The Tyranny of Certainty

THE TYRANNY OF CERTAINTY: How Expert Fraud, Therapeutic Wokism, and the Tyranny of Certainty Destroyed the Economic Left and Bankrupted CivilizationThey were certain they were right. That's what made them dangerous. In 2008, Alan Greenspan sat before Congress and admitted he had found "a flaw" in his worldview. But this was no mere technical error. The global financial crisis was the predictable result of a priesthood that claimed to know the future, built mathematical models that denied the possibility of disaster, and insisted there was no alternative to their policies.
This book argues that the tyranny of certainty-the belief that experts have found final answers-has become the defining pathology of our age. From the economics profession's fraudulent claim to predict markets, to NATO's catastrophic expansion eastward despite warnings it would provoke war, to the transformation of the left from a movement for economic justice into a therapeutic cult of privilege discourse, we are living with the consequences of elites who were too certain to admit error and too powerful to be held accountable.
The Tyranny of Certainty reveals:. How the economics profession's mathematical models systematically denied the possibility of the crises they caused. Why the left abandoned class solidarity for identity politics-and who benefited from that substitution. How the 1997 decision to expand NATO set in motion the war in Ukraine 25 years later. Why Europe's technocratic elite chose economic suicide over admitting their Russia policy had failed.
How therapeutic language and woke capitalism defanged economic radicalism while enriching the professional-managerial classBut this is not a book of cynicism. It is a case for democratic humility: the recognition that we might be wrong, that policy must be subject to revision, and that the freedom to not know is the foundation of both democracy and human dignity. The Grand Inquisitor promised humanity certainty in exchange for freedom.
This book explains why we must refuse that bargain-before it's too late. For readers of: Thomas Frank, Adolph Reed Jr., Wolfgang Streeck, Yanis Varoufakis, and anyone who suspects that the experts who broke the world are lying about how to fix it.