We tend to believe that our time is the most uncertain of all.
Perhaps it is true that the pace of change has never been greater. Even so, the feeling that the ground is shifting beneath our feet, that the future has become unreadable, and that our points of reference disappear before we can hold on to them is nothing new. These are experiences as old as the human condition itself.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a group of English textile workers began destroying the machines that threatened their livelihoods. They became known as the Luddites and, for two centuries, have been portrayed as ignorant opponents of progress. The historical reality, however, is far more nuanced. The Luddites were not opposed to technology itself. They opposed the loss of control over their own lives. They destroyed machines because it was the only way they knew how to protest against a form of progress that was moving forward without them, imposed upon them rather than shaped by them. Their actions cannot simply be dismissed as irrational. They were driven by desperation.
That desperation was real and justified. Yet the way it manifested itself, through rigidity, the search for a clear enemy, and the need to divide the world into opposing sides, reflects a far more universal human response than this particular episode suggests. And it has repeated itself throughout history. With the printing press, which challenged the Church’s authority over knowledge. With industrialization, which transformed artisans into factory workers. With the internet, which blurred the boundaries between public and private life. And now with artificial intelligence, which compels us to question not only what we do, but who we are.
Research in social psychology offers an explanation for this recurring search for control through the certainty that certainty itself provides. Arie Kruglanski introduced the concept of the need for cognitive closure, describing the human desire for definitive answers and a predictable world. During periods of uncertainty and perceived threat, this need becomes stronger. People are more likely to adopt rigid beliefs, seek out groups with clearly defined boundaries, simplify complexity into something more manageable, and divide the world into straightforward categories: us and them, right and wrong, a glorious past and a threatening future.
Once again, what emerges is not irrationality but an ancient protective mechanism, one that is highly effective in situations of immediate danger yet profoundly ill-suited to the complexity of the world we now inhabit. When activated collectively, this mechanism fuels extremism, polarization, and intolerance. We see it unfolding around us every day. Movements promising order through simplicity continue to gain momentum. Ideas that history has already tested, with far from encouraging results, are re-emerging. We fragment ourselves into opposing camps: people versus machines, nationals versus foreigners, those who stayed versus those who left.
The real challenge is not artificial intelligence, disruption, or uncertainty itself. We have lost the center.
There is a fundamental difference between a changing world and a human being who no longer knows who they are as that world changes. The first is inevitable. The second is an individual and collective identity crisis that reveals itself precisely through this fragmentation. Without a sufficiently grounded relationship with ourselves, every external change begins to feel like an existential threat. And when faced with threat, we respond as we always have: we seek control, we build walls, and we choose sides.
Some people focus entirely on the external world, on technology, on trends, on what the world demands, and in doing so lose themselves, becoming instruments of forces they never chose. Others retreat so deeply inward that they cease to live in relationship with other people and with the world around them. Neither extreme offers a solution. The real challenge is more subtle and far more demanding: to maintain a center strong enough to allow us to engage with the world without being swept away by it.
That does not come from acquiring more information. It comes from self-knowledge, from understanding who we are, what we value, and the perspective from which we think before deciding how we act. It is the hardest work and the least celebrated. There is no algorithm for it. No app. No accelerated version.
Perhaps that is precisely why it has become so necessary.
We live in a time when we are constantly being called upon as objects of forces greater than ourselves. The most radical response is to insist on remaining the subjects of our own lives. Not alone, because division and exclusion never build anything; they only create imbalance. Rather, together, with the awareness that what unites us runs deeper than any disruption that seeks to divide us.
The world is not going to stop. The real question is whether we can maintain the center whilst it keeps moving.
Duarte Afonso Silva, Development Manager Executive Education na Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics