So I want to talk about being wrong. And why it is incorrectly associated with defeat. In fact, I want to even go so far as to suggest that being wrong is one of the greatest victories available to us. First, to look at an example:
"It's disgusting because it just is."
"Ah, but that's a syllogism: something isn't disgusting - even if it is - just because you say it is."
"Ah, but your argument is a syllogism: just because you say mine is a syllogism doesn't mean it is."
"That's reductio ad absurdum..."
"You're reductio ad absurdum!"
The above is a real example of a conversation I have had once recently. Aside from the last line, I made that up. The person has a point, if you're not at all well-read on what words mean, but they don't realise what their point is. They think their point is that I have fallaciously affixed a label to their argument, whilst simultaneously doing it to my own (though I doubt their reasoning ran like this). Their point, however, would be much more substantive or persuasive if they were arguing that my initial point was wrong: the counter to my counter-argument says nothing about my original point (left out for your sake, you've heard it before). As far as I can see, whatever you might think about my initial argument (incest: k), you are wrong about why I might be wrong. That is an absolute as far as I can see, because it makes no sense: whichever parameters of sense you might wish to place around it. You may well be right, and I wrong, about the topic, but your argument makes no sense, and thus you are wrong up until you are right. You aren't in the middle, because you've tried to make a case, and your thought isn't inchoate (it is, in fact, the opposite: the absurd final deduction and aberration from logic), so you are wrong up until you are proven right. That is not a bad thing, however, surely? That I have, by anyone's standards, effectively debunked your counter-argument means that you have to go away and marshal a better argument. There are better ones out there (and I look forward to the day you present them to me, because I am by no means 'absolutely right' about the initial thought), and you now have to look for them. I don't mean to sound patronising: if the roles were reversed, I would relish the opportunity to look further into it (if I had an interest), and to see if I could come up with a more rational, reasoned, logical, emotional based opinion (as yours is none of those). No, there is a confusion between 'wrong' and 'wrong at this time'. It might seem a semantic difference at first, but I would conclude - and hopefully correctly - that it is the reason that people are so averse to being wrong. It is seen as an admission of failure: no, it's just a temporary loss of victory. Again, and we're going back a long way: not defined by its borders. Unless you physically cannot come up with a counter-argument which is better than "you're wrong 'cause I say so" then you have not 'lost', and even if that happens the only thing you lose by being 'wrong' is some misguidedness. Embarrassment at being wrong is tantamount to a refusal to learn. Have you ever heard someone say, "I hate all forms of learning"? I very much doubt that. And yet you will daily see people obstinately refusing to admit that they have been wrong.
Now, if this were some realist's logical extension about the nature of truth, I would probably have to cede my position (because it's way too fucking confusing for my little brain), but it's not. It's just mortal embarrassment: it's an ingrained social taboo predicated on religious faith and human stubbornness. Claiming that being wrong is the same as being an idiot, or as being ill-educated, or being misunderstood, or that it isn't possible because you're never wrong: these are the ravings of spurious egoists hell-bent on preserving an axiomatically flawed ego: to preserve the stability of the ego we must spurn evolution of the ego. Get out, man.
So if it's not a permanent loss (think Dawkin's temporal agnostics) can it be seen as a victory? I would say yes: it is a victory insofar as it means you have new knowledge, and a new argument, and a new opinion. That would be seen as the retention of new knowledge: and have you ever heard someone say (and mean) "I wish I'd never learnt that"? Please note here that saying and meaning are not the same thing; a semantic difference, again, but an important one. I talked about pyrrhic victories a while ago, and this is what you would 'earn' if you stubbornly refused to accept that you were ever wrong. Disingenuously maintaining that you are right - against what is all but technically irrefutable evidence - means that you never gain anything. Stoicism is the reserve of the childish and the stubborn. That's what the analogy refines to: infantile ego. If you accept 'defeat', then the next time you will not have to (assuming the conversation comes up at least once more, which it will if you subscribe to the 'nothing is original' thought), and the next time you might convert someone to your belief. To further demonstrate why being obstinate is a bad thing, look at this deduction which could be raised from the above example:
"It's disgusting because it just is."
"OK, so, that's a syllogism."
"No more so than yours is a syllogism saying mine is a syllogism."
"OK, even if were that true, what about your initial opinion? You are unwilling to accept that mine is correct, which is your right, but you are willing to tout societal taboos simply because you've never explicitly accepted them?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that your opinion that 'it's disgusting because it just is' isn't your own thought: it is a conglomerate of many other opinions and innate tendencies of society - predilections built over centuries of evolution and socialisation. Nothing you think is free, so to speak, and so you can't be unwilling to accept someone else being right if your basis for thinking that is someone else's opinion."
"That's confusing."
"Yes, has no real implications because you're wrong."
Do you see my point? No, of course you don't: it's an unreasonable deduction because it follows the same line as their counter-argument. It's deduced to the point of pointlessness. Of course what I am saying is true, but that doesn't mean it's right. Something can be true and wrong at the same time, 'John thought that raping Jane would be a decent move on his part' - I do not repute John's motives, but I will not admit that he is right (back to universal ethics, again). The point is that anything we say can be logically deduced to a ridiculous place, and that doesn't mean that it's right. That just means it's 'logical'. In this case being wrong means you can be right in the future. Being right is, obviously, a good thing (at least insofar as I am arguing here, it might not be great in other situations), and it's not something we should be ashamed of. It's an interesting binary that we are equally abashed by being right as we are being wrong.
