The Certainty Syndrome: A Pathology of Our Time

i. the consultation room and the meeting room

There's a particular quality of silence that fills a room when someone realizes they've been performing certainty for so long they've forgotten it's a performance. Or, if not performance, it's a device, a more or less conscious trickery, an opaque or transparent illusion. I've witnessed it in two distinct settings: the psychotherapy consultation room and the corporate meeting room. The silence has the same texture, a kind of hollow density, like the air itself has become aware of its own emptiness.

In the consultation room, it might arrive when a patient who has spent months explaining their life through an elaborate theoretical framework suddenly stops mid-sentence. It can be an "aha" or an "uh oh" moment. Either way, their carefully constructed narrative falters. The map they've been using to navigate their existence reveals itself as a drawing they've been making while walking in circles.

In the meeting room, it manifests when someone presenting quarterly projections is asked a simple question that their PowerPoint, often prepared by someone with lower rank or a consultant, hasn't anticipated. Watch their face in that microsecond before they recover. There's a flicker of something—panic? recognition?—before the professional mask reassembles itself and they begin speaking in the curious corporate dialect that sounds like language but carries no meaning.

I've spent two decades moving between these two worlds, and I've come to believe we're witnessing something that deserves attention, not just clinical but existential: a collective pathology of certainty that has infected our organizational life, our social discourse, and perhaps most troublingly, our relationship with knowledge itself.

This isn't simply about overconfidence or hubris. This is something more systematic, more pervasive. A syndrome in the true medical sense, a clustering of symptoms that point to an underlying disease process that has the risk of being recognized as a pandemic.

ii. symptomatology: reading the signs

Studying psychopathology, we learn to read symptoms not as isolated phenomena but as expressions of deeper organizational principles of the psyche. A patient doesn't simply have "anxiety"; they have a particular way of organizing their relationship to uncertainty that manifests as anxiety. Similarly, our contemporary certainty syndrome reveals itself through a constellation of observable behaviors that, taken together, suggest a profound disorder in how we relate to knowledge, doubt, and the limits of human understanding.

Let me sketch a preliminary diagnostic picture.

the primary symptoms

1. epistemic rigidity with compensatory flexibility display

This is perhaps the most fascinating symptom: an actual inflexibility of thought coupled with an elaborate performance of openness. The executive who begins every meeting with "I'm totally open to different perspectives" before systematically dismissing any view that challenges their predetermined conclusion. I'm particularly tired of listening to people say that they are consensual or that they aim for consensus, when in fact they just want to put up a show of apparent participation to end up enforcing their hierarchical power to push through the decision they already made before the meeting.

I see this in teaching and facilitation as well: the teacher or facilitator who asks for the characteristics of a certain kind of leader, for instance, appearing to listen and consider what the audience is shouting out, but ultimately ending up with the list they had prepared beforehand. Of course, there's always the thought leader who preaches "embracing uncertainty" through a rigid ten-step framework; the consultant who sells "agile methodologies" through inflexible implementation protocols.

It reminds me of what psychoanalysts call "reaction formation": a defense against an impulse by ostentatiously displaying its opposite.

We've become so terrified of uncertainty that we've created entire industries dedicated to performing comfort with it.

2. predictive compulsion

The uncontrollable need to forecast, project, and scenario-plan every aspect of existence. This goes beyond prudent planning into something more symptomatic. Five-year strategic plans with monthly KPI tracking. Daily mood monitoring apps. Relationship trajectory mapping. Career path optimization algorithms.

I once worked with a client who created a sophisticated spreadsheet to predict, plan and organize how they would manage email on a weekly basis. Sadly, the point was to gain two extra hours each week. The person was about to have their first child and didn't want to spend too much time working. So naturally, the solution was to create yet another system, a new way to do work about work, rather than simply doing less.

3. ambiguity intolerance syndrome

It's the physical and psychological distress when faced with genuine uncertainty. This can manifest as:

• Somatic responses: elevated heart rate when someone says "it depends";
• Cognitive flooding: inability to think clearly without clear parameters;
• Behavioral avoidance: creating false certainties to avoid dwelling in ambiguity;
• Emotional dysregulation: anger or anxiety when faced with open-ended situations.

As explored in the research on intolerance of uncertainty^[1], this phenomenon is transdiagnostic, appearing across various psychological conditions from anxiety disorders to OCD to depression.

