One of the most profound quotes I have stumbled upon recently is from Umberto Eco: “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
Isn’t that profound wisdom about living in a complex world? Because a complex world is by nature unpredictable, it is not useful to try to theorize what will happen or what lies below. Still, because of our pattern-seeking build, we tend to try to do so. While it is useful to do that at a small scale, it is ineffective to try to do it at a large scale.
Theorizing the world will never work. And it is becoming worst as the world becomes more complex every day, with increased interconnections between an increasing number of people.
Umberto Eco goes further by ascribing a lot of the harm around us to this attempt to theorize and make the world predictable. And indeed it is often this attempt that draws crowds to believe in certain things.
It is natural and reassuring to believe that the world is predictable and can be theorized. Unfortunately that’s impossible. This is scary and full of opportunities at the same time. Above all let’s not try to find the underlying truth, let’s let go and the world will be a better place.
