Torn in two? Why uncertainty can be better than you think.

A rumour is spreading: like wildfire it's sparking in comment sections on social media, like rowdies we throw ourselves into the fray with it. Who's messed up again? What do we think about the current winter fits? What's cringe right now? What's right? Who or what is good?

Our world is incredibly complex. It's art enough to find clarity in the jungle of one's own thoughts, so take that now a few billion and you end up above all at one thing: the many.

The diversity in all the facets of being human, from what we experience daily to the smallest details and preferences that distinguish us. And where there is much diversity, there is also much possibility. Seemingly endless possibility to think, to be, to live. How should one ever deal with that, how should one ever do justice to it?

The simplest answer is: not at all.

It is simple — yes, also that which our instinct longs for to protect us — to find exactly one right answer. To establish the greatest possible clarity, to reduce the many, to resolve the contradictions. It feels like a sigh of relief when you're finally certain you've understood it. Now to be on the right side, where everything is supposed to be understood, grasped and certain.

The ability to tolerate ambiguity, or also multiplicity of meaning, is also called ambiguity tolerance. To be able to endure the ambiguous, to hold the contradictions in the same hand, to observe them and to be able to let them be at the same time.

In psychology, ambiguity tolerance is examined as a personality trait. That is, attempts are made to find out whether people systematically differ in their ability to tolerate ambiguities.

Quite apart from the completely self-evident and indispensable diversity of the world (with or without humans), this ability plays a role both historically and today that should not be underestimated.

Ambiguity in every sense (how lovely that the word itself can be interpreted in so many different ways) has been pondered for an eternity, but what Else Frenkel-Brunswik noticed in 1949 in the USA should pave the way for some associations and relevance of the concept. As the trained psychologist and psychoanalyst, part of the first generation of women who could begin an academic career in the German-speaking world, fled from Austria to California, she began to investigate prejudices against ethnic minorities in children.

She noticed rather by chance that some children always found their parents "stupid", whilst others were able to differentiate their feelings of anger and love towards a parent and could accept them in their simultaneous existence.

She found differently strong such rigid thought patterns in the children she examined; found tendencies towards black-and-white thinking, premature value judgements, neglect of reality, all in the name of the most unambiguous possible judgements, of the one, supposedly correct answer.

But Frenkel-Brunswik was initially interested in the racist prejudices of the children. And these had to do in no insignificant measure with her chance finding regarding ambiguity tolerance: for the prejudices were stronger, the more unambiguous the value judgements of the children were, the less ambiguity they could tolerate.

Theodor Adorno was meanwhile interested in an even larger concept, on which he would shortly collaborate with Frenkel-Brunswik: are people differently susceptible to anti-democratic, authoritarian thought? And how could one establish that?

The so-called "fascism scale" which he published in his "Studies on the Authoritarian Character" together with, amongst others, Frenkel-Brunswik, incorporates many findings that had previously been found in the children. Ambiguity tolerance runs like a red thread through the long questionnaire and through the many interviews that the research team had conducted.

Ambiguity tolerance, so it seems, has the potential to act as protection — against the seductive farce of unambiguous answers, the misrecognition of the diversity of humanity, nature and world.

Next time, when you're not sure what is right and good. When you don't know what exactly it's about, and what it all means. When you are confronted with this uncomfortable feeling of tension, not knowing what's what, not being able to place yourself, not knowing what will happen in the future: try, difficult and uncomfortable as it may be (for us all!), to pause, and perhaps even enjoy the feeling for a moment.

For the world is as beautiful as it is bad. It has always been diverse, and it will always remain so. And precisely for that reason it is surely worth being seen and endured in all its facets.

For further reading:

• Adorno, T. W. (1973) Studies on the Authoritarian Character

• Frenkel-Brunswik, E. (1949) Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable