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Better to cry wolf and be wrong, he argued, than to remain silent
(Try saying an unadorned “I was wrong”—the full stop at the end, the silence afterward—and you’ll see how unfamiliar and uncomfortable it feels.) In part, this reflects our dislike of sitting with our wrongness any longer than necessary, since the “but” helps hasten us away from our errors.
But it also reflects our urge to explain everything in the world—an urge that extends, emphatically, to our own mistakes.
the sheer persuasiveness of first-person experience is not a good indicator of its fidelity to the truth. It’s as if we forget, when we are under the spell of that experience, about the other possible meaning of “first person.” Taken in a different context—in literature—it means almost the opposite of unassailable authority. It means limited omniscience. It means unreliability. It means subjectivity. It means, quite simply, one person’s story.
politics, which is to denial what a greenhouse is to an orchid: it grows uncommonly big and colorful there.* When
It’s as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible.
The more vociferously someone defends a belief, Jung held, the more we can be sure that he is defending it primarily against his own internal doubts, which will someday surge into consciousness and force a polar shift in perspective. According to Jung, this was especially true of the most dogmatic beliefs—which, by rendering all conscious doubt impermissible, must be all the more subconsciously resisted, and thus all the more unstable.
“a great part of psychoanalysis can be described as a theory of self-deceptions”—how and why we get ourselves wrong, and how uncovering those errors can change us.
from prayer to twelve-step programs to Buddhist meditation, that push us to accept our fallibility. Like therapy, and for that matter like travel, these practices help us weather challenges to our worldview with patience, curiosity, and understanding.
As soon as we think we are right about something, we narrow our focus, attending only to details that support our belief, or ceasing to listen altogether.
Here is Benjamin Franklin, just before appending his name to the most famous piece of parchment in American history: “I confess there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure that I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
Our desire to be right, as ego-driven as it often seems, is essentially a desire to take ourselves out of the picture. We want our beliefs to inhere in the world, not in our mind. The experience of realizing that we were wrong represents the frustration of this desire—the revelation that the self was there all along.
