Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [126]
Being wrong about love: Scarlett O’Hara did it in Gone with the Wind, Pip did it in Great Expectations, Cécile did it in Dangerous Liaisons, I did it in 1999, and at some point or another, you’ve probably done it, too. One reason this is an enduring theme of literature is that it is, alas, an enduring theme of life.* But another reason is that it hinges on a great (maybe the great) psychological story. We are born into this world profoundly alone, our strange, unbounded minds trapped in our ordinary, earthwormy bodies—the condition that led Nietzsche to refer to us, wonderingly, as “hybrids of plants and of ghosts.” We spend our lives trying to overcome this fundamental separation, but we can never entirely surmount it. Try as we might, we can’t gain direct access to other people’s inner worlds—to their thoughts and feelings, their private histories, their secret desires, their deepest beliefs. Nor can we grant them direct access to our own. As wonderfully, joyfully close as we can be to other people, there always remains, between us and them, an enduring margin of mystery. And, just as the gap between us and everything else means that we can be wrong about facts, memories, convictions, and predictions, it means that we can be wrong about one another.
That said, there’s something a bit weird about drawing an equivalence among these kinds of wrongness. Our beliefs about human beings somehow feel fundamentally different than our beliefs about, say, God, or the global financial system, or whether it’s better to take the Long Island Expressway or the Triborough Bridge in rush hour. The difference begins here: when I try to understand another person, my mind is trying to make sense of another mind. That means I’m forging a belief about something that—at least in some very basic sense—I am. However much individual people might differ from one another in certain respects, we all share roughly the same mental structures and aptitudes: a human sensory system and nervous system, a human consciousness and a human unconscious. As a result, we have at our disposal different tools for understanding (and misunderstanding) one another than we have for trying to make sense of other things.
One of these tools, an indispensable one, is communication. Unlike the Triborough Bridge or the global financial system, human beings can just tell each other about ourselves. Sure, words might mark our separation from the absolute essence of things (as Locke argued), but they also bring us closer together. Thanks to language, we can talk about our internal states, and we have a rich and reliable vocabulary with which to do so. Not that this vocabulary, or communication more generally, is perfectly reliable: my communications require your interpretations, and, as with other interpretative processes, this one can go awry. Maybe I’m deliberately trying to deceive you. Maybe I’m so lacking in self-awareness that my reports about myself are not to be trusted. Or maybe you and I just have different understandings of linguistically identical statements. To me, “I’m really stressed out” might mean “ask me how I’m doing” to you, it might mean “please leave me alone.” Still, notwithstanding these potential pitfalls, this ability to communicate about our thoughts and feelings is one of the more necessary and remarkable—and definitional—aspects of being human.
Another of our unique tools for understanding one another is extrapolation. That is, we can make inferences about other people’s internal states based on familiarity with our own. The specific instances of this kind of extrapolation can seem trivial: “You’re worried because your miniature schnauzer went missing? I understand, because I have a dachshund,