4. certainty performativity disorder

The compulsive need to appear certain regardless of actual knowledge. This creates a kind of "confidence theater": elaborate performances of supposed knowing that mask fundamental ignorance. The tell-tale signs:

• Speaking in buzzwords and jargon to avoid substantive statements;
• Using data visualization or starting interventions with "studies say that..." to create an aura of scientific certainty;
• Transforming guesses into "data-driven insights";
• Confusing correlation with causation, then presenting both as destiny;
• Blatantly lying.

In my late teens, during a night out in Sesimbra (a coastal town south of Lisbon), our hometown, I remember a friend claiming to have seen a movie that had not started filming yet (it was a sequel that had been announced). When confronted with this incongruity, he just shrugged his shoulders and said: "You guys never believe in me!"

secondary manifestations

The primary symptoms generate a cascade of secondary effects:

Intellectual Bulimia: Consuming vast amounts of information without digestion, then regurgitating it as "thought leadership." The modern professional reads executive summaries of books about summaries of research, then speaks with authority about fields they've never actually studied.

I remember a friend and mentor telling me a tale about a colleague he had when he was in the army who didn't know how to swim. That colleague wanted to learn to swim and spent some nights reading in the barracks library where he found a swimming manual. A few weeks into his "instruction," moved by shame, he threw himself into the pool. Luckily, my friend was on night watch near the pool and heard the water splash with the distress of his colleague, and knew how to swim.

Paradigm Addiction: The compulsive need for new frameworks, models, and methodologies. Like addicts needing ever-stronger hits, we cycle through management theories, productivity systems, and organizational paradigms with increasing speed, each promising to finally deliver the certainty we crave.

Personal Development Groupies: They normally inhabit the self-help and self-improvement territories. They're the ones who certify as coaches in a weekend, after a PNL workshop, followed by a non-violent communication program that includes a cocoa ritual, while dancing ecstatically. All this following self-proclaimed gurus running probable pyramid schemes.^[2] It's not uncommon for these people to emancipate and create a role, job title with words that do not exist, and to create "Frankensteinean" self-named methodologies that are even less prone to rigor, depth and breadth than the ones they're based on. They just arrogantly, while dressed in a shroud of humility and openness, do "their thing."

Complexity Allergy or Imperious Pragmatist: An immediate rejection response to anything that can't be reduced to a simple model or metric. Nuance becomes the enemy. Paradox is intolerable. "It's complicated" sounds like an admission of failure rather than a recognition of reality.

iii. the wellness-certainty complex: a case study in paradox

Recently, I found myself in conversation about vaccination—a topic that has become curiously divisive. I was speaking with someone deeply embedded in what we might call the "wellness-industrial complex." Someone who regularly attends retreats, practices various forms of bodywork, and speaks fluently the language of chakras and energy fields. The conversation took a revealing turn when I suggested that perhaps we needed to respect different perspectives on the issue, even if we disagreed with them, with the explicit intention to note what was happening between us in that conversation.

The response was immediate and absolute: "Excuse me, but those who vaccinate put others at risk, not just the ones around but also they undermine our genetic future, and whoever allows that to happen does the same!" The vehemence was striking, especially from someone who moments before had been extolling the virtues of openness and non-judgment.

What struck me wasn't the position itself but the certainty with which it was held. Here was someone whose entire professional identity was built around flexibility, flow, and accepting what the universe provides, yet who displayed a rigidity that would make a fundamentalist proud. The irony was lost on them entirely.^[3]

This certainty-within-uncertainty paradox reveals something deeper about how we use therapeutic and spiritual frameworks to avoid political engagement. The wellness practitioner's absolute certainty represents not just individual rigidity but a broader pattern where psychological language substitutes for structural analysis. Their certainty about vaccination becomes a way to feel politically engaged while remaining safely within individualistic frameworks of personal choice and bodily autonomy.^[4]

This encounter exemplifies a broader phenomenon I've observed in what we might call the "transformational space": that ecosystem of wellness retreats, circles, ecstatic dances, and plant medicine ceremonies. As documented in recent investigations^[5], there's a curious pipeline from yoga studios to conspiracy theories, from meditation retreats to anti-vaccine activism, from self-care to various forms of extremism. The common thread? Certainty masquerading as openness.

the ancestral wisdom monopoly

One particularly striking manifestation of this paradox is the "ancestral wisdom monopoly." In these circles, there's often a wholesale dismissal of modern knowledge - philosophy, science, medicine - in favor of indigenous practices and ancient wisdom. The shamans knew, the argument goes, and we've been wrong for thousands of years.