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Humorous Fallibilism
“I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.” ~Mary Oliver
Humorous fallibilism, what a delightful little paradox to chew on. It tastes like one might imagine an Everlasting Gobstopper tasting. Fruity with a hint of folly.
Fallibilism is Latin for “liable to err.” At its core, it’s the philosophical stance that our knowledge is inherently uncertain, always open to revision or outright debunking. Nothing is set in stone. Even our most cherished beliefs could tumble with a fresh bit of evidence or a sharper argument. Everything is subject to deep and penetrating interrogation. The only certainty is uncertainty. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. The only answer is to question.
Now, slap “humorous” onto that, and you’ve got a mindset that doesn’t just accept this uncertainty—it laughs hysterically at it. It’s stand-up comedy on a cosmic scale. Picture the universe as a cheeky comedian, constantly pulling the rug out from under us with a wink and a nudge. “Thought you had gravity figured out? Here’s relativity! Convinced the Earth’s the center of it all? Oops, here’s a taste of heliocentrism!”
If the solution to certainty is fallibilism and the solution to fallibilism is curiosity, then the solution to keeping curiosity forefront is maintaining a good sense of humor.
Humorous fallibilism leans into this absurdity, suggesting we shouldn’t just tolerate our ignorance but find the punchline in it. It’s self-awareness with a grin—knowing we’re all stumbling naked apes bumbling through an indifferent universe with half-baked theories and outdated maps, and that’s okay.
It’s Douglas Adams turning the chaos of existence into a galactic giggle-fest, or even Socrates, playfully prodding people into admitting they didn’t know squat, all while smirking at his own gaps in logic and reasoning. This kind of humor defangs the anxiety of being wrong—it’s less “Oh no, I’m a fool” and more “Ha! We’re all fools, pass the popcorn.”
It begs the question, “Does laughing at our own shaky footing make it easier to keep exploring, or is it just a way to shrug off responsibility for getting things right?”
How could it not be the height of taking responsibility? The High Humor required to “laugh into the abyss” is what Nietzsche pinpointed when he said, “There are heights of the soul from whose vantage point even tragedy stops having tragic effects.” Embracing the tragicomedy of an absurd universe is the closest thing we have to enlightenment. One could even go as far as to say that enlightenment shrinks or expands in proportion to our ability to become intimate with absurdity.
It’s not just about having a laugh at the abyss; it’s climbing up to a perch where the whole mess—tragedy, uncertainty, absurdity—turns into a dark comedy you can’t help but applaud. That’s not dodging responsibility; it’s owning the hell out of it. Elevated above the rigmarole, you’re free to say: “I see the chaos, I get that my grip on truth is slippery at best, and I’m still here cracking a smile. I’m still here mocking the devil with my tongue in God’s cheek.”
Enlightenment tied to intimacy with absurdity is sharp as a tack through the third eye, or a Everything, Everywhere, All at Once googly-eye stuck on the forehead. It flips the script on parochial ideals. It turns the tables on nihilism. It squares the circle of God. Instead of chasing some pristine, unshakeable wisdom, enlightenment becomes about dancing with the ridiculousness of it all in a perfectly imperfect pirouette.
The more we can cozy up to the fact that the universe doesn’t owe us meaning or certainty, the more spacious our mind becomes. It’s less about solving the puzzle and more about enjoying how hilariously unsolvable it is. Like, the ultimate Zen isn’t a meditating monk on a mountain—it’s a guy laughing his ass off because the mountain is a mirage.
Douglas Adams would probably be shouting “42!” while pointing at the TV set like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in that meme from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Nietzsche would probably be nodding along, twirling his mustache, because that “height of the soul” isn’t denial or detachment—it’s full-on engagement with the mess, just without the drama.
Tragedy loses its sting not because you ignore it, but because you see the cosmic pratfall behind it. You free yourself to own it. All of it. The whole absurd mess. You discover the labyrinth of yourself. You are free to become Legion.
You see how you are Multitude. You are death and darkness and madness. You are devil and demon and Minotaur. But you are also life and light and goodness. You are angel and Overman and God. Your Trickster Shadow—the most poignant archetype for humorous fallibilism if there ever was one—is your most “alive” aspect. It’s your fierceness, your cunning, your audacity, your primal lust. It’s your laughing, jesting, frolicking higher awareness, dragging you kicking and screaming through Dark Nights of the Soul with undaunted glee.
As Nietzsche said, “Calamity! is Rancor's cry; The jester calls it Play!”
Understanding that you are whole, you don’t renounce the shadow but return to it with full engagement by making a double movement, a trickster two-step, a connecting dance: from dark to light and back again to darkness, so that at every step, you are making the movement of infinity.
This numinous movement kicks up the dust. It gives you the power to pivot, to interrogate rather than gravitate. It’s choosing risk-taking over script-making. It doesn’t settle; it meddles. It mixes it up. It knocks off the dross. It chooses improvisation over tradition. It transcends the comfort/discomfort dichotomy through sincere nonattachment.
Like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith practicing the Principle of Correspondence, you’re able to bring the material to the spiritual and the spiritual back again to the material, imbuing your life with divine significance, with mystical providence, with a humor so hyperaware that it is elevated above all things, laughing hysterically at being the punchline of the cosmic joke.
Humorous fallibilism is not detachment for the sake of peace; it’s nonattachment that dives headfirst into the fray, finds the sacred in the absurd, and comes up grinning.
“Calamity? Nah, mate, it’s absolute play!”—that’s the jester’s mic-drop.
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About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (Humorous Fallibilism) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.
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