I don’t know who won the debate last night. I’m not certain at this point who’s going to win the general election. To be honest, I don’t know what I know anymore. Is it supposed to rain tonight ? How long will I have this headache? Are my health insurance premiums going up? Exactly what percentage of my savings have I lost and if it’s all on paper, does it really matter? Damned if I know.
Uncertainty is a state of mind I’ve been examining as part of the research for my book. Humans, particularly Americans, don’t like to be uncertain. We want to know who won, who’s winning, how much we’ve lost, how fast we can make it up and, occasionally what it all means. To not know is to be in a position of weakness.
Or not. Accepting uncertainty as a more or less permanent condition can be liberating. It allows you to consider possibilities. Whatever it is you don’t know for certain you’re free to imagine. Why not imagine the best of all possible worlds? Doesn’t mean it will happen, just that it might. It’s that glass-half-empty, glass-half-full point of view.
It’s one thing to not know something absolutely and another to not make up your mind with the information you have at hand. Most people I know (myself included) have pretty much settled on a candidate whose vision we feel is most in line with ours, which is why I was so fascinated to listen to the comments of the undecided voters being grilled by various commentators last night. As Gail Collins pointed out in today’s New York Times, these undecided swingers in unpredictable states are the voters on whom the candidates are now focused like laser beams. They claim to be examining the positions of the candidates, which have remained largely unchanged for some time. Clearly, if they admit to making a decision before November 4th, they won’t be as interesting to either the press or the politicians. Which begs the question: are those oh-so-unsure but ever-so-popular independents really still undecided? I don’t know for sure – but I tend to doubt it.