The Freedom Of Being Wrong
EPISODE 062: THE FREEDOM OF BEING WRONG
Joseph Chilton Pearce said, "to live a creative life we must lose the fear of being wrong." And yet we live in a culture where the need to prove ourselves right has never been more easily satisfied. Many of us spent the formative years of our lives in schools that were built not around learning, discovery, or exploration of new ideas, but remembering the one right answer. Is there freedom to be found in a willingness to be wrong? Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
If the internet has given the human race one great dubious gift, aside from the very many pictures of kittens to which we now have access, it is the ability for individuals to prove more broadly than ever before just how right we are, and when feeling particularly ornery, how wrong others are on issues about which we feel absolutely certain. One can barely read a blog post without someone taking a vocal and contrary position, though it'd be easier to take them more seriously if even half of them actually read the article whose ideas they claim to be refuting.
I can't count the number of times, when the trolls have shown up at the front door of my blog–and they have been mercifully few–that the arguments have been loud and passionate and uncompromising in what seems like inverse proportion to how much of the article they've actually read. The few that do read what I write, somehow still manage to skip over the parts where I very clearly say, "this isn't about that" and then double-down on why I'm so wrong about the thing I wasn't really writing about. I have never felt so much like I was taking crazy pills as when faced with the denizens of the internet who are not only convinced they are right, but convinced by just how much it must matter to the rest of the world that they are right.
When did it become so important to be right about everything? To know things with such certainty, and to defend that certainty so vigorously? Perhaps more to the point, when did it start mattering that we all agree on whatever things we feel so right about, or so ashamed at the possibility of being wrong about? And if, as I suspect, it has always been this way through time immemorial, and the internet really only amplifies this basic human tendency, what's the fear of being wrong got to do with your creative life? I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 062 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
It will probably come as no surprise to you that I think, at least in part, much of the blame for this obsession about being right, or the fear of being wrong, lies in the way we were educated. My schooling, for all the good it did me, and we can debate that some other time, was nothing if not a many years-long adventure in being more and more right, and less and less wrong. Being right was rewarded, being wrong was punished. Understanding or the ability to learn and discover new things, or to risk something in that exploration, were not exactly encouraged.
Perhaps this all just shows you some glaring lack in my education, but I suspect it's more universal than just my own experience. Culturally many of us in the west have been taught to value being right, and to feel shame and embarrassment at being wrong. What's all cock-eyed about this is that it isn't about truth and facts, wisdom or understanding. It's not about knowledge. The fear of being wrong, especially being wrong in front of others, isn't about these things at all. It's about how others see us, and how we see ourselves, and the fears that build up around those are very deep fears indeed. Very few people defending their opinions to the death are defending ideas, or some deeper truth. They're defending themselves. I know this because, well, as they say: I have seen the enemy, and he is me.
I'm 50 years old this year, and still–in my less enlightened moments–I find myself desperate to be right. To not be wrong. I still have to take a deep breath sometimes and remind the part of me that seems never to have left high school, that life does not require that everyone agree with me. Nor does it need me to know everything. I think about this when I find myself tempted to open my mouth on things I really know nothing about. I've read, what? A couple articles on Covid-19 and suddenly I'm tempted to jump into discussions about the subject as if I'm some kind of expert on virology? It makes it easier to say " I really don't know enough about that to have an opinion," and if not to say it, which would be the mature and honest thing to do, then at least to think it to myself and step away from the keyboard.
More embarrassingly, I think back to my years in theology college and the bitter arguments we would have about things no human being can be certain of. And yet there we were, arguing about the theoretical and the imagined, until we were blue in the face and ready to start accusing each other of heresy. It would be amusing were inquisitions and wars not started with the same kind of conviction. What is certain is that no real break-throughs of the imagination were found when defending those particular ramparts. No new ideas. No creative thinking. Certainly I grew no closer to wisdom, much less grace, which is absurd because it's probably something like the nature of grace about which we were so mercilessly arguing, refusing to admit the possibility that we could be wrong about things so truly unknowable.
