Stop making your mind up!
Radical Uncertainty - an antidote to anger, narcissism and intellectual frustration
There are two things you definitely don't need at this point.
One is yet another 'independent' newsletter giving the lowdown on an issue, from multiple perspectives, so that you can decide what you think about it.
Another thing you absolutely don't need is yet another ‘heterodox’ newsletter offering polemics about how terrible this, that, or the other perspective on some burning issue of the moment.
Rarely Certain is about resisting the intense gravitational pull of knowing where you stand on x. And lots of things that flow from this.
The stories, anecdotes, essays and thoughts offered in Rarely Certain are intended to encourage readers to be comfortable with uncertainty as a healthier alternative to simplistic, superficial moral and epistemic confidence.
Rarely Certain is about embracing radical uncertainty, humility and being genuinely human in a culture of overwhelming information and opinion babble with their endless demands on your allegiance to whichever ideas are preeminent or hegemonic.
It’s about being comfortable with contradiction and complexity.
Sign up if you're interested in feeling better.
Welcome to Rarely Certain by me, Mike Hind, a longtime journalist currently in year 3 of recovery from Twitter addiction & a lifetime of flawed thinking.
EDIT: March 30th 2023
Like any endeavour of this sort, Rarely Certain has been evolving.
Initially I wasn’t sure what the elevator pitch could be, but I think it turned out to be
Rarely Certain occupies a post-partisan sociopolitical niche, free of ideological constraint, acknowledging that almost everyone is almost always a bit right (while also a lot wrong) about everything.
A corollary is that being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is just as often a personal conceit as it is an objective material fact about one’s status, because everything is more subtle and complex than we’d like it to be.
“Basically, I hate conformity” - Wendy O. Williams
“Know your feelings and how they cloud your thinking” - me
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