Take the Plunge. Admit When You're Wrong
I’ve been obsessed with how we know what we know since I was in college. I think the short answer is that sometimes we discover we’re wrong. For me, being mistaken (or at least being open to the possibility that we might be mistaken) is one of the most critical parts of the human experience of knowing stuff.
That was my immediate guess 20 or so years ago and I’ve spent the intervening years toying with it in my writing.
What fascinates me is that finding out you’ve been wrong is never just a question of reshuffling a set of fact cards you keep in your head. Finding out you were wrong means changing your life to coincide with your new understanding.
The thing is, we are invested in what we believe, even when it’s a small thing, and giving up on an investment of any kind is difficult. In economics, they call it the sunk cost fallacy, this idea that because you’ve invested so much in a company you have to keep investing in it until it pays off.
Learning to Be Wrong
Cutting our losses isn’t something that comes to human beings easily. It makes sense in a way because we know deep down that when we’ve chosen wrong there might be something the matter with the way we decide to choose.
I mean, that’s what regret is, seeing the possibilities that closed up when we chose one path over the other. Regret is a powerful motivator when it comes to choosing self-deceit. We can see time and alternatives in ways that other animals just can’t, and if the decision is big enough it is always easier to pretend we’re right than it is to start from scratch.
In my experience, it isn’t the fact of being wrong that drives people to self-deceit, but rather what being wrong implies.
This was my main takeaway when I realized I wasn’t a religious person anymore. I wasn’t worried about losing my belief in God and the supernatural, there was nothing I could do about that. I worried about how to fit that worldview into the larger picture.
What would I tell my mom or my kids? How could I relate to my friends? After all, I’d spent nearly three decades claiming something was a fact, and I had been wrong. I looked around at (let’s call them) public atheists, and they seemed a little overwrought, clinging to non-belief like maniacs cling to posterboard outside Planned Parenthood.
Riding the Rollercoaster of Wrong
There may be millions of children this week who transition from believing in Santa to not believing in Santa. For many, it won’t be their first blow to belief, but it will be the biggest they face for a long time. For many if not most Western Christians learning the truth about Santa is a part of their childhood they all have a story for.
Think about divorce or the breakup of any long-term relationship. More to the point, think about the edge of a breakup, that moment of dawning that’s like cresting a rollercoaster, it even causes that same sick feeling in our stomachs, a weightlessness as our entire bodies prepare for a major shift.
The difference with a rollercoaster is that physics takes over and brings us to an inevitable end, an end we saw when we got onto the ride.
In this week’s podcast, I revisit the Mandela Effect, which is the result of people deciding that they don’t have to accept being wrong or misplacing their belief. Ever.
It’s about people who trade that top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling for a daydream about another universe where their faith has never been misplaced, and everything they believe has ever been true still is.
I think that makes for a sadder, or at least incomplete, human experience. But as I look around at the multiple realities we all seem comfortable in inhabiting, in this post-truth world the Mandela Effect makes almost as much sense as any other description.
It’s also a little sad, though. What’s appealing about the rollercoaster analogy is that enduring the drop allows you to soar, to attain speeds you never could without releasing that potential energy, the catharsis that comes from accepting that you were wrong and letting the chips fall where they may.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
Personal Update
If you like this, could you forward it to someone you think might light it too? Alternatively, if you followed a link here, consider subscribing. I’ll be honest, I have something pretty cool (I think) coming up in the next three or four months.
The podcast is out, if you’d care to give it a listen. I plan on publishing every other week. It’s just 15 or so minutes long and I’d like to make it participatory. That is, I’ll take comments and critiques in the form of voice recordings. If you want to make them on your phone and send them along, I’ll respond in kind in bonus episodes.
Facebook has gotten into podcasting, so if you have the Facebook App, the show is available on my page. It isn’t available on the web browser, though, only mobile.
I guess this is the part where I remind you that Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult would probably make someone a nice Christmas gift. It’s still available for one-day delivery according to my search.