Nobody knows anything

Well, that's not exactly true. We've come to know a good deal since the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, about how the universe works, what life is and how our natural world came to be, our own biology -- all sorts of important stuff that I and all educated and sane people know very well. Nowadays a lot of people don't want to know the truth, but that's not what I'm talking about.

 

Specifically, nobody knows enough about human society to predict its future. Every year we get a whole lot of economic forecasts which offer a range of predictions about the stock market, interest rates, GDP, unemployment. Most of them are substantially wrong, and the prognosticator who guessed right this year will be wrong next year. 

 

I don't think anybody foresaw the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. SecDef Lloyd Austin said he sure didn't, and if anybody should be in a position to know it would be him. Now people are coming up with all sorts of reverse engineering solutions to why it happened, most of which are absurd. I've seen a lot of takes that Israel wiping out Hezbollah deprived Assad of a necessary base of support but that is completely absurd.  Hezbollah had virtually no physical presence in Syria and could not possibly have done anything to defend the regime. It is much more plausible that Russia could no longer defend Assad because of the Ukraine war, and that mattered a good deal. But still, nobody saw it coming.

I thought I was being transgressive by refusing to shed a tear for United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but it turns out my reaction was basically mainstream. However, it also turns out that he was not acting out of personal grievance. He was a rich kid with an Ivy League education who adopted what I consider to be very correct views about the health insurance industry but decided to take a bizarre action in response. Bizarre and apparently feckless as murdering the guy seems to be, it has provoked a massive outpouring of rage against the industry which just might matter in the end, which is to say that much of history is stochastic. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Hitler surviving his WWI injuries, Comey announcing he'd found a new trove of emails just before the 2016 election, Joe Biden blanking out in the debate . . . there are a googleplex of minor events and accidents that have massively changed the world. 

We don't know what's going to happen. We never will. Just do your best to get through it.