Avoid Being Wrong!

In school, we were taught that there are right and wrong answers. Sometimes in math we could figure out the right answer, but if we arrived by the wrong route, our work was still marked wrong. As an instructor, I once wandered into that swamp, downgrading a good performance because it didn’t fit the parameters I had set. Was the performance still good? Yes. Was I wrong to insist on obedience before effective functionality? Yes. Officials executed people such as Socrates for corrupting the youth by teaching them to seek truth through argument. Lots of people despise honest argument. We just hate to think we can be wrong. We don’t want to look foolish, even if we are.

Maybe being wrong is the problem. Being right means we’re the good guys, the smarter guys, and we hate suspecting that we aren’t always the good guys. Being wrong feels like doing something bad, and we never want to think we’ve done something bad. Many today go to immense trouble to reframe the facts of history so the ones writing the books are the good guys who never are and never were wrong. Our killing or cruelty or destruction was necessary. The others were wrong—not us. Our country is without stain or human failings. Wrong.

What does it take to admit you’re wrong? Maturity more than intelligence. We have to realize that statistically as human beings—even parents and teachers, we have to be wrong sometimes. If we can see when we’re wrong, we can do better. As certain Native Americans believe in making decisions for the future, not the present, we need to be able to see how to improve. We can’t improve if we insist we’re always right regardless of the outcome or human costs.

We can paralyze ourselves with indecision if we accept that everything has a right and a wrong answer. Dr. Ellen Langer (author of THE MINDFUL BODY), considered the creator of positive psychology, reminds us that we can’t know what the right answer is for any dilemma. We have to choose whether we’ll accept COVID vaccine, for example. What we can’t know is what our outcome will be either way. Perhaps we’ll die if we do or die if we don’t—especially those of us who qualify as senior citizens. Someone survives even the most deadly disease—for reasons we often can’t imagine. Someone else dies from what should have been safe. Dr. Langer advises us to make the decision as best we can according to our own evidence and value system and then go full steam ahead and make the best of whatever comes next. Don’t second guess yourself because all decisions are guesses based on probabilities, not predictions. Most of our decisions are not as tragic as life and death, even when we treat them as though they were. Stressing makes our outcomes worse.

If we’ve learned anything from the recent huge advancements in health and science, archeology and DNA, we should realize that we misunderstood much of what we concluded was true around us. The wisest course is to remain light on our feet, able to switch directions when necessary and take advantage of new information to make a better world for us all. The ancients didn’t understand everything, nor were they immune from the hubris that made them color their so-called wisdom to suit their preferences. We are the same unless we stop insisting on being “right” in favor of trying to be wise and kind.