. And that feels like a threat to our belonging – our safety. 

So certainty offers psychological comfort. It tells us: You belong. You are safe. You know what’s right. In an era of dizzying complexity, certainty feels like an anchor in stormy seas.

But that comfort comes at a cost. Instead of thinking, we perform. And that performance reinforces the tribe. To ask questions is to appear unfaithful, and to doubt is to risk expulsion from the tribe. 

That’s where cancel culture comes in.

The battleground of moral purity

At its best, cancel culture demands justice where traditional systems have failed. It calls out abuse, bigotry, and harm. But the darker side of cancel culture emerges when it becomes ritualised punishment for those who violate the script of accepted belief – not through malice, but through uncertainty.

A novelist tweets something awkward about a critic. A professor hesitates over pronouns. An actor voices a politically outdated opinion. In the blink of a headline, they’re not just criticised, they’re branded. And in this ecosystem, to be wrong once is to be wrong forever.

This isn’t justice. It’s moral absolutism. It’s a belief that right and wrong are clear-cut, that people can be summed up by their worst moment, and that uncertainty is an indulgence we can no longer tolerate.

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the culture wars, where issues like race, gender, education, and identity have become battlegrounds not of policy, but of moral purity. You don’t just support trans rights or question them – you’re either a compassionate ally or a dangerous ideologue. You don’t just worry about immigration or support open borders – you’re either a xenophobe or a bleeding heart.

There’s no space to say, “This is complicated,” without someone accusing you of cowardice or betrayal. Certainty is demanded. Ambiguity is punished.

The mainstream news cycle and social media algorithms feed this polarisation. They reward certain outrage, not the nuance of uncertainty. The more certain you appear, the more clicks, likes, and retweets you get. Doubt doesn’t trend.

The healing power of curiosity

Here’s the rub: certainty kills curiosity. If your side is obviously right, why listen? If your worldview is complete, what’s left to learn?

And so, we silo ourselves. We follow people who say what we already believe. We distrust media that challenges us. We villainise those who ask the ‘wrong’ questions.

So how do we move forward in a society that runs on certainty?

First, we can start by recognising the emotional function of certainty. It isn’t always about facts. It’s about fear, belonging, and identity. That doesn’t mean we should discard our beliefs, but that we should hold them with humility. 

Second, we can resist the pull of the tribe when it demands loyalty over truth. That might mean calling out your own side. Or listening, truly listening, to someone who thinks differently – not to defeat and humiliate them on Facebook, but to understand their position and, by doing so, more clearly define yours.

Third, we can normalise saying: “I don’t know.” It’s not a weakness. It’s an opening. It invites dialogue, discovery, growth. It’s how science progresses, how philosophy endures, how democracy survives.

Certainty feels powerful. It rallies the crowd, silences dissent, and draws a clean line between right and wrong. But in a pluralistic world of 8 billion minds and countless lived experiences, certainty can’t do all the work we ask of it. It can’t replace empathy. It can’t solve complexity. 

If we want to live in a society that’s freer, wiser, and more humane, we’ll need something rarer than certainty. We’ll need the courage to be unsure.