Food For Thought: When Is The Last Time You Embraced Uncertainty?

I came across this passage in a new book I’m reading on human perception and thought it was a very interesting and pertinent piece of knowledge:

“The biological motivation of many of our social and cultural habits and reflexes, including hate and racism, is to diminish uncertainty through imposed rules and rigid environments...in doing so, these inherited reflexes (to remove uncertainty from our lives wherever we can) prevent us from living more creative, compassionate, collaborative and courageous lives. With the making of this kind of certainty (like hate and racism), we all lose freedom.”

I’ve never heard racism/prejudice explained in such a foundational fashion, that it’s a mechanism for those who lack the compassion and courage to confront the discomfort of uncertainty (people who are culturally different than them) by assigning blanket meaning to a group of people instead of embracing and exploring differences on an individual level.

Food for thought to reflect on all the areas of our life we try to remove uncertainty from, why we do it in each case (whether it’s a lack of courage or creativity, etc.) and how that impacts our experience.