Do We Have The Right To Be Wrong?

And is the violation of this freedom the basis for war, not progress?

Week 7 | Philosophical Discussion: a palate cleanser narrative about being wrong.

A number of years ago, I got into an argument over whether reincarnation did or didn’t exist with my half-brother, Colin.

This is an old family wound caused by the way his parents’ marriage ended.

Legend has it, that when Colin’s dad and our mom were married, his dad gave her an ultimatum. He asked her to choose between God or him.

And my mom chose God.

It should be noted that my mom was part of a new-age spiritual movement that included both the Christian God and incorporated many Hindu & Buddhist Gods as well.

So which God Colin’s father asked her to give up, I’ll never know.

Kali, the Hindu goddess; destroyer of evil

But I do know that after 11 years of marriage, they got a divorce. The four kids were split up in a custody battle. My brother Colin was raised by his Atheist father––and over the years, he continued to feel rejected by my mom’s choice of God over them.

Even though I was born many years later when my mom married my dad… I could tell that it left a bitter taste in young Colin’s mouth to see a new family affirm his mom’s spirituality.

With us, she didn’t have to choose between God(s) or family.

Leaving Colin further behind, and more and more embittered about it.

---

Years later, as an adult in my twenties, I knew that Colin and I didn’t have the greatest premise to our relationship, but I was no longer on speaking terms with my mom and I wanted to create healthy relationships with all of my distant family.

So, for 5 months, I moved in with my two half-brothers in order to be their roommate & get to know them in adulthood. I learned quite quickly that as adults, they played a lot of games.

When they weren’t in their rooms playing RPGs, they were in the living room playing video games. And if a single soul came to the house and they had to take a break from the computer or the TV, well they had a massive bookshelf full of board games near the dining room table and they would try to rope guests into cooperative / RPG-esque card games or board games instead.

Frankly, I loved it. I finally had something in common with my estranged brothers. We played games every week for 5 months (in between re-runs of Top Gear).

And it was on one of those days, that Colin and I decided to play Risk. A game that brings out the absolute beast in me.

---

But here’s where it takes a turn.

Because when I lost, I was so traumatized, that I made the grave error of saying in passing, “I think I was a general in a past life.”

The kind of statement so small & thrown out in such a whimsy, that even a Mormon probably wouldn’t react to it. So why did he?

---

Perhaps because Colin was riding the wave of world domination. He got swept up and began to passionately attack my suggestion that reincarnation exists. And perhaps because I was so wounded from losing a game of world domination, I needed to reclaim my honor, so I passionately began arguing back.

Over what? Who could say? Because let’s face it, I don’t know the definitive answer to whether reincarnation exists or not and I don’t have an attachment to proving it to an atheist one way or another.

(Spoiler: I will jump ahead a decade and say that I do describe myself as an Atheist who believes in reincarnation today––funny how that happened).

But at this time, I was 22 and I was apathetic to the whole obnoxious game of proving my worldview to people dead set against it.

If you don’t want to believe that spirituality exists––fine––then just go on with your life without that belief. Why make a fuss about it?

---

I was aware of Colin’s wound, but in that moment, I wanted to stubbornly react to something much deeper in the general approach he took to the argument.

Already, I had misplaced a large portion of my life in the wasted efforts of the constant defense & attack mode. And I was good at it. I’m still good at it. I try to win every argument anyone dares invite me to. And I often think I’ve won.

BUT I was also beginning to learn (hundreds of arguments later) that I had never once gained what I sought to gain by arguing. Because what I truly wanted was validation.

And I think it’s an irony that what most people want from an argument is least likely to be gained by arguing.

I had come to the slow realization that I was never able to get people to understand me in an argument. I only alienated them instead. I could never convince them to give up their right to be foolish or to relate to my point of view. But it took a long time for me to stop trying.

---

Arguments are often, ruthlessly, based on the need to take away someone's right to believe what they believe and replace it with your own “corrected” belief.

The unspoken premise of a righteous argument is that you SHOULD replace wrong with right. That’s just a given. That’s part of what makes you so defensive of the truth and so righteously ruthless in proving someone else’s view incorrect.

