Socrates in the age of certainty

In an era awash with information and allergic to uncertainty, we could do with a bit more Socrates. Not the marble bust or the high-school quote machine, but the actual man: barefoot in the streets of Athens, refusing to let people finish their lunch without interrogating their concept of justice. He did not lecture; he needled. He did not write; he confronted. His brilliance wasn’t in producing doctrines, but in dismantling them, especially the comfortable ones. And for that, they killed him.

Socrates is often remembered as the father of Western philosophy, but that title is misleading. Fathers hand down rules. Socrates handed down doubt, not as a weakness, but as a method. He taught through questions, not answers. Through conversation, not proclamation. He believed that real thinking begins when certainty ends. That ideas, like people, reveal their character only under pressure.

This is precisely what makes him so dangerous today. We live in a culture that rewards instant conclusions and punishes ambiguity. To hesitate, to wonder aloud, to say “I’m not sure” is to risk being labelled weak or worse — suspicious. In this environment, Socrates would not be hailed as a sage. He would be ratioed. Or flagged for misinformation. Or accused of "platforming 'dangerous ideas".

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His offence, in 399 BCE, was not religious deviance or corrupting youth. It was exposing epistemological arrogance — the belief that people knew what they did not know. Socrates made the powerful look foolish and the confident look shallow. And he did it not by asserting his own superiority, but by holding up a mirror they couldn’t bear to look into. That mirror is still with us. And it remains as unwelcome as ever.

The Socratic method — now sterilised into classroom exercises — was, in its original form, a social provocation. A refusal to accept slogans as substance. A way of turning conversation into interrogation, and thereby exposing just how much we outsource our thinking to others. The media. The tribe. The algorithm.

This is why Socrates still matters. Because in an age that confuses repetition with truth and feelings with knowledge, we need someone to ask the awkward questions. Not to mock or humiliate, but to reintroduce a basic discipline: the willingness to follow an argument wherever it leads, even if it leads away from where we wanted to go.

He was not a contrarian. He was a citizen. And that is perhaps the hardest part to digest. Socrates believed that being a good citizen didn’t mean loyalty to the regime, or compliance with the norms, or sharing the right hashtags. It meant caring enough about the polis to hold it accountable to its own ideals. He believed the good life was the examined life, not the comfortable life or the performative one. That dignity comes not from public approval, but from private integrity.

He drank poison rather than renounce that belief.

And while the means of execution have evolved, the impulse has not. Socrates would have seen our time not as post-Enlightenment but pre-critical. A civilisation so awash in data that it has forgotten how to think. So obsessed with identity that it has lost interest in truth. So reflexively offended by challenge that it punishes the questioner before considering the question.

He would have seen that we’re still doing what Athens did: mistaking noise for wisdom, confidence for knowledge, and popularity for virtue. And that every few decades, a society decides it cannot bear the weight of honest thought — and finds new ways to silence it.

Socrates didn’t die because he was wrong. He died because he wouldn’t pretend to be right. That distinction still matters. And in a time when platforms shape belief more powerfully than argument, we need to ask — not rhetorically, but seriously — who are today’s gadflies? And how are we treating them?

If we can’t stomach doubt, we will never discover truth. That’s the uncomfortable legacy of Socrates. And it remains, two and a half thousand years later, the most subversive idea in politics, in media, and in thought.