Bubbles of Certainty and our Triple Witness to ‘Truth’ – Part 2: Us & Them

In Part 1: You & Me we saw how Bubbles of Certainty and the Triple Witness to ‘Truth’ are important tools in helping human beings guard themselves against paralysis by indecision and fear.

But they also create the illusion that the evidence we already possess—and the sense that ‘all the pieces fit’—means that we have personally discovered the truth and now have a duty to protect it and help others realise the truth for themselves.

So what happens if one person’s Bubble of Certainty meets another’s? And another’s? And another’s? What are the implications for society and the different groups it consists of, each with their own truth? That’s what we look at here, in Part 2: Us and Them.

1. Our Triple Witness as Yardstick

Let’s assume that you and I have sound judgement. That whenever we encounter new information or evidence, we can generally tell if someone is trying to mislead us or make things up; that we have a strong sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; and that we have little trouble working through difficult issues to reach our own well-reasoned conclusions.

Having gone through such a process on a particular topic, should we not be reasonably confident that we are more likely to be right than wrong on that topic? And if we are more likely right than wrong, should we not also be able to use our own conclusions as a yardstick when assessing the opinions of others?

As wise as us

When we assess the opinion of others using our own conclusions as a yardstick, we generally assume that everyone who is ‘as wise as us’ (and who shares the same value system) must come to the same conclusion as ourselves. How could they not? Our own Triple Witness confirms that it’s the only conclusion that ‘makes sense’.

If you’re not like us, you’re against us

If someone doesn’t reach the same conclusion as ourselves, we assume they’re either not as wise as we are, or else they’re relying on some questionable value system. They may even be deliberately opposing us—which implies hostility, malevolence, or antagonism towards us. Either way, they’re clearly not like us. And we definitely don’t want to spend too much time around people who are not on the same wavelength as we are. Sure, we could try to show them the error of their ways. But if they’re not going to listen, move on.

Meanwhile, chances are they’re thinking the same about us—guided by their own Triple Witness to the ‘Truth’.

Dividing the world into Us and Them

So we tend to divide up the world into:

• Those who are with us (or like us)
• Those who are against us (or different from us)

It’s us versus them.

Thus we naturally gravitate towards those whose ideology and beliefs best match our own, with whom we feel ‘safe’ because we know that our comrades will never  threaten our Bubbles of Certainty—doing so would mean undermining their own, and they’re unlikely to do that.

2. The Hardening of the Bubble

The benefits of ‘us’ and ‘them’

It’s not just about feeling safe and minimising hostile encounters with people who don’t see the world as we do. Joining up with like-minded others brings additional benefits:

1. The evidence already in our possession matches the evidence of everyone else around us—so now we have ‘external’ validation of our conclusions. It means there’s even more chance we’ve discovered the truth! Or so we believe.
2. We strengthen and confirm one another’s coherence. Everything just feels ‘right’ when we’re together because collectively we’re focusing only on what we agree upon, staying within our shared Bubble of Certainty. Peace, harmony and understanding reigns amongst us. If only the rest of the world could experience what we have…
3. Our combined conviction drives us to re-shape the world in accordance with what we know to be the truth—through campaigning, lobbying, advocacy, proselytising etc.

Notice that it’s that same Triple Witness, but now working at the group level. Amplified like this, it has the potential to change Society. Instead of separate individuals having to create personal Bubbles of Certainty to protect themselves from uncertainty, now we have the opportunity to impose order and control on the external world itself, permanently reducing its chaos and unpredictability!

💡 Enlightenment

The feelings of camaraderie and kindred-spirit that we have with those who share our Triple Witness bolster the conviction that our own understanding of the world must be correct. It is our group alone that possesses the truth, and that truth can save society, humanity, or the planet—just as it has saved us.

As custodians of the truth, we now have a duty to protect that truth and to share it with the rest of the world so that they too can share in what we have. So we begin to see our own group as ‘chosen’, ‘enlightened’ or special in some way.

📖 Codification

To protect the truth, and enable it to be readily disseminated to others, we begin to codify the truth that we’ve received. Codification allows us to evaluate whether or not someone is ‘one of us’ and formalises the truth so that it can be referred back to as an authoritative source should a dispute arise amongst us. Whenever a dispute arises for which our codified truth has no explicit recommendation, then the experts amongst us can make a judgement so as not to contradict the codified truth and to ensure it reflects the underlying spirit of the codified truth. This then gets added to our growing body of certainty and control over potential outcomes.

Gradually, what began as informal truth intuited by individuals, now becomes formalised truth, mandated by the Group. It is no longer about like-minded individuals naturally gravitating towards kindred-spirits on the basis that we share a common Bubble of Certainty. It is now about establishing criteria for membership and rooting out heresy (or misinformation). It’s about who is in and who is out.

