I’m Absolutely Right… And Reality Will Never Change My Mind

Without picking a side or even a specific issue, I’ll offer the observation that it feels like people are not willing to meet in the middle on issues anymore and that we are as polarized now as we’ve ever been… or at least that’s the sense I get from watching the news.

Having said that, my own personal experience is that people are rarely that unbending but it is still a perception I carry and which I feel is reinforced by the world around us. Talk and news shows tend to get better ratings if they are more edgy and controversial and so that’s what gets air play… even if most people can be fairly rational most of the time. Still, the topic of this post is meant to further undermine the absolutist positions that often get put forward in the broader dialog – a “this is the absolute truth and there’s nothing you can say to convince me otherwise” kind of inflexible approach to the world.

So let’s start with some reasons why a person might take an “I’m always right” stance:

1. No one wants to be wrong. Seems fairly straightforward but we exist in a world where we’ve been conditioned that we need to be successful and, to be successful, you need to be constantly correct. What’s worse, being wrong can be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence so the need to be right ties directly into our self image. It can even undermine your confidence and introduce doubt in your abilities and decision-making abilities.
   
2. Being on the winning team is great. It’s the opposite side of the same coin… just as losing shows weakness, being right builds confidence and can demonstrate how smart / insightful / worthy you are. It vindicates our decision-making abilities and, if you are right often enough – or all the time – you gain a reputation and challenges become less frequent. You main even gain an advantage by being perceived as being a winner.
   
3. Changing (opinions) is hard. They don’t call it inertia for nothing. The mental pathways we establish when we learn something start to become ingrained and reinforced the more we revisit them. For example, when I first learned to drive I remember being anxious because there was so much to watch and keep track of. Now, decades later, driving is second nature – and that’s not a bad thing. But when I drove in England on the other side of the road, you can be assured that I was more aware and involved in how to drive again. The same’s true for something we have come to believe in. We are used to thinking about it in one way and to break that pattern and establish a new thought process takes time, effort and repetition. It can be hard.

There’s likely other aspects to consider here but this is a reasonable list – being right means you’re smart & should be listened to; being wrong implies something’s wrong; and change is just hard. Add in ancillary reasons like people who like being the center of attention or are mis- or uninformed and it’s not hard to see why some people adopt this unshakeable faith in what they believe is true. It helps us not only get through the day but to survive and thrive in our lives.

But the reality is that – I believe – we’re actually wrong about a lot of things… or at least not fully informed. As I’ve come to embrace that perspective, I’ve also tried to adopt a default setting of “huh, tell me more” when someone says something I don’t know much about or don’t agree with.

Again, no picking sides here today but I want you to picture people debating some divisive topic. Maybe it’s religion or the right to privacy over public safety or politics or, more recently, vaccinations or whatever you can think of that has people taking extreme positions. And the more extreme a topic you picked, the more likely I’d guess that you also saw people who are loud, angry and maybe even aggressive towards those on the other side. Trying to picture them having a polite discussion probably seems laughable.

And those are exactly the times when I think we get ourselves into trouble.

Someone recently said to me that, whenever I’m feeling overly confident or cocky about something, that I should consider what people 100 years from now might think about my position.

That actually brought me up short as I started thinking about people 100 or more years in the past and what some of their “irrefutable truths” were.

Here are just a few examples….

And the list goes on and on but the point, I hope, is becoming clearer. In each of these instances, the common understanding at that time was that the above was true. Women weren’t capable of voting, sticking leeches on a sick person would heal them or that smoking was harmless. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find people who still believed these things (well, okay… the leaches thing is actually making a comeback but that just further proves the point that our knowledge is ever-evolving).

Take the example of the Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis. He was one of the first doctors who noticed that washing your hands between patients could lower the mortality rate. But his suggestion was met with scorn and dismissed by other doctors who ridiculed Dr. Semmelweis for going against accepted beliefs at the time. (Supposedly, he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his fellow doctors where he was then beaten by the guards and died two weeks later.)

Wow. I need to say this one again….

Now when I see pundits on TV loudly proclaiming how foolish or uninformed their opponents are, I can’t help but think about Dr. Semmelweis and wonder if, a few centuries from now, some George Jetson-type will watch this same video recording I’ve just seen, shake their heads and chuckle at how stupid we 21st century humans were.

So maybe the next time we are absolutely sure that we’re right and have this urge to laugh at or dismiss the other person’s obviously incorrect opinion, maybe we should pause and ask them why they believe what they do. And then actively listen to what they say. They may not change our minds but I believe we would all benefit from giving each other a little grace and to have a willingness to at least consider a different perspective.

Consider our own history. I don’t see any reason to think that at least some of the things we hold dear today will eventually be supplanted with newer, hopefully more informed truths. And wouldn’t it be nice to be (eventually) right about that?

Know that I’m pulling for you!