3. Fragments Of An Explanation

(22) What follows is not an explanation in the strong sense. I will not pretend to know which forces mattered, which mattered most, how they interacted, or how to trace them through centuries in a way a historian would accept.

Still, once we have seen the imbalance between opinion and strategy, it is hard not to ask how we got here. So I will do something weaker, and hopefully more honest. I will sketch fragments. Each fragment is a plausible contributor. Maybe together they will shed some light on the situation, and inspire more and better research.

(23) A first fragment is philosophical.

A large part of Western philosophy is organized around answers. Around opinions and their justification. Around what is true, what can be known, what must be accepted, what can be proven. This is not a criticism. It is simply what philosophy, in that tradition, decided to take seriously.

Plato is an obvious reference point, because he set a tone that echoes down the centuries. Socrates himself, insofar as we can reconstruct him, may have been closer to the art of questioning than to the defense of answers. It is with Plato that the balance decisively shifts. A distinction is drawn between knowledge and mere opinion, between what is stable and what is shifting. A distinction that may be less absolute, and more practical, than it is often taken to be. Once that distinction is in the air, it becomes natural to treat having the right view as an achievement. And it becomes natural to treat uncertainty as a deficiency.

The logic of propositions grew sophisticated. The logic of questions remained a quiet corner. We became fluent in defending specific answers, less fluent in handling possibilities without one strong contender.

(24) A second fragment is skeptical, and it is about a path not taken.

There was, early on, a viable alternative to a philosophy centered on answers. It did not deny reason, nor did it glorify ignorance. It took uncertainty seriously and tried to live with it. This alternative is usually gathered under the name skepticism.

Skepticism, in its classical forms, did not primarily argue that nothing can be known. What it emphasized instead was restraint: restraint in assent, restraint in judgment, restraint in closing questions too quickly. Faced with competing answers that could not be decisively ranked, the skeptic did not rush to choose. Suspension of judgment was not a failure, but a practice.

This was a genuine alternative. It offered a way to inhabit uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis. It suggested that peace of mind and practical adequacy might come not from correct answers, but from not demanding more closure than a situation could support.

But skepticism never became a dominant cultural framework.

Part of the reason is that it does not scale well institutionally. It does not produce clear doctrines. It does not anchor identity easily. It does not reward strong declarations. It offers no obvious badge of membership. It is difficult to teach as a set of conclusions, because it is not one. And within that framework it withered.

(25) A third fragment is religious, and it is about the moral weight of belief.

In many religious traditions, belief is not merely a stance toward a proposition. It is an inward orientation. It can be loyal or disloyal. Pure or corrupt. Saving or damning. It is not only something one has, but something one is.

Christianity is not the only tradition that moralizes belief, but in Europe it became a dominant cultural framework for a very long time. It taught generations to treat assent as a serious act. To treat wrong belief not merely as error, but as sin, heresy, or betrayal. Even when people later loosened their faith or rejected doctrine, parts of this moral grammar remained. Belief retained its weight. And under the right circumstances, perhaps rightly so.

This matters for our topic because it changes the social meaning of opinions. An opinion is no longer only a useful closure of a set of possibilities for practical navigation. It becomes a sign of character. A person's stance becomes readable as a person's virtue.

When belief carries this kind of weight, it becomes harder to keep possibilities open calmly. It becomes harder to treat uncertainty as a normal condition.

(26) A fourth fragment is educational and institutional.

Most modern schooling trains us to answer. It trains us to produce the expected output under time pressure. It does not often train us to ask what kind of question we are facing, or what a responsible answer would even look like.

There are exceptions. Scientific education, at its best, teaches careful doubt and provisional models. Some forms of training in engineering, medicine, and law teach reasoning under constraints. But in the broad middle of education, success is measured by closure. By delivering the correct answer, not by managing the space of possibilities.

Even in adult life, institutions often reward clarity over adequacy. Meetings want conclusions. Reports want recommendations. News wants a takeaway. A culture can become very productive under such pressures. But it also becomes impatient with the open-ended.

This is one way strategy gets fenced off. It survives in niches where uncertainty cannot be denied because consequences enforce it.

(27) A fifth fragment is technological and economic.

The speed and scale of modern communication systems changed the ratio between information and action.

For most of human history, people heard about events in distant places through slow channels. News travelled with bodies. It arrived late, incomplete, and often without the power to demand a response. Today, information arrives immediately. It arrives in volume. It arrives with emotional framing. It arrives with social cues about what one is supposed to think.

We are informed far beyond our capacity to respond.

This is a simple fact with deep consequences. If one cannot act, one cannot close the loop. There is no feedback. There is no correction through consequence. Old opinions are like yesterday's news. "Are we still talking about this?" And the stream continues, and it continues to ask for orientation. It asks for alignment. It asks for judgment.

In such an environment, opinion becomes the default form of participation. It is a way to show that one is awake, informed, human, responsive. And it is increasingly a way to extract value, by assembling opinions into marketing profiles.

(28) A sixth fragment is social.

Opinion is cheap and strategy is expensive.

An opinion can be expressed quickly. It can be signaled. It can be shared. It can be rewarded. It can bind groups. It can create the feeling of being on the right side of something. It can be updated without much cost, when it is not tied to action anymore. The social environment can treat opinion as a kind of currency.

Strategy requires patience. It requires restraint. It requires attention to constraints and tradeoffs. It requires admitting uncertainty. It often requires waiting. It can look cold when it is merely careful, and it can look cowardly when it is merely realistic.

In settings where people interact primarily through statements, the reward structure naturally favors statements. Not because people are shallow, but because statements are what can be exchanged. A culture of constant expression will favor the mode of reasoning that expresses easily.

(29) A seventh fragment is professional.

Strategy has not vanished. It has become specialized.

In domains where decisions have consequences and feedback is real, strategy is unavoidable. Engineers keep possibilities open because reality punishes premature closure. Doctors keep possibilities open because the wrong closure can harm a patient. Investors keep possibilities open because markets do not care about conviction. Security teams keep possibilities open because adversaries exploit certainty.

In such environments, the habits of strategy are cultivated, often explicitly. One learns to consider plausible alternatives. One learns to act robustly. One learns to revise when new information arrives. One learns to pay attention to consequences rather than to applause.

But these domains are often separated from public discourse. Their language can be technical. Their time horizons can be different. Their constraints can be invisible to outsiders. Their caution can be misread as evasiveness. Their refusal to close possibilities can be misread as lack of backbone.

So we end up in a strange situation. Strategy is alive, but it lives behind fences. Opinion is everywhere, because it travels well.

(30) None of these fragments required bad intentions.

It is tempting to tell stories with villains. It is tempting to blame philosophers for corrupting common sense, religion for poisoning belief, or technology for destroying attention. But these are satisfying closures, not careful explanations.

The imbalance did not need to be planned to become pervasive. It could emerge from ordinary incentives and ordinary human traits. We like clarity. We like belonging. We like the feeling of having located ourselves. We do not like the discomfort of open questions. And we now live in systems that constantly present us with questions at scales we cannot inhabit.

If this sketch is even roughly correct, then the question is not primarily who is right. The question is how to live coherently under these conditions.

That question brings us back to the distinction we started with. Not as a theory, but as a practice.