If you want to destroy a democracy, you need to do two things. First, you need to destroy the idea of a greater good. Over the course of the past roughly 45 years, neoliberal capitalism has done that job. Margaret Thatcher famously said the following: “who is society? There is no such thing!” If there is no society, no greater good, if, in other words, only the individual matters, then you can pursue policies that disassemble what holds societies together (public infrastructure, the social safety net etc.).
Depriving people of their means of survival then is not an attack on every single person (in other words, on society itself). Instead, it’s merely an attack on some people who, and this is usually implied but occasionally said, for some reason had it coming (the poor, foreigners, asylum seekers, women, etc.).
Second, you need to establish doubt as one of the drivers of public discourse. Arguing for truth (one of those larger goods) is tedious, and it takes too much time. Instead, you only need to instill in people that their own personal doubt, whatever it might be based on, is valid and that everything, however much it might be based on facts or reality, should be subjected to doubt.
In a nutshell, this idea pours gasoline onto the small fires in the reptilian parts of people’s brains: if it is acceptable that everything can be doubted, there will be strife. And strife serves the purposes of those who want to destroy democracy and replace it with something else (whether they’re a former TV personality with a severe psychiatric disorder or a street thug whose education was provided by the KGB).
Doubt, of course, has long played a role in the lives of human beings. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with doubt per se — quite on the contrary: the most dangerous people usually are those who are incapable of doubting themselves.
We all experience doubt throughout our life times. On a larger scale, we might question our life choices (“maybe I should have pursued a different career?”). On a daily basis, the sheer infinity of choices we face each come with a bit of doubt (“should I have bought eggs from a different company?”).
In other words, doubt is part of the essence of being human being. Doubt comes with — or creates — uncertainty.
It’s so interesting that even as doubt is essential to being human, if there’s anything we hate it’s uncertainty. For example, when physicists developed quantum theory, one of its most bewildering aspects was what became known as the uncertainty principle. The cat in the unopened box, to use the image widely known outside of the world of physics, should be thought of as simultaneously alive and dead. How can this be when in our daily lives we only know cats that are alive or dead — but not both?
Anna Püschel‘s Encyclopedia of the Uncertain attempts to provide an answer, even though it will largely depend on the reader her or himself to determine whether that’s the case. Some readers might embrace the uncertainty; others might discover the solution for their personal conundrum.
The book compiles a large number of text fragments with images and illustrations (the list of references runs all the way up to 517). Interspersed in between are excerpts from the artist’s own writing.
This is an unusual book for a publisher that has so far focused on a very specific style of photobook, one in which text typically plays a large role. There is a consistent didacticism to their back catalogue that is entirely at odds with what this Encyclopedia provides.
Even though the book purports to follow the conventions of encyclopedic books, it’s probably closer in spirit to a pre-scientific Wunderkammer approach. And how could it not be that? How could there be certainty in a book focusing on uncertainty?
Encyclopedia of the Uncertain is not the type of book that you would read like a novel. Or at least I am unable to do it (there are people, I was told, who do read encyclopedias). Instead, you’re much better off nibbling here and there, whether in the order in which the material is presented or not (I don’t think this matters).
Opening the book in a random spot might deliver something genuinely interesting, or it might not, much like reading it from the beginning (something I initially attempted to do) delivers the same experience.
What I especially appreciate about the book is that it rejects the idea of making ultimate sense, the idea of coming to a specific conclusion. Too often when artists attempt to engage in what they think is scientific work, the end results are simultaneously scientifically clumsy (if even that) and artistically needlessly didactic.
Of course, didacticism has its place — but not in the arts, the domain of the useless, the poorly defined and uncertain, the domain of love and doubt.
“As individuals in uncertain times,” the text accompanying the book says, “we not only have the right but also the duty to look for truth, and not blindly follow the loudest voices that (un)knowingly propagate falsities.” You get to hear or read that a lot these days: it’s the idea that you can fact check away fascism. But you can’t — unless you understand the idea of truth better.
In an episode of Seinfeld, George tells Jerry: “Jerry, just remember. It’s a not lie if you believe it.” To treat utterances by, say, Donald Trump as lies is pointless, given that there is no shared understanding of the idea of truth. I’m convinced that Trump actually believes all the things he’s saying, even if he changes his mind all the time. He’s not a liar: ordinary liars understand and accept the idea of an agreed-upon truth.
That’s why Trump’s world and Vladimir Putin’s converge. Putin emerged from the Soviet Union’s KGB. Under the Communist system, truth was defined by facts or reality. Truth was defined by the party and its ideologues. And that truth could radically change from one day to the next (as it occasionally did). People were sent to the gulag or shot in KGB prisons because what had been true the day before now was not any longer.
I think the only way to re-center the truth is to first re-center something else: the greater, universal good. You will need a greater good, because if there is no greater good there will be nothing that provides the solid ground truth can stand on. And that greater good will have to be unconditional and apply to everyone.
The one thing that most people still don’t understand is that the sciences work with doubt all the time. They acknowledge uncertainty, and they incorporate it into their work. Given that we live in a quantum world, it would be scientifically unsound not to do so.
While absolute scientific certainty can never be had, it’s doubt and uncertainty that actually drive scientific progress: what if there were a better way? What if we attempted to be a little bit more precise? What if in that tiny little imprecision lies a way to improve our understanding of what’s going on?
As individuals in uncertain times, we thus have to understand that uncertainty is not the — or a — problem. Doubt and the resulting uncertainty are what make us human. Doubt creates the most beautiful art.
Our main problem is our lack of a will to work towards the greater, universal good. After all, there is such a thing as a society, and it is rather beautiful, however imperiled it might be right now.
Encyclopedia of Doubt; text fragments, images, and illustrations compiled by Anna Püschel; 768 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2024
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