Activism Operates on Borrowed Certainty
Activism operates on borrowed certainty. Someone approaches with revelation’s urgency, insisting they’ve discovered something you need to understand. They’re handing you their prescription eyeglasses. Sometimes the world sharpens. Sometimes everything becomes illegible. You won’t know until years later.
We are each on our own path - nobody has a right to lead us astray from it. Yet all of us need to learn, and people who have learnt something already should help others learn too. But if we do not know something yet, how can we decide who is showing us a path we will benefit by walking on? That is the dynamic adventure of life. No one can ever know. But everyone eventually ends up knowing in hindsight. We can never know for sure in the moment.
Except hindsight might be the cruellest fiction. When you declare “that activist changed my life,” you’re speaking from a present that hasn’t revealed its own futures. What appears beneficial now might appear catastrophic later. Hindsight is just foresight that ran out of patience.
So is all activism vain? Maybe, maybe not.
Perhaps it’s vain precisely when it succeeds. The activist who “helps” you replaces your confusion with theirs, substituting one uncertainty for another whilst claiming clarity. You were lost following your instincts; now you’re lost following someone else’s.
Or perhaps activism functions as testimony rather than teaching. “This path destroyed me” versus “this path saved me.” Same path, opposite testimonies, both sincere, both provisional. You metabolise contradictory certainties into uncertain next steps.
The alternative to activism isn’t passivity. It’s recognising that when you feel compelled to change someone’s mind, you might be managing your own uncertainty. Converting another creates social proof for beliefs you cannot verify. If enough agree, uncertainty feels like knowledge. It isn’t, but it quiets something unbearable.
What remains: we cannot know if interventions help or harm. We know we intervene, and interventions become raw material for others’ sense-making. They’ll decide later whether we led them astray or towards something needed, as uncertain about that judgment as we were in offering it.
Activism persists, not because it works or fails, but because uncertainty is unendurable alone.
Can learning survive contamination by another’s certainties? Does refusing to share constitute wisdom or cowardice? What if all activism is just witnessing uncertainty, without resolving it?