It is not arrogance or elitism to assert that you are right. If your opinion is based on a valid thought, or on the majority of evidence that has been collected, then there should be no shame in touting it. We are not ashamed of saying natural selection is right, are we? Technically it has never been proven, but that doesn't stop us saying it and being proud of it. That's arguably the greatest scientific discovery in the past 500 years, is it not? If, however, someone came along tomorrow and demonstrated the veracity and ultimate truth of the Bible, I'd be happy to jump on that. That's not fickle, that's reasonable. There's no shame in being right, because there's no point in being right if you're not willing to argue it and to try to convert other people. Then it's just a fatuous statement of your own brilliance, and would normally be misguided too. Don't be afraid to say that you are right, because it is one of the best things we can do as a society. As soon as we can accept that - as far as we can see from the evidence presented to us - one person is right, and the other wrong, then we can change. Stasis is the product of refusal, and, again, you'd struggle to meet someone who would say, "I hate change", and mean it. They'd say it, sure, but I doubt anyone who says that they mean it (aside from... some religious people). I'm not saying one should be overly proud of being right, because then you're going into arrogance, but one should not hide when one succeeds. If you get a promotion at a job, you could suggest that it is because you have been right more often than not, and more often than anyone else. You wouldn't dream of saying, 'it's because I am better than X', but you would be well in your right to say, 'I have performed better than X over a period of Y'. Yet, you probably wouldn't ever hear that either! When you look at it like this doesn't it seem utterly foolish? No, you are (unbelievably, stupidly, and ironically) more likely to hear, 'I was right: face it'. We're self-conscious when we are right, but that doesn't change how we feel about it. We're self-conscious when we are wrong, and that feels shameful. The two do not match up, as far as I can tell.
So why are we ashamed (because I think, ironically, we can assume that we are)? Well, for starters, modesty is often seen as a necessity when it shouldn't be. It is also seen as tantamount to self-deprecation, which, again, it shouldn't be. It is a good thing to be modest when modesty is due (no one likes arrogance, do they?) Just as it is a good thing to be confident when confidence is needed. These are not bad things, incidentally. It has been ingrained into us, from an early age, that humility is a civilized trait. Anyone seen as spouting their own brilliance is, justifiably, laughed at. Through a distillation of our culture, however, arrogance has become synonymous with being right and being proud of being right. I don't think that is the case, as I have hopefully demonstrated above (especially given that I would be equally happy to be wrong). A further crystalline deduction is that to be right is not a good thing. It is a by-product of seeing humility as a good thing (which I am not arguing against). I would say, however, that being right and being humble and modest: they are not mutually exclusive. I don't think I need to go further into that, because I have hopefully shown how the two are equally good. No, I think I have happened on to what makes being wrong so awful, and what makes being right equally terrible. It is the presence of your fellow human.
I could, for example, say, 'I am of reasonable intelligence', without feeling guilty, because I think it is true. As soon as I introduce something else into that sentence, however, the paradigm shifts entirely. What if I was to say, 'I am of reasonable intelligence... smarter than X, in fact'? What then? Whether it is true or not is irrelevant. The injection of a human into that skews it completely. Is that a good thing? I would argue not, because motives are something which are crucial in analysing something. To use one of Harris' examples: what if we had the 'perfect' weapon. Today's leaders would aim to reduce 'collateral' damage, whereas despots like Hitler would not. They are both killing, but one is indiscriminate, the other with pure of motive (prevention). The two are not morally equivalent, are they? I doubt you'd say they are, even though they both end with the same result (although this precludes the thought of probabilities and possibilities). Neither is 'better' than the other, 'cause neither is 'good'. Likewise with my example: they are not the same, are they? No, they are not, but neither is better than the other. Neither is 'good'. Both are useful. By saying the first you are implying the second, and it is only when you give voice to the second that it suddenly becomes unacceptable. What faulty programming gave us that conclusion? It is humans which destroy our ability to be proud of being wrong. Shame is what I would call a reflective emotion (because I don't know what it's really called). I mean that shame only works if there is another person present (or an opinion, or whatever) who might laugh, or gloat, or be smug. In an argument, people don't want to concede that they are wrong - simply because they fear the other person will use the result in a negative way. Similarly, if you trip up in the street you will probably blush, but only because other people might have seen you. If you fall up the stairs in your own home and blush it is simply because your mind is saying, 'what if someone had seen me!?' (that's what I think anyway). So, that's why people need to realise the distinction that is the crux of what I'm saying: you are wrong, and what you are saying is wrong = not the same thing. I could be wrong about everything I've just said. It could be utter rubbish. In fact, it probably is, but that's not to say that I'm an idiot because of that. Equally, I could be an idiot, but that isn't demonstrated by my being wrong. Even if I was wrong again and again that wouldn't be truly indicative of being an idiot. No, there could be hundreds of other factors weighing in and making me consistently incorrect. To assume 'that is wrong' to be the same as 'you're wrong'. Even when someone says, 'you're wrong' (as I have done so in this piece, I imagine), what they're probably saying is, 'what you're saying is wrong', or 'your thinking here is wrong'.
If someone poses a reason why being wrong is a bad thing, and I agree with it, then I will rescind the above. Until then: keep your fragile egos, I want to keep learning.
Edit: Jesus fucking Christ I use a lot of colons. I wish I had as many colons. Then poop would be hirarious. Yeah. Brain is tired after an exam this morning and then this. I'm'a be immature now, kthx! I think I aced the exam, too.
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