⚔️ The Enemy

Any questioning or hostility we encounter from outsiders—particularly other groups in their own shared Bubbles of Certainty—only serves to strengthen our conviction that we must protect the truth at all costs. We come to regard those who oppose us as the antithesis to whatever it is we stand for: their Anti- to our Pro-, and vice versa. And if we are ‘good’, they must be evil. If we are right, they must be wrong.

So we begin to emphasise the qualities that make us different to this enemy of everything we stand for. We deliberately draw attention to those differences, whilst minimising or ignoring any similarities we might have. In a sense, we become defined by them, in the same way that ‘up’ is defined by ‘down’.

What starts out as an insubstantial bubble now becomes an impenetrable wall between us, bolstered by our codified truth and history of encounters between us and them. To accept that they may be right on anything would be to suggest that we might be wrong on something. Worse, admitting they may have a point could undermine the justification and purpose of our very existence.

3. Patterns of Society

Under the right conditions, what begins as a personal Bubble of Certainty and our natural gravitation towards like-minded others, rapidly becomes an institutionalised pattern within society. It is no longer about carving out our own little safe-space from a chaotic and uncertain world; it is about controlling the world by imposing our own truth and order upon it.

This is a pattern we find repeated throughout history and society, across every domain—from politics, to religion, to science, to philosophy, to economics, to healthcare, to academia, to culture, to ethnicity and race, to nations. In fact, we find these same underlying patterns wherever there are human beings faced with uncertainty.

Once our bubbles reach the institutional level, society gets reshaped into the image of the dominant groups’ beliefs, regardless of whether or not those beliefs correspond with actual truth. If those Bubbles of Certainty have already become hardened to exclude everyone who isn’t like (or with) the group, society can become a troublingly hostile environment for the dominant groups’ enemies, leading to institutionalised prejudice and injustice.

Recognising the Patterns

Practise looking for these patterns, first in your own life, then expand your search outwards to take in more and more of society. When we learn to recognise these patterns, we also begin to see the human dynamics that underly them.

The most obvious patterns to look for are:

1. Polarised thinking – us/them; pro/anti; in/out; right/wrong; left/right etc.
2. Claims a group exclusively possesses the truth (or morality)
3. Propaganda and recruitment
4. Attempts to control the thoughts, speech or behaviours of others – “You’re not allowed to say that”; “Don’t read/look at that”; “Don’t follow/talk to them”; “If you don’t do X, you can’t do Y” etc.
5. Ostracism (sometimes dehumanisation) of those who do not conform to the group’s truth – how much power a group has will dictate what form the ostracism takes. Calling someone names or blocking them on social media is a form of ostracism open to all of us, regardless of our power. Incarceration or deportation is generally available only to those in government.

Questioning the Patterns

Whenever we see such patterns—first in ourselves, only then in others—it is time to start considering the following questions:

1. What uncertainty or unpredictability are we/they guarding ourselves/themselves against?
2. What do we/they believe to be the truth?
3. What evidence do we/they possess, and how robust is it?
4. What evidence are we/they excluding or ignoring?
5. Where does our/their underlying value system come from?

These questions work for the individual as well as the group and institutional level. For example, an individual who won’t let their partner go out with their friends is just as likely to be guarding against some uncertainty (e.g. fear their partner will meet someone better) as a government which seeks to prevent their citizens from reading certain news stories or holding proscribed opinions.

But we must always remember that just because we identify such patterns, it doesn’t automatically follow that someone does not possess the truth (or part of it). As we saw in Part 1: You and Me, sometimes truth coincides with our beliefs, and sometimes it doesn’t. More often it partially coincides.

Asking questions such as these will at least help us discern what may be true and what most definitely is not. Questioning will also enable us to better understand ourselves and others, which is foundational for discovering common ground and growing in collective wisdom.

Conclusion

All of us rely on Bubbles of Certainty. Bubbles help us create bonds with individuals like ourselves, allowing us to form groups where we can carve out a little bit of control and predictability together in an uncertain world.

Once these bubbles expand from a group level to the institutional level, society becomes increasingly reshaped in the image of the group’s beliefs. Previously, entering the group’s Bubble of Certainty was optional—one of many groups an individual could become part of—now the Bubble expands to becomes society’s norm. Anyone who wishes to access society’s collective benefits must now conform, or else face ostracism at the societal (even national) level.

Societal bubbles are ultimately the outgrowth of belief or value systems that originated by carving out fragments of safe-space from a chaotic and uncertain world. Consequently, they cannot help but exclude at least some of the truth—woe betide anyone who now finds themselves in possession of the very truth the group wishes to exclude!

What happens, for example, if the qualifying criteria for inclusion in society is having the ‘right’ ethnicity, ideology or physical capacity, for example? Now they find themselves trying to survive in a society where inequality and injustice has been institutionalised, permanently doomed to live outside a society-wide bubble whose ‘truth’ has no room for them.

If our species stands any hope of overcoming inequality and prejudice in society, we’re going to need to learn to understand, recognise and question our own Bubbles of Certainty. And for that, we’ll need Wisdom.