Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

by Kathryn Schulz

our beliefs come in bundles. That makes it hard to remove or replace one without affecting the others—and it gets harder as the belief in question gets more central. In this respect, beliefs are like the beams in a building or the words in a sentence: you can’t eliminate one and expect the fundamental soundness or fundamental meaning of the overall system to remain unchanged. As a result, being wrong sometimes triggers a cascade of transformations so extensive that the belief system that emerges afterward bears almost no resemblance to its predecessor.

these strategies for deflecting responsibility for our errors stand in the way of a better, more productive relationship to wrongness. I call these strategies the Wrong Buts (as in, “I was wrong, but…”),

we are exceptionally bad at saying “I was wrong”—or at least, we are bad at leaving it at that. For most of us, it’s tough not to tack that “but” onto every admission of error. (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. This desire to account for why we were wrong is not a bad thing. In fact, the frenetic theorizing that occurs in the aftermath of error represents one of the better things about being wrong: proof positive that our fallibility drives us to think and rethink, to be creative and to create.

unconscious denial involves unconscious deceit—but in this case, the chief person we deceive is ourself. That’s why sincere denial is also known as self-deception; it entails keeping a truth from ourselves that we cannot bear to know.

making a horrible mistake does not make me, or anyone, a horrible person.”

“If I had identified the correct person, would Teresa Halbach be alive today?” As Penny knows, that question is unanswerable. Nobody can say what the course of history would have been if her life and Avery’s had never intersected. And she knows, too, that she will have to find a way to live without that answer, and without the answer to many other questions about why the prosecution of her assault went so terribly awry. This is what makes Penny’s story so remarkable: she is able to live both with and without the truth. That is exactly what overcoming denial calls on us to do. Sometimes in life we won’t know the answers, and sometimes we will know them but not like them. Our minds, no matter how miraculous, are still limited. Our hearts, no matter how generous, can’t always keep us from hurting other people. In other words, denial isn’t just about refusing to accept the difficult, complicated, messy external world. Nor is acceptance just about accepting the facts. It is also, and most importantly, about accepting ourselves.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be…and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims?…The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. —PHILLIP ROTH, AMERICAN PASTORAL

there are few things more gratifying than the feeling that someone deeply understands us. In fact, as we are about to see, this feeling of being “gotten” is the sine qua non of our most important relationships, and the very hallmark of being in love.

We are born into this world profoundly alone, our strange, unbounded minds trapped in our ordinary, earthwormy bodies—the condition that led Nietzsche to refer to us, wonderingly, as “hybrids of plants and of ghosts.” We spend our lives trying to overcome this fundamental separation, but we can never entirely surmount it. Try as we might, we can’t gain direct access to other people’s inner worlds—to their thoughts and feelings, their private histories, their secret desires, their deepest beliefs. Nor can we grant them direct access to our own. As wonderfully, joyfully close as we can be to other people, there always remains, between us and them, an enduring margin of mystery. And, just as the gap between us and everything else means that we can be wrong about facts, memories, convictions, and predictions, it means that we can be wrong about one another.

That said, there’s something a bit weird about drawing an equivalence among these kinds of wrongness. Our beliefs about human beings somehow feel fundamentally different than our beliefs about, say, God, or the global financial system, or whether it’s better to take the Long Island Expressway or the Triborough Bridge in rush hour. The difference begins here: when I try to understand another person, my mind is trying to make sense of another mind. That means I’m forging a belief about something that—at least in some very basic sense—I am. However much individual people might differ from one another in certain respects, we all share roughly the same mental structures and aptitudes: a human sensory system and nervous system, a human consciousness and a human unconscious. As a result, we have at our disposal different tools for understanding (and misunderstanding) one another than we have for trying to make sense of other things.

