Some Kind of Life: Stigma Signaling

How To Be Wrong

“I thought I was wrong once […] but I later found out I was mistaken.” —Edward Abbey, in The Monkey Wrench Gang

I once got a compliment from a guy I worked with. We’d worked in the same store for more than a year. He was one of my supervisors, but I’d worked at the company for decades and he for a year or two, so it felt a bit more equal than that.

One quiet morning we were working side-by-side getting the store ready to open and talking about I-have-no-idea-what. Maybe music, maybe work, probably a little of each. He said, and I remember this being a non-sequitur, “You don’t mind being wrong, do you?”

My response was immediate: “Actually, I love it!”

To be clear, I hate being wrong, but that feeling is like most of my emotions, a blinding flash that dissipates rapidly. Then I get to the part I love: learning something new and correcting my errors.

I feel shame when I’m confronted with an error, especially if it causes anyone else any kind of pain, or even just inconvenience. I readily admit mistakes when I find them, even if no one else noticed; it allows me to move on and not fret about them. The sooner I get to correcting, the sooner the heat of shame dissipates.

It’s a fool’s errand to try to eliminate errors. I played this game when I was younger, thinking I could get better at everything until I stopped making mistakes. The problem is that none of us get better at anything unless we make mistakes. 

“‘I’m going to suggest solutions to a problem in which i’m not only uninvolved but to which I feel superior.’ It’s done by politicians…and parents.” —David Mamet, in Three Uses Of The Knife

I enjoy playing poker and racketball and cribbage. I especially enjoy playing these against other humans. Cribbage is ok against a computer, poker is boring because all the stakes are gone, and racketball is, as of now, impossible to play against a machine. I am at or below average at each of these, nothing special really. So I have the freedom to play them against people better than me or worse than me, and on rare occasion, can be evenly matched. I never learn as much as I do when getting beaten.

I used to play racquetball regularly with two different friends. One of them beat me every single time. It wasn’t a question of whether he would win. It was a question of how close I could get. With either of them, it would drive me crazy if they gave up. I sympathized—it’s hard to play against someone who can’t keep up. I think they each managed because one of them could slip up and lose a point occasionally and the other had to actually try to beat me. If he didn’t try, it would get too close and I could beat him occasionally. I think they both kept playing with someone worse than them because I never gave up.

I was the lucky one, I was learning.

Let me be honest. I have pushed back many times when challenged about being wrong. Shame hits the ego and the ego fights back. I am occasionally not in the right mind to be proven wrong and take it poorly like the uncultured child that I am.

And, judgmental soul that I am, I think poorly of those who can rarely admit when they are wrong and often only under duress or overwhelming evidence.

The last several years of pious language correction lead to a bit of an over-reaction in society. Being told that it was impolite or improper to say certain words in certain contexts lead to a blowback where we have members of Congress whose social media feeds barely look different than those of fourteen-year-old boys. I am a fifty-year-old man who wears shorts 330+ days per year, but even I know when to put away childish things.

This is not about right or wrong, this is about communicating clearly and getting your point across. If you want me to believe that you being able to post the word “-*-*-*-” or “*-*-*-*” is somehow more important than me listening to the rest of your message, that’s fine, but I didn’t get the message because I was distracted by how poorly you sent it.

If you say something dumb and you need to be corrected, then you take the correction with humility then ask for clarification if you don’t understand. You’re a human. You’re learning. If you remain dumb through obstinance or ignorance, then you can suffer the consequences, even if those consequences are beneficial, like a seat in Congress or a hit podcast with supporters who think that being wrong is some beta behavior.

That quote at the beginning, from a comic novel, stuck the first time I heard it because it is both the perfect example of what my monkey brain wants to believe and what my analytic mind can accept. I am often wrong, and in accepting that I can sometimes feel just as right.

It is ego that causes me to celebrate my own wrongness and ability to adapt in an essay like this and you would be just as foolish as I am to think I am any better than my monkey brain. It’s good that I love monkeys.

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