Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [115]
The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.
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Our national pastime of baseball differs from the society that spawned it in one crucial way: The box score of every baseball game, from the Little League to the Major League, consists of three tallies: runs, hits, and errors. Errors are not desirable, of course, but everyone understands that they are unavoidable. Errors are inherent in baseball, as they are in medicine, business, science, law, love, and life. In the final analysis, the test of a nation’s character, and of an individual’s integrity, does not depend on being error free. It depends on what we do after making the error.
The second presidential candidates’ debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry took place on October 8, 2004, a year and a half after the invasion of Iraq had begun. With deaths mounting, costs running into the billions, an insurgency growing, and American troops bogged down in a war that Bush had said would be over quickly, this exchange occurred:
Linda Grabel: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.
President Bush: [When people ask about mistakes] they’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is “Absolutely not.” It was the right decision. On the tax cut, it’s a big decision. I did the right decision. Now, you asked what mistakes. I made some mistakes in appointing people, but I’m not going to name them. I don’t want to hurt their feelings on national TV.
For the next two years, as the situation in Iraq deteriorated further, President Bush continued his self-justifying slide down the pyramid, confirming his certainty that he had made the right decisions. He kept asserting that the invasion was not a mistake, that we were winning, and that all we needed to do was be patient and “stay the course.” In the midterm election of 2006, which most experts regarded as a referendum on the war, the Republican party lost both houses of Congress.
Most of the public sighed in relief. Surely, now George Bush would have to change his course of action in Iraq, and he finally had a face-saving way to do so: He could say he would follow the advice of the Iraq Study Group, or his generals, or even the will of the people, and gradually pull our forces out of Iraq. But anyone who understands the psychology of self-justification would have predicted that Bush would do just the opposite: His “solution” to the disaster he had created would be to do more of the same. Having gone as far as he could down that pyramid, becoming more and more entrapped by his own self-deceptions, Bush would have become blind to alternatives.
In January 2007, as this book was going to press, George Bush addressed the nation. “Where mistakes were made” in a few tactics used in conducting the war, he said, he was responsible for them. But he held firm to his belief that his initial decision to invade Iraq was crucial in the fight against terrorism. What, then, was the new strategy he