Thanks to language, we can talk about our internal states, and we have a rich and reliable vocabulary with which to do so. Not that this vocabulary, or communication more generally, is perfectly reliable: my communications require your interpretations, and, as with other interpretative processes, this one can go awry. Maybe I’m deliberately trying to deceive you. Maybe I’m so lacking in self-awareness that my reports about myself are not to be trusted. Or maybe you and I just have different understandings of linguistically identical statements. To me, “I’m really stressed out” might mean “ask me how I’m doing” to you, it might mean “please leave me alone.” Still, notwithstanding these potential pitfalls, this ability to communicate about our thoughts and feelings is one of the more necessary and remarkable—and definitional—aspects of being human.

favorite novel. Coetzee replied that it was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—because, he explained, the story of a man alone on an island is the only story there is. Crusoe named his small island Despair, and the choice was apt. Despair—the deep, existential kind—stems from the awareness that we are each marooned on the island of our self, that we will live and die there alone. We are cut off from all the other islands, no matter how numerous and nearby they appear; we cannot swim across the straits, or swap our island for a different one, or even know for sure that the other ones exist outside the spell of our own senses. Certainly we cannot know the particulars of life on those islands—the full inner experience of our mother or our best friend or our sweetheart or our child. There is, between us and them—between us and everything—an irremediable rift.

Let go of the romantic notion of love, and we also relinquish the protection it purports to offer us against loneliness and despair. Love can’t bridge the gap between us and the world if it is, itself, evidence of that gap—just another fallible human theory, about ourselves, about the people we love, about the intimate “us” of a relationship. Whatever the cost, then, we must think of love as wholly removed from the earthly, imperfect realm of theory-making. Like the love of Aristophanes’ conjoined couples before they angered the gods, like the love of Adam and Eve before they were exiled from the Garden of Eden, we want our own love to predate and transcend the gap between us and the world. In some ways, this strategy seems doomed to fail. As anyone who has experienced it knows, heartbreak socks us not only with the temporary loneliness of lost love, but also with the enduring loneliness of being alive. When we are in its grip, the lesser crisis of heartbreak is not terribly distinguishable from the greater crisis of existential despair. And yet there is a method to the madness. The idea of transcendent love can’t save us from all suffering, but it can save us from perpetual suffering. It makes our moments of disconnect from the universe seem isolated and astounding, rather than ongoing and inevitable. And that, in turn, helps us dismiss such moments as aberrations and forge the necessary amnesia to carry on with our lives. That should sound familiar, because our overall r...

Given those stakes, Felder says, “it’s a terrible shock when you have to accept your own fallibility.” (This is all the more true, he notes, for his A-list clients, the ones who are accustomed to authority and control. “People believe in their own infallibility in a ratio that’s consistent with their power in life,” he says. “As you get higher, you get more and more people around you saying you’re right, and you get less and less used to being contradicted or being wrong.”) Even if you can accept your fallibility in general, the specific crisis of a failed marriage is a stunningly hard pill to swallow. “With divorce, you’re losing a validation of yourself. It’s like: ‘I trusted this girl, I told her my innermost secrets and this was going to be my companion through life and I made a mistake, I’m no judge of people.’ That’s got to shake you on a pretty deep level.”

This is the thing about intimate relationships: we sign up to share our lives with someone else, and sooner or later we realize that we are also living with another person’s reality. But we don’t particularly want to live with our partner’s reality. We just want him or her to second our own. The failure to do so constitutes a betrayal of a tacit contract—a commitment to affirm our vision of the world. This is the person whose job is to understand us perfectly and share our worldview down to its last particular (or so we think, consciously or otherwise), and his or her failure to do so is both maddening and threatening. We also fight so much inside our intimate relationships because it is there that our core convictions are most vulnerable to challenge. Remember the difference between how communities react to internal versus external dissent? When strangers disagree with us, we can choose to ignore, dismiss, or denigrate them, without any immediate or obvious consequences for our own happiness. But when our loved ones disagree with us, we don’t have such an easy out. We can feel their realities encroaching on our own, and we have to deal with the discomfort of conflicting theories and the distressing possibility that we might need to be vulnerable, give ground, be mistaken. Of course, we can ignore, dismiss, or denigrate our loved ones, too—and many people do—but the result is miserable for everyone involved. The other and better option, Hendrix says, is to accept our partn...

It isn’t that we care so fiercely about the substance of our claims. It is that we care about feeling affirmed, respected, and loved.

