Someone once said, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Or, since we stubbornly persist in not speaking Latin, what some people say with some regularity is, “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
The Confiteor may be most familiar to Catholic and Anglican congregations, but we could all learn something from it.
There are very few things we can be sure of in our lives, but being wrong, at least some of the time, is one of them. What’s remarkable is that no matter how much it happens, more often than not we behave as if this is a completely novel experience. There are palpitations and sweating. Maybe we get a bit tetchy, maybe it’s outright horror.
And if we have to – gods forbid – admit we’re wrong, that’s when it really goes south. When we have to tell someone (or more some than one), then we’ll start digging a hole to curl up in.
If being wrong is something that happens so often, and by a reasonably young age we see that many, many times we will be the one to whom it happens, why is it so difficult for us to deal with? Why do we do so much to hide it when it happens? Why do we so often double down when we’re confronted with it?
There are many sources for this, but I like this one because it comes from a book called Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. This really-good-name-for-a-book is why I am trusting Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson with this important definition.
“Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent,” Tavris and Aronson say.
Social psychologist Leon Festinger had already used the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe: “The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions – especially the wrong ones…”
In other words, when you are cognitively dissonant, you will do who-knows-what to keep your wrong-and-strong behaviour or beliefs on the table. In other, other words, it looks like a mistake, it walks like a mistake, it quacks like a mistake, but instead of calling it a mistake, you insist it’s a duck.
The thing all the research points to is that our egos can’t take it. Our self-worth can’t take it. Item one is the thing we believe. Item two is another thing that says we’re wrong. We can’t hold these opposites in our heads.
When I say such an idea is insupportable, I mean we’re really not wired to support it. Our minds don’t really care for contradictions.
I’m following me – I mean them – I mean me…I’m following the theory so far. But I think there are some points on which I have to part company with them – or me. Yes, I can part company with me.
That’s it. For what feels like all my life I’ve lived with the certainty that I was almost always wrong. It’s because I am a youngest sibling (we’ve never done anything right). It’s also because when you have any mental health problems, you’re the first pe