We’ve convinced ourselves that we have an honorable duty to the truth.

Even if that’s just something we tell ourselves to distract from the fact that most arguments are actually caused by a deep need to be valid and understood by other people.

And arguing might just be the worst way to achieve that.

(Which only exasperates the vulnerability we’re trying to deflect from in the first place).

---

But that’s because what a lot of us fail to remember in the midst of a heated debate is that you can't actually take away someone's right to choose their belief––even if it's wrong. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.

More often than not, once someone feels that you’re trying to take away their right to choose their own beliefs, they’ll simply begin defending themselves, and will, thus, close their minds to all evidence you present them with in an effort to hold their ground.

The sad truth is that by arguing with people for many years, I had only enabled them to feel justified in closing their minds & reinforcing their ‘false perspectives.’

But the wild truth is that a good portion of the time, we don’t hold our ground because we feel our ground is correct. We do it because it’s ours.

Subtextually, people fight because we want to protect the one most valuable thing we possess: our minds.

---

Even as a teen, I was well aware that arguing made me a bully. But what I couldn’t see for many years was that people didn’t want to protect themselves from the truth, they wanted to protect themselves from me.

From my violation of them.

From my need to force them to change against their will.

Our mind is our last autonomous place and what we choose to do with it is one of the only freedoms you can violate but never truly break (torture aside).

So, from that vantage point, one might say that portions of our stubborn & defensive ignorance (which paradoxically appear even in intelligent people) are actually self-protective behaviors we employ to protect this free, sacred ground from intrusion––

We’re not protecting our truths. We’re protecting our freedom.

And we strangely refuse to give up on our denials of ignorance…

Because on the subconscious level we realize that there’s actually something even more important than being right…

BEING FREE.

---

Sure, at the root of my debate, I wanted validation from others––whether I was prepared to admit this vulnerability or not.

But I had already begun to learn that when you seek to get others to validate you by invalidating them, all you get is MORE people trying to invalidate you than you had in the first place––and passionately so.

So by this point in my life, I’d seen the insanity of an argument. It got me nothing I wanted. But I still chose to argue with Colin because I realized freedom was one thing I could still fight for––in a sense.

And it’s exactly something I wanted to protect after growing up amongst toxic relatives who constantly kept me on the defense.

---

Thus, what really bothered me was not the fact that Colin disagreed that reincarnation could be true. It was the subtle implication of his whole debate posture.

It was the nuance, in Colin’s mind, that if reincarnation didn’t exist, I had no right to suppose it did because this made me irrational and wrong––and I had no right to be wrong.

So I dug my heels in the ground and decided to try to change his mind––not to get him to believe in reincarnation. But to change his mind from thinking that I don’t have the right to believe what I believe, to thinking I do have the right to believe something he disagrees with.

Which can be simplified to mean: I have the right to believe in something he believes is wrong.

Or further simplified to mean: I have the right to believe in something wrong.

Or just: I have the right to be wrong.

---

So there it was. After all of those years of defending myself in order to avoid being wrong, at all costs, I had strangely gotten to a point where I was comfortable with the possibility that I was wrong.

Comfortable with, in fact, the guarantee that I was wrong about something. Likely many things. Though I might never know which of those things were which.

I had gone from using my arguments to provide me validation, sorely needed… to using arguments to protect my independence from validation.

I still wanted to be right, of course.

But I wanted the basic freedom to be wrong as well.

I can’t imagine there are too many people who argue in order to convince people that they should be allowed to be wrong. But there it is. I decided that in all future conflicts, I would begin with these two simple premises:

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I chose to see that at all times both of these claims are 100% true:

1. I see things the way that I see them.

2. There will always be a possibility that I’m wrong.

This allowed me to give up trying to defend myself. Because within my own accepted premise, it’s your right to think I’m wrong.

It’s your right to judge and criticize my views from your vantage point. I won’t try to take that away from you.

There IS a chance that I’m wrong. That’s not in dispute.

---

BUT… I’m still allowed to see things the way they appear in my perspective EVEN IF I’M WRONG.

I’m still allowed to view the world the way that I do, even if I’m wrong.

