Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [168]
This idea of self-creation suggests something else important about error. Being wrong doesn’t just make us human in general; it also helps make each of us the specific person we are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears. This is what Benjamin Franklin was getting at in the quote I used as an epigraph to this book. Error, he wrote, is “the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it,” a place where “the soul has room enough to expand herself.” Mistakes, he meant, are the evidence and expression of an individual identity.
This is an idea with deep and important roots in our intellectual history. It is, in essence, the crucial insight of evolutionary theory. Because of errors in the replication of genetic sequences, we wind up with variation among individual members of a species; and because of that variation, the species as a whole can adapt and survive. Such errors literally keep their hosts alive. A population that is too small or too homogenous to support significant genetic variation is doomed. For every species, then, error is a mechanism of survival and change. For us human organisms, with our richer relationship to wrongness, mistakes enable not only our biological evolution but our social, emotional, and intellectual evolution as well.
And wrongness also allows us to thrive in another way. I began this book by noting that we think of being right as essential to our survival and happiness, but in one key respect, nothing could be further from the truth. Countless studies have shown that people who suffer from depression have more accurate worldviews than nondepressed people. Depressed people do not nurture the cheering illusion that they can control the course of their lives. They rarely possess the conviction, so common in the rest of us, that they are above average in virtually every respect. And they understand, all too acutely, the basic conditions of existence: that their lifespan is just a brief blip in the cold sweep of history, that suffering is real and ongoing, that they and all the people they love are going to die. That outlook is known as depressive realism. Depressed people might be unhappy, but—when it comes to these big-picture, existential matters—they are generally more right than the rest of us.
It scarcely requires saying that this kind of rightness is not fun. “To see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying,” wrote the philosopher Ernest Becker. “…It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.” As that indicates, the correlation between accuracy and depression runs both ways: people who are depressed tend to perceive the harsher realities of life more clearly, and people who clearly perceive those harsh realities tend to be (or to get) depressed. In an odd reversal of the usual state of affairs, when it comes to these existential issues, the bigger and more important the belief, the less it pays to be right. That’s why, as I’ve said, the goal of therapy isn’t necessarily to make our beliefs more accurate; it is to make them more functional. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, the psychologist, has even argued that “a key to the good life might well be illusions at our deepest, most generalized level of assumptions and accuracy at the most specific, least abstract