Admitting You Are Wrong
Why is it so hard for people to say something like:
“You know, I was wrong. Totally wrong. And you were right. I am now changing my view to your view. Thank you for convincing me.”
I do this all the time. And it is a strange thing but it is cathartic for a few reasons:
- First – if I was really wrong, it feels good to admit it to myself.
- Second – the other person feels so good and I get to feel good that I made the other person feel good.
- Third – by switching my view, I am now actually right after all!
As a seeker of truth – which all philosophers should be doing – and consistent with my mission statement:
Communicate Truth Understandably
The foregoing is now easy for me. But it wasn’t always so. I admit I was as pigheaded and opinionated as just about anyone.
But I learned a thing or two over the years.
My career going very deeply into the dumps for many years certainly brought this epiphany on over time.
And starting a law firm where I made mistake after mistake cemented this.
In the end, I learned that I was wrong so many times about things I was sure I was right about, that it humbled me.
Finally, I realized that I didn’t know everything and once I realized that, I started to consider that maybe I didn’t truly know anything at all for sure. Just like Socrates who allegedly said:
“The only thing I am sure of is that I don’t know anything.”
And when this happened I was liberated from the trap that so many of us find ourselves, which is a combination of:
- Self-assured belief that we are 100% right all the time
- Inability to acknowledge wrongness even when it is obvious
Now, as a philosopher, I feel like that one-eyed man in the world of the blind.
I find myself the (one?) person who is willing to be open-minded to other views and free to change my view to the extent it is warranted. And I rarely – close to never – see that in others.
Yes, that makes me sound arrogant, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean it the opposite way; namely, I am humble in acknowledging I am wrong so often. But, yes, arrogant in concluding I am a rarity as a person willing to do this in the first place.
Notably, people have asked me in my lawyer life what is the secret of my success in starting a law firm that has done so well. I have always said the same thing in answer to this question:
My realization how fallible I am
Okay, enough about me and my epiphany about the virtue of wrongness.
But what about (almost) everyone else. Why is it so hard to just admit for us human beings to admit that their view is just plain old wrong?
I think we would all agree that we would have better and more fulfilling interactions with our friends and family – our work colleagues – our country – and even humanity as whole – were we able to do this.
But there must be deep-seated emotional or primal reasons why admitting one was wrong is so difficult. I guess I don’t have a particular answer here; however, it does seem to be endemic to human nature. And perhaps rather than hoping it will change, it might need to be accepted as a not-so-great part of human nature.
Now, trying to be useful, I have spent some time thinking about how to foster this type of thinking and this is the best I can do.
When you are talking/arguing/discussing something with someone who is particularly self-assured of the rightness of their opinion – and you would like to have a good-faith intellectual discussion — consider asking the other person:
Do you think you are right about everything?
Most (or at least some) people will be brought up short by this question, and reply with something like: “Well, I guess not everything.”
And maybe this admission of fallibility will permit the fostering of a discussion that is an honest interchange of ideas, since both parties have acknowledged that there is a chance that they might be wrong.
And perhaps that interchange will result in both persons learning from the other and maybe even a change of opinion from prior wrongness to rightness – and daring to dream for a moment – even an out-loud statement that: “I was wrong and you were right.”
The Bruce Philosophical Project