So we should be able to be wrong from time to time, and be at peace with other people’s occasional wrongness, and still love and be loved. That’s so basic as to be banal, and yet it runs counter to our prevailing model of romantic love. There is no room for divergence, disagreement, or error in the starry-eyed, soul-mate version of love articulated by Aristophanes et al. To accommodate those eventualities—and we had better accommodate them, since we can be damn sure they are coming—we need a more capacious model of love. In this model, love is not predicated on sharing each other’s world as we might share a soul. It is predicated, instead, on sharing it as we might share a story. This analogy is not accidental. What is true of a story is true of love: for either one to work, you’d better be good at talking and good at listening. Likewise, if stories only succeed when we consent to suspend disbelief, relationships require of us something similar: the ability to let go of our own worldview long enough to be intrigued and moved by someone else’s. This is storybook love in a whole different sense of the phrase. It is not about living idyllically in our similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in our differences. It is not bestowed from beyond the normal human realm but struggled for and gained, slowly and with effort. And it is not about unchanging love. It is about letting love change us.

It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. —G. E. VAILLANT, ADAPTATION TO LIFE

I love the perfection of expression in this metaphor. Arrogance at its blindest certainty.

The problem in buyer’s remorse, then, isn’t that we don’t ask ourselves the right questions about what we’ll want in the future. The problem is that we don’t know ourselves well enough, or remain static for long enough, to consistently come up with the right answer.

As that implies, stories starring a true self are teleological; we end up exactly where we are meant to be. This, too, is both an attraction and a weakness of the idea of an essential self. It suggests that our lives are deterministic, that yesterday’s convictions—which we thought we chose based on their intellectual, emotional, or spiritual merits—were merely a trap into which we were lured for the benefit of some predetermined future self. Whatever meaning or worth our past might have had on its own terms is effectively written out of existence. Even more problematically, the idea of a true self suggests that we will never undergo momentous upheaval again. How could we? Having finally discovered who we really are and have always been, there is no further transformation available to us. If the self is constantly changing, then we can constantly feel our way forward, constantly become someone new—but if each of us possesses a fixed essence, then we can only return to it. Accordingly, our past departure from that essential self can only be a single and inexplicable aberration, associated as often as not with betrayal, transgression, and sin.

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,” wrote the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, “and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence.” But, of course, we don’t say this of organic entities like buds and blossoms and fruit. And we need not say it about ourselves, either. In the optimistic model of wrongness, error is not a sign that our past selves were failures and falsehoods. Instead, it is one of those forces, like sap and sunlight, that imperceptibly helps another organic entity—us human beings—to grow up.

On the whole, though, being wrong when we’re very young is less a series of isolated incidents (as we regard it in adulthood) than a constant process—inextricable from learning, inextricable from growing up. Forming theories about the world, testing them, and figuring out where they went wrong is the very stuff of childhood. In fact it is, literally, child’s play. Scientists, parents, and educators all agree that kids play to figure out the workings of the world. What looks, to an adult, like a game of blocks or a stint in the sandbox is really one giant, joyful science experiment. Moreover, recent work in developmental psychology suggests that error might play the same role in the lives of children as it does in the lives of scientists—inspiring them to sit up and take notice, generate new theories, and try to understand what is going on around them. Being wrong, in other words, appears to be a key means by which kids learn, and one associated as much as anything with absorption, excitement, novelty, and fun.†

In traveling (as in other kinds of adventures that we’ll encounter in the last chapter), we embrace the possibility of being wrong not out of necessity, but because it changes our lives for the better.

Being right might be fun but, as we’ve seen, it has a tendency to bring out the worst in us. By contrast, being wrong is often the farthest thing in the world from fun—and yet, in the end, it has the potential to bring out the best in us. Or rather: to change us for the better. When I asked Anita Wilson how she thought her experience of wrongness had affected her, she said, “I’m a much kinder person than I used to be.”

Ultimately, then, we are transformed by error through accepting it. To be judgmental, we must feel sure that we know right from wrong, and that we ourselves would never confuse the two. But the experience of erring shows us otherwise. It reminds us that, having been wrong in the past, we could easily be wrong again—and not just in the abstract but right now, here in the middle of this argument about pickles or constellations or crumb cake. At the same time, it reminds us to treat other people with compassion, to honor them in their possible rightness as well as their inevitable, occasional wrongness. Instead of taking their errors as a sign that they are ignorant or idiotic or evil, we can look to our own lives and reach the opposite conclusion: that they are, like us, just human.

