Make Friends with Absurdity in Your Worldview

But do so with honourable humility

Photo by Vlad Bagacian, on Pexels

Worldviews that are transparent excuses to prop up our prejudices and aspirations, making no contact with anything apart from ourselves, are infantile extensions of our ego.

Worldviews for more mature adults require some degree of self-sacrifice, in that we must acknowledge that things exist apart from us and our preferences and conceits, things that are either neutral towards our welfare or outright hostile to us.

But there are two kinds of epistemic self-sacrifice, and one is much worthier than the other.

The stretching of intuitions

The worthier kind is based on critical thinking, which is displayed when we apply some humility and open-mindedness, questioning our assumptions and adjusting our beliefs to suit logic or rational assessments of evidence. Arguments and explanations can force us to accept things we’d rather not accept.

The primary case of this self-sacrifice is featured in the scientific methods of inquiry. Scientists design experiments to test hypotheses, rather than accepting assertions dogmatically or out of fealty to a tradition or deference to an authority figure. Scientists aim to let the mind-independent facts speak for themselves, as they control for variables and search for the most plausible, useful explanation of the observed pattern.

As a result of that skepticism, scientific explanations tend to be counterintuitive, which is a measure of their maturity, or their departure from the self-serving fluff that appeals to children or philosophically immature minds.

For instance, intuition alone tells us our planet is flat and central to outer space. This is what our unaided senses tell us, but it’s also a flattering assumption since it presents us as nature’s purpose or pinnacle, and that’s just what our inner child would have us believe. We’d prefer to think our lives matter not just to us or our friends and family, but to all of existence. Otherwise, doubts and fears would creep in, tarnishing our assumptions and practices.

Scientists distinguish their methods by questioning such intuitions and seeking non-native modes of obtaining data, such as with technological extensions of their senses, including telescopes and microscopes. With those techniques, scientists discovered nature’s perfectly inhuman scale that makes a mockery of the human-centered presumptions that apparently evolved to keep us engaged with the terrestrial matters of survival and reproduction.

We hardly evolved to search for cosmic knowledge that would threaten our animalistic functions, stultifying us with alienation and despair. Any such audacious species might have died out before it could even have formulated the concept of evolution that occurs in deep time (requiring millions of years of unguided development).

We formulated that concept only because we have the anomalous, bootstrapped ability to question our evolved nature and practices, to stretch our intuitions and think outside the box. And we obtained that ability only very recently in geological time (between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago), so we still have a chance to extinguish ourselves with it.

Only by becoming cognitively inhuman can we grapple with nature’s inhuman reality, such as with evolution’s deep timescale or the unimaginable number of stars in the universe.

Submitting to a collective

Yet there’s a second kind of epistemic self-sacrifice, and this one’s more tribal and compatible with primitive ways of thinking that don’t depart from what we evolved to do.

Suppose you live in 2026, and yet you wonder whether the Earth is flat rather than round. Most people mock this belief, but you decide to double down on it, and you join a flat-Earther cult. Your membership in that group boosts your confidence, so you’re loath to abandon it. But the group’s leaders exploit your gullibility and loneliness, requiring that you accept increasingly bizarre notions to prove your loyalty. With each further degrading demonstration of fealty, you lose your cognitive independence.

Here, then, is another kind of self-sacrifice: the surrendering of autonomy and critical thought in some collectivist endeavour. Whereas the scientific kind of selflessness amounts to a surrender to inhuman facts, this second kind is about the individual’s submission to groupthink. You identify with a strongman leader or the rules of an organization like a cult or totalitarian state.

Again, whereas the first self-sacrifice is virtuous because it instills genuine humility that’s productive and honourable, the second kind is contemptible because the cultist doubles down to save face. Far from keeping an open mind and thinking critically about her beliefs, she falls down a rabbit hole, seeking aid from a group to boost her confidence and help her overcome her doubt with fallacious reassurances.

But unlike the childish, self-centered belief system that solipsistically extends the individual’s preferences and presumptions, the collectivist worldview submerges the individual in a group mind or a revered leader’s worldview. So collectivism sacrifices the individual, but in a way that’s unethical from an individualist standpoint.

The individualist thinks we should be humble because we confront an inhuman enormity as part of our existential condition. The collectivist thinks the lower social classes should be humble in submission to the whims of an elite vanguard.

Both kinds of self-sacrifice face absurdities. The individualist faces the clash between evolved intuitions and social preferences, on the one hand, and nature’s inhumanity on the other. The collectivist faces the clash between individual and group identities.

Individualists enjoy prestige for overcoming their personal preferences with objective knowledge, whereas collectivists enjoy the benefits of group membership by accepting absurd creeds, and they defend their group with Orwellian displays of fidelity, all to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that they blundered down that rabbit hole in the first place.

Scientists would face ridicule if they were caught being uncritical and merely standing by some prejudices dogmatically, since the modern ethos is opposed to that presumed medievalism.

Collectivists face ridicule from the wider society, just by joining a cult, but they also face ridicule within that smaller group whenever they depart from its mantras, however absurd the latter may be. And a cult’s teachings are necessarily absurd since they’re designed not to accept inhuman reality but to test the members’ loyalty and solidify the secret society, as it’s always in danger of being swept up by a mainstream culture.

So there we have an analysis of epistemic humility. We might assume that ethics applies only to our bodily actions, not our habits of thought. But there are clearly ethical and unethical uses of the mind, too. There’s intellectual humility and honesty, and cognitive dereliction of duty.

This is also why the biological assessment of maturity isn’t the only one available. Biologically, we can tell whether someone’s a child or an adult. You simply count the years that have passed since the person’s birth, or note the body’s growth. But minds, too, can be gauged for their maturity. There are childish and mature, existentially noble ways of thinking, so an adult body may well house a childish mind.

The most glaring case of the latter scenario is President Donald Trump, who very obviously suffers from infantile solipsism or narcissism. Trump fears that any self-sacrifice would make him a loser, so with magical thinking, he projects his wishes onto reality, refusing to accept the existence of anti-Trump facts that threaten his self-esteem.

This is the most straightforwardly infantile way of thinking since it doesn’t even mimic the honourable form of epistemic self-sacrifice by surrendering individual preferences for the sake of demonstrating loyalty to an exploitative group. Trump is biologically an elderly adult, but psychologically and epistemically, he’s still very much a child.

Of course, those who submit to the MAGA cult demonstrate the inferior, collectivist form of epistemic self-sacrifice. Far from recoiling at Trump’s monstrosity, they revere him as their precious leader.

Notice that accepting either of those grotesque absurdities is itself an opportunity for self-sacrifice for the rest of us who strive for intellectual honour. We must accept that our leaders may be more parasitic than heroic because some of our social systems don’t cultivate virtue. The reason our elections and other social systems may fail us is that they’re kludges that confront a witheringly inhuman cosmic wilderness in which we’re all less than afterthoughts.

Further reading

• What it Means to Say Life is Absurd
• All Worldviews Cope with Life’s Absurdity
• Who are the Best People in an Absurd Universe?
• Stories Are Our Shields Against Life’s Absurdity
• Only Godlike Technology Can Save Us from Life’s Absurdity

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