The Performance of Certainty

Why we present ourselves as more sure than we are and what it costs all of us

I want to start with an admission, because I think admissions are more interesting than arguments.

I do not know what happens after we die. I do not know whether consciousness is fundamental to reality or an emergent property of matter. I do not know whether the political position I lean towards is, on balance, correct, or whether I hold it because it reflects my temperament, my history, and the company I have kept. I have considered views and careful positions and genuine commitments, but they are held with an uncertainty that I think honesty requires me to acknowledge.

I almost never say this online. And I suspect you don't either.

This is what I want to think about today: the strange performance of certainty that social media demands of us, and what we are actually doing when we give it.

What if we could all just say, "I don't really know."

The Social Logic of Confidence and Certainty

Online communication selects for certainty the way certain ecosystems select for certain traits. Hedged, nuanced, genuinely uncertain speech does not travel well. It does not inspire sharing. It does not generate the quick emotional recognition, the "yes, exactly", that makes content spread. What travels is the confident assertion, the sharp formulation, the opinion stated as though it were a fact and the fact as though it were obvious.

This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is a form of social adaptation. We learn, mostly unconsciously, what the medium rewards, and we begin to produce more of it. The performance of certainty starts as a stylistic choice and ends, if we are not careful, as something that reshapes the way we actually think.

Because here is what I have noticed in myself, and what I think is worth paying careful attention to: when you habitually present a position with more confidence than you actually feel, it becomes harder, over time, to access the genuine uncertainty beneath it. The performance begins to colonise the interior. The mask, worn long enough, starts to become the face.

What Epistemic Humility Actually Is

Philosophers have a term for the appropriate calibration of confidence to evidence: epistemic humility. It does not mean doubting everything, or refusing to commit to positions, or treating all views as equally valid. It means holding your beliefs in proportion to the evidence and reasoning that support them, which almost always means holding them with more tentativeness than online discourse encourages.

The philosopher William James made a distinction that I find useful here: between living hypotheses and dead ones. A living hypothesis is one you genuinely entertain as possibly true, that has real force for you. A dead hypothesis is one you can describe but that carries no real weight in your thinking. Epistemic humility keeps hypotheses alive. It maintains genuine openness to the possibility of being wrong, not as a formal concession but as a real orientation toward truth.

Social media, by rewarding confidence and punishing hedging, gradually kills hypotheses. It presses us toward the performance of certainty which means, functionally, toward a kind of closure. And closure, for anyone genuinely interested in truth, is the enemy.

The Things We Are Actually Uncertain About

Let me name some things that are presented online with a confidence that I think the evidence does not warrant.

Complex political and social questions, where the genuine evidence is contested, the trade-offs are real, and the long-term consequences are largely unknown. The psychology of people we have never met, announced with confident diagnostics from a paragraph of their words. The moral status of choices we face no personal stake in. The character of public figures from a handful of moments in a recorded life. Historical causation, which is always more tangled than the versions that travel.

None of this means we cannot have views. It means the views ought to carry the genuine weight of their uncertainty, which is almost always more than we display.

The Courage of Not Knowing

There is a thing the Zen tradition calls 'beginner's mind', shoshin, the quality of encountering something with openness and lack of preconception, as a beginner would, even when you are an expert. Shunryu Suzuki, the teacher who brought this concept to Western audiences, put it simply: in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

I think about this often in relation to the internet's expert's mind: the posture of already knowing, already having the answer, already having categorised the situation before it has fully presented itself. The posture that performs certainty because certainty is what the platform rewards.

In the Andean traditions I work within, there is an understanding that genuine wisdom is not the accumulation of conclusions. It is the deepening of the capacity to be present to what is, including what is complex, unresolved, and genuinely unknown. The curandero does not arrive at the ceremony with all the answers. They arrive with attention, with skill, and with the willingness to be surprised.

This is not passivity. It is a form of courage. Certainty, paradoxically, is often the easier position. It requires less of us. Genuine uncertainty, held openly, honestly, without anxiety, demands something more.

What This Might Look Like in Practice

I want to be concrete, because I think this can seem abstract until it touches something real.

What if, the next time you were about to make a confident assertion online, you paused and asked yourself: what is the actual state of my knowledge here? Not the knowledge I would need to be certain, but the knowledge I actually have, right now, in this moment. And if there is a gap between the two, what would happen if you named it?

What if "I'm not sure, but I think..." became as natural as the confident assertion? What if "this is genuinely complex and I hold this position tentatively" were not a sign of weakness but of intellectual integrity?

What if you tried, just once, to write something online that was exactly as certain as you actually are - no more, no less - and see what that felt like?

I suspect it would feel vulnerable. I suspect it would feel like risk. And I think that feeling is exactly the point. Because the things worth saying, the things that actually move conversations forward rather than simply performing your position within them, tend to be the ones that cost something to say.

Certainty is cheap. Honesty about what we do not know is one of the rarest things on the internet. Which might be exactly why, when we encounter it, it stops us.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. The relationship between knowledge, humility, and genuine wisdom is something I explore both philosophically and in my practice. If this piece landed somewhere for you, I'd love to hear. You can reach me at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

Is there something you present online with more certainty than you actually feel? I'd genuinely love to know.