I’m uncertain about most things, including politics. I’m trying to stay that way. A democracy dies when its people fail to question their political beliefs.

I came out of the womb a non-believer, as nearly as I can tell. I struggled throughout childhood with the seeming necessity and yet impossibility of religious faith. My decision at age 18 to embrace my lack of faith started me on a quest for guidelines — the rules of evidence, so to speak — to follow in the pursuit of truth.

I found a partial answer in science’s methods for proving and disproving beliefs and opinions, but I discovered that science itself reveals how little we can know.

Leading scientists acknowledge the chasm between us and reality. “We will always be mired in error,” Astronomer Carl Sagan warned in his book, “The Demon-Haunted World.” Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman declared, “People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.”

The causes of this dilemma include language, complexity, and, most of all, psychology.

We can start with language. Scientists have struggled since the beginning to find a way to make a solid connection between words and reality. All have failed.

 The Encyclopedia Britannica, in its philosophy of language section, traces the history of that hopeless quest. It reflects the fact that words aren’t a direct copy of reality and don’t mean the same thing to everyone. We distort reality simply by trying to describe it with hazy words like liberal, conservative, fascism, and socialism.

Uncertainty also reigns in the scientific theory known as chaos. It’s the source of the famous butterfly effect, the fanciful idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas. Tiny events interact with others in complex situations, and spiral unpredictably into huge consequences.

We instinctively resist the idea that important events can be so random and seemingly chaotic. We cling to the belief that we can understand the past and control the future. Nassim Taleb, in his book, “The Black Swan,” explores this delusion and its harmful effects.

It arises from the brains that nature has imposed on us. Psychological researcher Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” based on 40 years of research, puts to rest the idea that humans are, by and large, rational animals.

The human mind is unable to know reality directly, and must instead create beliefs about the world based on its experiences. It develops explanatory stories that are familiar, comfortable, seem to hold together, and demand a minimum of mental effort. It calls on logic only when a belief is under threat, looking for evidence to defend it and ignoring facts that might weaken it.

The less we know, the easier it is to support our stories. “It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness,” says Mr. Kahneman. ”Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.”

Mr. Talib puts it this way, “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation; our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”

None of us are capable of escaping these mental limitations. Mr. Kahneman acknowledges that about himself. We can overcome our prejudices only briefly and with great effort.

If we could be truly certain about our political opinions, we wouldn’t need to tolerate those of others. But democracy requires us to acknowledge that everyone is wrong in some way. We trust that, in an uncertain world, we can come to the best achievable solutions through open discussion and compromise.

I and my liberal friends need to keep the importance of uncertainty in mind as we taste the bitter fruit of this year’s election. We must, if we’re to learn from it, open ourselves to the possibilities in the ideas of those on the other side. We must most of all avoid the temptation to console ourselves with a sense of superiority to the followers of Donald Trump.

A disregard for uncertainty presents a different danger for Republicans: an arrogant confidence that leads to overreach and a backlash against them in the 2026 and 2028 elections.

There will be battles to be fought, but both sides must, if we’re to reunite and move forward, acknowledge, against all our instincts, our inescapable predicament: The only thing that’s certain in this world is that everything is uncertain.

Lowell Harp is a retired school psychologist who served school districts in Ogle County. His column runs monthly in The Ogle County Life. For previous articles, you can follow him on Facebook at http://fb.me/lowellharp.