Eventually, You’ll Be Wrong
Over time, it will always take more effort to justify a strongly held opinion than to adapt and evolve it.
Evolution
Jonathan Haidt once wrote, “You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”
Humanity has always been a species that rallies around ideologies. From politics to economics to societal questions to religion, once a core belief takes hold in the mind, it has a tendency to stay there for quite a while. It may seem—given the state of the world over the past few years—that we live in a more divided time than ever. But people have always and will always hold unwavering positions that they’ll never give up on… except that over time, they will give up on them, or at least revise them. That’s because a truly unwavering position can never be sustained for very long. And this is scientifically provable.
Any ideological position (which I’ll define as a belief based on opinion that is not actually provable or disprovable) is based on that position being somewhat compatible with the surrounding world. Yet, over time, the surrounding world is guaranteed to change. And so, on a long enough timeline, any ideological position starts becoming incompatible with reality. In a nutshell: There are way more ways for you to be wrong than to be right.
Understanding this is, in my experience, a key aspect of becoming an effective leader. In a universe where the only constant is change, no leader (be it a CEO, a politician, or anyone else) should weigh pride in any opinion too highly, because that opinion will likely one day be forced to evolve.
Entropy
There’s an analogous concept in physics that is unsustainable over time: order. Any time molecules are well sorted, any time heat is contained, any time energy is organized in some fashion, things are being arranged and organized in a particular way. Yet over time, this organization devolves due to the phenomenon of entropy. At its core, entropy is the universal fact that everything tends towards randomness and chaos, given enough time. (This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which I’ve written about before.)
Consider a pool filled with lukewarm water. In it, water molecules are bouncing off each other at various speeds, which, at the aggregate, put the average temperature of the pool at 70°F. You might say that this arrangement of molecules is completely random and chaotic. There is no structured order (i.e. no two parts of the pool look that different on any meaningful scale).
Now boil a pot of water and dump it into part of the pool. Something key has changed, because various parts of the pool are no longer identical. Some parts are hot (where you dumped the boiling water), and some are not. The molecular arrangement is no longer entirely random. The entropy of this system has become relatively low.
And over time, we all know what happens: the hot water molecules disperse, the average temperature of the pool slightly increases, and the structured temperature differential disappears. Randomness has returned. Entropy has risen.
One of the most intuitive ways to understand entropy is to think about the likelihood of different arrangements. The probability of an arrangement of molecules that has all the hot molecules clustered together in a pool is significantly lower than the very many arrangements that have the hot molecules mixed in with the others. In other words, the more options there are for how to arrange the system and still have it seem the same on average, the higher the entropy.
Strongly Held Opinions
What does this have to do with ideology? Well, no opinion is formed in a vacuum. When created by the brain, an opinion must incorporate the information of the surrounding world (i.e. it’s a bunch of water that gets dropped in a larger pool). Yet just like that hot water in the corner of the pool that dissipated over time, a worldview will start to evolve and change with time. That’s because of entropy too: There are more ways for your worldview to be wrong than there are ways for it to be right.
Consider tenets in the areas of foreign policy or fiscal policy. Virtually every political position touted as the panacea to diplomatic or economic woes over the years has had to contend with the changing circumstances of the world. When these positions are formed, they take into account the state of the present day. What’s more, they are compatible with the present day. After all, who would take on an opinion about something that was immediately incompatible with the world?
Yet, as time goes on, the world changes, and the people holding opinions that may now be incompatible with the circumstances of the day are faced with a choice: they can hold onto their ideologies and grapple with the cognitive dissonance that stems from doing so, or they can evolve their ideologies to fit the present day (often without ever admitting they were wrong!).
Is it any surprise that no political party ideology stays consistent for that long? Or that economic theories are constantly revised as unexpected economic phenomena occur? Or that many of the literal understandings of certain texts (like, say, the U.S. Constitution) have had to evolve over the centuries?
Ideals vs. Ideologies
In both my personal and professional lives, I’ve had to learn the hard way that there is a big difference between values/ideals and ideology. The former is a compass that helps you generally know which direction you want to head in. It’s a loose guide that informs what’s right and what’s wrong. The latter is a map, a specific trail, a set of directions for how to live that offers no room for deviation or adjustment. But the world changes. Inputs change. Traffic patterns change. Ironically, the longer one holds onto an ideology, the more incompatible that ideology can become with the person’s ideals.
In my experience as an entrepreneur, for instance, it was quite a wake up call to find that most of the assumptions I had made (and strongly stuck to) early on were wrong. I’ve written about this journey before, the notion that there are many more ways for early choices to reach dead ends that successful outcomes. The ability of a leader to take in input from the outside world, recalibrate, put aside pride, and adjust their perspective is the only way out of this maze. Why should any other form of ideology be any different?
With all due respect to the great Fyodor Dostoyevsky, I think he got it wrong when he said this:
The Heat Death of the Universe (and Strongly Held Opinions)
Cosmologists believe that at some point in the distant future, all of the usable heat in the universe will be chaotically distributed. Maximum entropy will be reached. And the universe as we know it will effectively end. This is what is referred to as The Heat Death of the Universe.
This is also the eventual fate of any strongly held opinion. As stated above, a changing world is not only likely. It is inevitable. That means that the more strongly one holds onto an opinion, the more likely it is to eventually be incompatible with the surrounding world. That also means that it will be ever harder to continue justifying any opinion.
That leaves two real options for any strongly held opinion: Either adapt to the changing world… Or suffer an inevitable heat death.
And this is not to say that one shouldn’t live with values or ideals. On the contrary, I think this viewpoint is liberating. It means that we as humans should simultaneously live our values and also head into the future with an open mind.
P.S. Again, this is looking only at opinions that are unprovable. One shouldn’t stop defending provable assertions just because they haven’t yet been proven.
P.P.S. For a great read on entropy, I recommend the Brian Greene book Until the End of Time. Everything Greene writes is gold.
P.P.P.S. For a great read on ideology and opinions, I recommend the Jonathan Haidt book The Righteous Mind. That’s where the opening line of this article came from.
