When you are lied to by the fake news, the fake school propaganda textbooks, or when you are surrounded by ignorant people who can’t see things the way they actually work, you develop coping methods over time to deal with the necessarily resulting uncertainty.  This scales up nicely to the species level, and down to the individual decision level as well.  Humans just don’t know enough of the future to be able to make exact plans in advance.

All civilizations that I know of have come up with games to deal with uncertain decision making.  They are typically games of chance: geomancy, tarot, throwing the rune staves, dice, goat knucklebones and many others.  Believe it or not, mathematically, these work for the benefit of the species as a whole.  Not everybody should do the same thing, because not every circumstance is the same.  Thus, a question such as “should I move?” is answered differently for each family, and the families get spread out over the landscape.  Yes, some stay in the path of Vesuvius, but a bunch don’t.  Yes, some move into the path of the plague or the collapsing river dam, but a bunch don’t.

We learned early on as a species not to put all of our eggs in one basket.  Thus, some prepare for the global warming, and some prepare for the next ice age, and some prepare for the climate to be very slow at shifting, while muttering “not in my lifetime suckers” under their breath.  This is good.  Regardless of who is correct, somebody has prepared for the correct option, so somebody survives.  “Where should I move to prepare for the diminishment of the availability of oil resources and the next famine due to the lack of fertilizers and pesticides and working combines?”  The answer, obviously, is for some to stay, and some to move around, for some to garden, and some to keep researching the biodiversity of fungi in big university ivory towers, and some to manufacture and internationally trade plant-based medicine on massive scales.  There is no one right place to move to prepare for an uncertain future.  Perhaps the answer is, where the jobs are, or perhaps the answer is where I will have access to clean air, clean water, clean food, and medical care when I need it and to hell with jobs.

Humans are very good at lying to their conscious mind.  They can handle vast amounts of cognitive dissonance for decades.  Yet, if they tapped into their unconscious minds, a wealth of information would come forward.  They would know who is a creepy person, and would stay away from those people with the slimy eyes, simply by engaging with the patterns of body language which betray unspoken intentions.  This intuition is very useful in decision making when there is just a little bit of uncertainty.  If you are asking “Is my boss planning to fire me or lay me off?” usually, you have a gut feeling, even if you would not necessarily know why or when.  Tapping into that gut feeling using a game of chance can give you more information.

When there is quite a bit of uncertainty, using a game of chance is just about the only way to make the decision without succumbing to paralysis by analysis by the analytical paranoid types.  Sometimes, you just can not know in advance what the risks of ruin are for each option.  There comes a time when ranting and raving against the bought and paid for mainstream media doesn’t work, and you have to make a move, or perhaps wait motionless, based on only the very limited information and patterns of behavior which are available to you.

It helps a lot to be able to formulate the right question.  There are times when even the act of attempting to formulate the right question can give you insights into something you are missing or hiding from yourself.  “Should I lose weight?”  Is that really the right question?  Is it instead “should I lose body fat?”  Or is it “should I become the healthiest I can be, so that I am prepared and able to live life with joy?”  And what does healthy mean, anyway?  I mean, maybe you should really gain weight by adding more muscle than fat lost, or maybe you should have sufficient amounts of body fat to be healthy in the possible famine filled future?  And maybe your weight should fluctuate over time.  Maybe the inverted Moon tarot card is the best outcome possible, and that is a good thing.