The relentless need to be right, and the fear of being wrong–or worse, the inability to accept being wrong about almost anything as a very real and constant possibility–is the opposite of the kind of open-mindedness we need to be curious and creative. Being unflinchingly right all the time is not only just about the surest way to stop ourselves from listening and learning, but none of us are remotely as smart as we have convinced ourselves we are. It helps to remember that while there is usually only one way to be right about any given subject, there are just so, so many ways to be wrong.
How many ways? As a start, a 2018 article in The Atlantic tells me that the Wikipedia entry on cognitive biases lists 185 of them. Not only is that almost 200 ways we can be wrong, it's 200 ways we can be wrong while being certain we are right. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking or deviations from reason. They are oversimplified ways of understanding a complex world. They feel right, they seem true, but they often lead us astray.
I've discussed confirmation bias before, that's the tendency to believe true the evidence that we think backs up what we already believe and to reject evidence that contradicts it. There are 184 others cognitive biases. Like, for example the way we believe ourselves to be smarter, funnier, or more talented than we really are. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, also known as the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town in which "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."
The number of ways in which we can be wrong while believing ourselves to be right, is staggering. It's not just mistakes in reason, either. Our senses, and our certainty in the way we perceive the world, is just as suspect. I saw it as a magician all the time and it still astonishes me how easily we take as certain something that only has a passing resemblance to what is true or real. Our senses fail us all the time, though that wouldn't be such a problem if we weren't so sure we saw what we saw, or heard what we heard. We can be very certain about some really uncertain things.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss is quoted as saying: "The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong. Because that opens your mind to the realization that the world is different than you thought it would be, and you have to begin to open your mind to the possibilities of existence. And opening your mind frees you, it doesn't constrain you. It makes the world more wonderful, more exciting, and more worth living in.”
What he's wishing for all those kids and the adults they will become, is the humility to remain open to new ideas and the possibility of re-thinking things often and always. He's wishing for them, and for us, the kind of holy curiosity that Einstein was always going on about, the kind that questions everything and thrills at being wrong if only because it means we have learned something new, and shuffled off yet one more thing that was holding us back from seeing the world a little more clearly. He's wishing for us the kind of relationships that come from holding our version of the truth a little more gently and being willing to listen to other points of view, and re-think our own. And I think he's wishing for us all the kind of creative freedom that comes with being, and finding out that we are, wrong about things now and then.
The freedom of being willing, even eager, to be proven wrong about things we haven't questioned, is a freedom from the need to feel shame for not being right.
It's a freedom from the incredible burden of needing to carry the whole truth with us all the time, and the obligation to defend it.
It is a freedom to question whether there isn't a better way to do the thing we've always done this way.
It's a freedom to discover that the answers that satisfied us as younger people no longer satisfy us as adults, and to be OK with that.
The freedom not to be right is the freedom to keep looking, to discover, and to feel no pressure to adopt the first or easiest answers as our own. The one who has arrived and camped out on any one truth, big or small, is the one who never journeys further down the road to discover larger but less obvious wonders that might otherwise await. To be cut off from wonder seems a very high price to pay for unwavering certainty in ourselves.
What set me off on all this was a book I'm reading right now by Canadian clinical psychologist, Jordan B Peterson, called 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos. More specifically, it was this one quote that caught my attention. He's talking about how sure we can be about what we believe about ourselves. "What do you know about yourself?" Peterson writes, "You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave. Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge." I think that's good advice for both what we think we know irrefutably about ourselves and of the world around us, microwave ovens included, and a reminder not take ourselves too seriously.
But perhaps worst of all, the fear of being wrong sabotages our willingness to risk, to take a chance, and to venture forward without any guarantee that our instincts, ideas, or methods are right, when it's often only by being wrong (and being open to seeing that) that we find missing pieces, and discover whole new areas into which our knowledge or skill (or current lack thereof) can expand, pull us along in its wake, and allow us to become more than we are now.
The freedom in being willing to be wrong now and then opens a space within us to replace old ideas with the new or the more flexible. To see new perspectives. To learn. To grow. To risk, and to treat with greater respect those with whom we differ, and from whom we might learn something. The freedom in being willing to be wrong is the freedom to peer with unself-conscious curiosity and wonder into the unknown, which is where our creative work always happens, and it allows us to remain receptive to surprises and the possibility of our work becoming larger than our assumptions and take us into places that are even larger still, and into which we and our creative work have room to grow.
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Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0