In The Face Of Uncertainty
Hugh Hewitt > Blog
Sunday, October 19, 2025
The article linked here is about the swine flu of 2009 as a “dry run” for the covid lockdowns. It is not entirely unreasonable, while at the same time being a bit too conspiratorial and overwrought. Nonetheless, it contains one of the greatest summations for what happened I have ever encountered – “…an unprecedented response was justified due to the unprecedented uncertainty of an invisible threat….” Everything I have or am reading indicates this to be the case – that we acted out of uncertainty and ignorance, not knowledge and assuredness. This insight is less about science and more about character.
In many ways, how one’s life proceeds is dictated by one’s risk tolerance level. Those with high risk tolerance end up as entrepreneurs. (Those with very high tolerance end up as serial entrepreneurs, mounting failures like peanut shells in a bar.) Those with low risk tolerance, at least until the Trump administration, end up with civil service jobs.
From the Census Bureau, “Nearly six in 10 young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up, and eight in 10 live within 100 miles, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University.” It would seem most people are more risk averse than they are risk tolerant. And yet this is a nation founded on risk tolerance – originally settled by people that went far, far from home at far greater risk than such a move would entail these days. It would seem risk tolerance is not genetic, at least not through too many generations.
We have seen, in the case of covid, what extreme risk averseness can produce and its not a pretty picture. It would seem it would behoove us to promote at least some level of risk tolerance. It also seems a good place to start would be to ask what has changed in the nation such that risk tolerance has decreased as the generations have proceeded.
My answer is simple. We have lost faith in ourselves which proceeds from faith in the Almighty. Proverbs, “The wicked flee when no one is pursuing,
But the righteous are bold as a lion.” It would seem risk tolerance is born of righteousness – or at least our presumption of righteousness. Christ came along later and taught that none of us are truly righteous, but that He can make us so. Which brings me to this from the letter to the church among the Jews:
Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever abandon you,” so that we confidently say,
“The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid.
What will man do to me?”
Interesting – desire for material things stands in the way of sufficient reliance on God to produce risk tolerance. (The internet and the “virtual world” it creates is most definitely material.) I also find the phrase “What will man do to me?’ fascinating. Covid wasn’t a fear of men, it was a fear of the unseen and the invisible. But then isn’t that God’s department? Elsewhere in Proverbs:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding.
So all of this raises an interesting question for me. It seems undeniable that young people are turning back to faith, and specifically faith in Jesus Christ. What kind of faith are we going to offer them? One that is bold and risk tolerant or one that cowers in fear from a germ? Both will save their souls, but only one will preserve the nation, our culture and our society.