It takes courage to leave our past selves behind. But it takes even more to carry some token of them with us as we go: to accept that we have erred, recognize that we have changed, remember with compassion our caterpillar past. As difficult as this can be, the dividends are worth it. “The main interest in life and work,” said Foucault, “is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” Such transformations don’t only come about through wrongness, of course—but wrongness is always an opportunity for such transformations. Recall what I said earlier: if we could freeze the frame on each of our mistakes, what we would see in the center every time would be change. The scale of that change varies widely, but in the end it knows no limits. Our errors can alter our beliefs, our relationships, ourselves. In a sense, they can even change our whole world. We can find ourselves living—uncomfortably, frighteningly, thrillingly—in a place where we can experience things we could never have experienced before. “They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change,” C. P. Ellis said. “That’s not necessarily true. Since I changed, I’ve set down and listened to tapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes, ’cause I know what he’s sayin’ now. I know what’s happenin’.”

The subjunctive, not a tense but (appropriately) a mood, connotes doubt, improbability, and false beliefs; its prevailing atmosphere is one of ambiguity. The subjunctive has largely disappeared from English, lingering only in grammatical niceties like, “If that were true, I would be the first to admit it.” In Romance languages, though, it is alive and well—the default idiom of dreams, hopes, suppositions, counterfactual situations, and disbelief.

Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. If we have developed formal methods for doing so, it is because, as I have shown, our hearts are bad at it. And we pay a price for this weakness. I don’t just mean we make mistakes we could avoid if we tempered our beliefs with doubt. It’s true that those mistakes can be costly, but the price of ignoring our fallibility goes well beyond that. It extends, in fact, to our overall outlook on the world. When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity, and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt. This isn’t Hamlet’s doubt—that of agony in the face of a difficult decision. Nor is it the doubt of insecurity, apprehension, or indifference. This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn’t divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can’t embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.

But there’s something else, too, that we miss out on if we decline to honor our fallibility. I have written, in this chapter, about the importance of acknowledging our mistakes primarily as a way to prevent them. Sometimes, though, accepting wrongness is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. By way of conclusion, then, I want to turn to a very different reason to embrace error: not for the purpose of eliminating it, but for the pleasure of experiencing it.

Lacking an umbrella, I returned to the car at a flat run, threw open the door, and flung my sopping self into the backseat—to the visible astonishment and considerable alarm of the total stranger who was sitting there nursing her infant. It was, you will have surmised, the wrong car. I extricated myself, extremely rapidly and extremely inelegantly; in my final glimpse of the woman, she hadn’t yet altered the stunned look on her face, or slackened her protective grip on her baby. When I found my way to the right car, my sister, who had been following my mad dash at a distance (whether it was too much of a distance to warn me of my impending mistake or whether she was simply curious to see what would happen is a point of some contention), was still convulsed with hysterical laughter. No question about it: being wrong can be funny. And a cruel but indisputable corollary: other people being wrong can be very, very funny. If, at the end of the last chapter, you wondered what I meant by embracing error strictly for the pleasure of experiencing it, this kind of humor is part of it. As we’ll see in a moment, wrongness and comedy are entwined at the roots. And not just wrongness and comedy: also wrongness and art, wrongness and learning, wrongness and individuality—even wrongness and survival.

comedy should serve as “an imitation of the common errors of our life.” Nearly a hundred years later, the great comic playwright Molière echoed that sentiment, observing of his craft that, “the duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.”

incongruity theory posits that comedy arises from a mismatch—specifically, a mismatch between expectation and actuality. According to this theory, funny situations begin with attachment to a belief, whether that attachment is conscious or unconscious, fleeting or deep, sincerely held or deliberately planted by a comedian or a prankster. That belief is then violated, producing surprise, confusion, and a replacement belief—and also producing, along the way, enjoyment and laughter. In other words, the structure of humor is—give or take a little pleasure—the structure of error.

