Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [217]
* People with borderline personality disorder are sometimes described as being stuck in this stage, because they continue to regard the world as a place of absolutes. The disorder is characterized by, among other things, an overpowering need to be right and a corresponding inability to accept the possibility of error, or the potential validity of multiple viewpoints.
* In the long run, the suppression of disagreement is likely to be bad for the rulers as well as the ruled over. As the legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in Why Societies Need Dissent, “Dictators, large and small, tend to be error-prone as well as cruel. The reason is that they learn far too little. Those with coercive authority, from presidents to police chiefs, do much better if they encourage diverse views and expose themselves to a range of opinions.” This was the lesson of groupthink as well, although power there was consolidated in the hands of a small group instead of in the hands of the individual.
* The bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”
* Another traditional explanation of the origins of humor is the relief theory, according to which laughter serves to release pent-up mental, emotional, physical, or sexual tension. The relief theory helps explain why we laugh at dirty jokes and scatological humor, and also why we sometimes get the giggles in the face of stress, gravity, or tragedy. However, since it doesn’t bear very much on error, I have left it out of the main discussion. The same goes for more recent theories of humor emerging from evolutionary psychology, most of which are rooted in claims about primordial social hierarchies and/or ancient habits of play.
* Or possibly the second funniest, which is the ranking it was given by the American Film Institute in a list compiled in 2000. Top honors in that list went to Some Like It Hot, which might lead readers familiar with both movies to conclude that the real source of comedy is not confusion and error but rather men in dresses. This cross-dressing theory of comedy receives some support from the rest of AFI’s list of all-time funniest movies (Mrs. Doubtfire also makes the top 100, as does Victor Victoria), not to mention the rest of performance history. (See, for instance, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Taming of the Shrew.) It’s true that real or implied gender transgression furnishes its own (complicated) source of humor. But the real comic strength of cross-dressing narratives might be their ability to trigger follies of mistaken identity—much like stories about identical twins separated at birth.
† Bergson played devil’s advocate on this one, arguing that we only fail to find errors funny when we are invested in the beliefs that they destroy. “Look upon life as a disinterested spectator,” he proposed, and “many a drama will turn into a comedy.” In other words, with sufficient distance and dispassion, all wrongness would be amusing. To the gods, the human spectacle might well constitute one long sitcom.
* Szymborska explicitly contrasted the poet’s embrace of doubt with its antithesis, the zealot’s embrace of certainty. The trouble with “torturers, dictators, fanatics and demagogues,” she wrote, is that “they ‘know,’ and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments.”
† I can’t resist a footnote on Jane Austen’s Pride