Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [148]
We need not necessarily venture abroad to have these kinds of willing experiences of error. Sometimes, the unknown places we visit are the unknown places inside of us. Psychotherapy, for instance, is explicitly premised on the notion that we can change by exploring the parts of ourselves that have been hidden from conscious awareness—in particular, by coming to understand our own habitual delusions and mistakes. The psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman has suggested that therapeutic interventions “can all be considered attempts to get the client to question and change old assumptions and construals of reality.” Likewise, the psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann noted that “a great part of psychoanalysis can be described as a theory of self-deceptions”—how and why we get ourselves wrong, and how uncovering those errors can change us.
We venture inward, then, for the same reasons we venture out: to fill in the unknown places on the map and correct our misperceptions about what’s going on there. In the process, we get to know ourselves better—but, ideally, we also get better selves. The goal of therapy, after all, isn’t just to help us understand why we feel and act as we do. It’s also to help us change the way we feel and act: to foster a set of beliefs that is less rigid, more functional, and more forgiving, toward ourselves as well as those around us. The same could be said of all the other practices, from prayer to twelve-step programs to Buddhist meditation, that push us to accept our fallibility. Like therapy, and for that matter like travel, these practices help us weather challenges to our worldview with patience, curiosity, and understanding.
This is one of the most powerful ways being wrong can transform us: it can help us become more compassionate people. Being right might be fun but, as we’ve seen, it has a tendency to bring out the worst in us. By contrast, being wrong is often the farthest thing in the world from fun—and yet, in the end, it has the potential to bring out the best in us. Or rather: to change us for the better. When I asked Anita Wilson how she thought her experience of wrongness had affected her, she said, “I’m a much kinder person than I used to be.”
A friend of mine expressed a similar sentiment. “Here’s my story, which I bet is the story of many women,” she told me. “I was brought up Catholic and always believed that having an abortion was wrong. I felt at the time that it was the only thing I believed in one hundred percent—it was wrong and I would never have one. Then I got pregnant and even though I was married, it just was not our time and I had an abortion. I had to work on it but I came to believe that I was not a murderer, just a regular person going through life.” The experience of having to reevaluate her own belief system, she concluded, “helped me in not being so judgmental.”
Ultimately, then, we are transformed by error through accepting it. To be judgmental, we must feel sure that we know right from wrong, and that we ourselves would never confuse the two. But the experience of erring shows us otherwise. It reminds us that, having been wrong in the past, we could easily be wrong again—and not just in the abstract but right now, here in the middle of this argument about pickles or constellations or crumb cake. At the same time, it reminds us to treat other people with compassion, to honor them in their possible rightness as well as their inevitable, occasional wrongness. Instead of taking their errors as a sign that they are ignorant or idiotic or evil, we can look to our own lives and reach the opposite conclusion: that they are, like us, just human.
One person who was able to do this was C. P. Ellis. During the televised broadcast of the 1988 Democratic Convention, Ellis told Studs Terkel, “the cameras zoomed in on one Klansman. He was saying, ‘I hope Jesse Jackson gets AIDS and dies.’ I felt sympathy for him. That’s the way my old friends used to think. Me, too.” At first, this is a startling statement. Inside mainstream America, we seldom hear