In his influential 1900 essay on laughter, Henri Bergson posited that, “A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.”

If we want to keep laughing as much as we currently do, we must also keep bumbling into the gap between the world as we think it is and the world as it turns out to be; we must keep on getting things wrong. At best, we can learn to laugh at these mistakes—but at the very least, we can take comfort from the fact that, in the broadest sense, we laugh because of them.

Our capacity to err is inseparable from our imagination.

Whether you are trying to be right, like the realists, or trying not to be right, like the Dadaists, whether your medium is canvas or a urinal or the walls of a cave, the art you make will always be subjective and askew. Plato feared this fact, but no one who makes art can avoid it. If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place.

But Keats wasn’t interested in remedying wrongness. He recognized error and art as conjoined twins, born of the same place and vital to one another’s existence. In life as in linguistics, art is joined at the root to artificial—to the not-true, the un-real—just as a fiction is at once a creation and a falsehood.

Making mistakes as one might make poems, rejecting certainty, deliberately exploring ambiguity and error: this is the optimistic model of wrongness on Ecstasy. It does not truck with (to borrow Carson’s words again) “fear, anxiety, shame, remorse / and all the other silly emotions associated with making mistakes.” I don’t agree that such emotions are silly, but I do agree that they are not a good place to set down our luggage and settle in. Artists entice us past them, into a world where error is not about fear and shame, but about disruption, reinvention, and pleasure. Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness.

This feeling of being utterly absorbed in something, from cover to cover or curtain to curtain, is the primordial pleasure of art, one that kicks in long before a grasp of tradition or an admiration of technique. It is the kid-happiness of disappearing into another world.

This suggests a curious paradox. If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds—from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents—it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people’s inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs. (Odd, how able and happy we are to do this with fiction, when we often have so much difficulty doing so in real life.) Put differently, art is an exercise in empathy. Through it, we give the constraints of subjectivity the slip; we achieve, however temporarily, that universal moral aim of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

If we could contrive to embrace error as we embrace art, we would see that it bestows on us these same gifts. Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angles, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own. And, whether we like it or not, they also serve as real-life plot devices, advancing our own story in directions we can never foresee. Through error—as through the best works of art—we both lose and find ourselves.

...we can never foresee. Through error—as through the best works of art—we both lose and find ourselves.

Stated in more familiar terms, art is subjective. As Picasso put it, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

For those who share this view, the fact that our beliefs inhere in our minds is a given, and a gift—one whose benefits (humor, imagination, intelligence, individuality) are so manifestly worthwhile that we willingly pay for them with our mistakes.

This idea of self-creation suggests something else important about error. Being wrong doesn’t just make us human in general; it also helps make each of us the specific person we are. In our inability to get things exactly right, in the idiosyncrasies of our private visions of the world, the outline of selfhood appears. This is what Benjamin Franklin was getting at in the quote I used as an epigraph to this book. Error, he wrote, is “the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it,” a place where “the soul has room enough to expand herself.” Mistakes, he meant, are the evidence and expression of an individual identity.

Countless studies have shown that people who suffer from depression have more accurate worldviews than nondepressed people.

If excessive accuracy in our self-image and worldview is correlated with depression, the opposite is true, too. Sometimes, being wrong makes us happy. Think of Don Quixote,

Take away our willingness to overestimate ourselves, and we wouldn’t dare to undertake half the things we do. In this sense, all wrongness is optimism. We err because we believe, above all, in ourselves: no matter how often we have gotten things wrong in the past, we evince an abiding and touching faith in our own stories and theories. Traditionally, we are anxious to deny that those stories and theories are stories and theories—that we must rely on our own imperfect representations to make sense of the world, and are therefore destined to err. But, to risk a bit of blasphemy, stories and theories may be all we have that God does not. They are the hallmark of two of our highest human endeavors, art and science, and through them we can imagine new realities. That is why error, even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope. We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time. In this optimistic vein, embracing our fallibility is simply a way of paying homage to, in the words of the late philosopher Richard Rorty, “the permanent possibility of someone having a better idea.” The great advantage of realizing that we have told a story about the world is realizing that we can tell a better one: rich with better ideas, better possibilities—even, perhaps, better people.