By accepting the lens that I view things through, there will always be a probability that I’m incorrect. But I’m well within my right to take that risk.

Viewing the world as I do isn’t a choice to view things correctly. It’s not contingent on being correct.

It’s contingent on being free to be wrong.

Free to make mistakes.

And I don’t owe it to anybody to be right. Not now. Not ever.

---

After many years of wasted debate, I was starting to look at the problem a different way.

I was gradually coming to realize that believing people were wrong to believe something wrong only made a world full of wrong people, and that made me pessimistic and angry––and always in argument.

While exonerating those same people by believing that although I still think their personal belief might be untrue, it is, however, well within their right to believe something untrue––made a world full of right people.

Myself included.

In a world full of wrong people who are wrong to be wrong, you have to fight to prove that you're not like everybody else. It puts you on the constant defense.

But in a world full of right people, who are wrong, but perfectly within their right to be wrong, you aren't struggling to exonerate yourself to others.

You aren't struggling to exonerate yourself at all.

Being wrong only means you’re human. It doesn’t make you the odd one out to be incorrect.

You’ve de-stigmatized a huge portion of your fear & your corresponding need for validation in order to cure it.

---

This is why I’ve made friends with people from all over the world––without needing to grill them on their personal belief system, culture, or religion. It’s why, in 2019, I hosted philosophy discussions that drew people in from over a dozen countries.

It’s why I created a podcast during the pandemic that only featured guests from outside of the United States.

And it’s why I created a Substack where I can ask open philosophical questions that I might already have opinions on––because, despite the fact that I’ve spent nearly 20 years forming my own opinions about the universe that I exist within,

I still believe that everybody deserves the right to figure out how they feel about something for themselves. And discuss it in a fair forum.

We’re all free to form our own views. Even if that means we borrow our views from writers or thinkers who articulate it better. We’re still landing on the ideas that make sense to us and relate to us.

And that organic process is part of being a free, autonomous, thinking human in the world.

---

Look, the truth is, we’re all likely a little bit right & a little bit wrong during every single moment we exist.

But we’re also fluid and part of the constant commotion of being alive.

What’s the point of defending a static position when there’s actual room for growth here?

Growth is a third potential in every argument that both parties continually ignore when they’re trying to find analytical & rational defenses for their belief system.

What if instead of choosing to be wrong or right, we could just both choose to grow?

---

And isn’t that just pragmatic for all things at all times? In every war fought there are people on both sides who are imbalanced. (Even if they’re fighting for the ‘good side’).

Within our psyche, there are irrational AND rational beliefs that somehow coexist.

Beyond the black and white simplification of people as either good or bad, right or wrong, we can clearly see that we’re complex, flawed, and dynamic. Both crazy & sane simultaneously.

That doesn’t excuse truly harmful behavior. And it doesn’t excuse truly evil people.

But it does ask the obvious question, “Do we ALL exist in a flawed mental state?”––and also “Once you see this about yourself, how do you handle it?”

• Do you accept it or struggle with it?

• Do you claim it in others, but deny it in yourself?

• Or do you simply bury it deep inside of you in order to try to obscure & hide it the best you can?

It takes forgiveness to accept the fragility of your worldview.

And it takes confidence to accept the power of other people’s worldviews.

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I wanted to take this palate cleanser moment to explain this nuanced shift I made nearly 15 years ago because it feels all the more relevant in our world today.

I want to create a community that embraces the paradox of opinionated people with critical thinking skills who have their own set of values & their own authentic worldview… sharing a single forum.

Not needing to be in competition with each other.

A forum where people know how to not pit strong worldviews against each other.

Sure, it’s rare.

But if nobody asks for people to begin behaving like this––who’s gonna create the space for this community to exist?

I live in the same world you do and I know that there aren’t a lot of spaces where people are trying to take a bundle of human beings with ecclectic worldviews and let them try to get along.

So my questions this week are:

1. Do we have the free will to be wrong?

2. Is the violation of this freedom the basis for war, violence, conflict––not progress?

3. Are there productive benefits to arguing with people?

4. If so, what would the boundaries of those discussions / arguments / or debates be?

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Bluesky

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