On the Love and Pursuit of Wrongness

Sometimes I am baffled by the egoism of people.

No—that is inaccurate. Egoism is not the problem. A strong individuality is one of the great conditions of originality and creation. What baffles me is the need to be correct, to be superior, to preserve oneself by proving that somebody else stands below.

This is not individuality. It is dependence wearing its clothes.

The person who measures himself through others has already surrendered to an external standard. His superiority requires witnesses. His correctness requires defeat. Remove the opponent and the structure through which he knows himself collapses.

By individuality I mean something more demanding than identity, preference, or the performance of difference. Individuality begins when the self can take its present contents—its opinions, intuitions, desires, even its character—as objects of judgement. It is the attempt to move from the superficial perspective into a metacognitive one and to impose standards whose final reason is oneself, not the crowd one follows or the rival one wishes to surpass.

This is why the desire to be right about our own ideas is so dangerous. It often protects not the truth of the idea, but the identity to which the idea has attached itself. Criticism of the opinion becomes an attack upon the person; revision feels like surrender; and the mind, supposedly engaged in reason, becomes a guard defending the tower in which it has imprisoned itself.

Consider a man who believes in God speaking with a man who does not. If each enters the conversation seeking to be right, what is there to discover? Every question becomes a trap. Every argument is searched for its weakest point. Each recognises the other's uncertainty and rationalises his own. They may speak for hours and leave more confident than before, having mistaken the exhaustion of conflict for the acquisition of knowledge.

Now let both men enter with the desire to be wrong.

The debate changes radically. They are no longer guards of opposing towers, but explorers comparing maps. Each may strengthen the other's position, expose the weakness of his own, or begin arguing against the belief with which he arrived. The conversation is no longer a performance of possession. It becomes an instrument through which both participants place themselves in danger.

Perhaps neither changes his final position. Wrongness does not require conversion. A hidden assumption may die; a distinction may appear; an argument once thought decisive may reveal itself as decoration. That is already movement. They leave with more work than they brought—and therefore with more thought.

Being right leaves us where we are.

Wrongness creates.

Do not misunderstand me: to pursue wrongness is not to prefer falsehood. It is not to disagree automatically, change one's mind for novelty, or perform contrarianism as evidence of independence. The compulsive dissenter is still ruled by the opinion before him; he merely reflects it in reverse.

To pursue wrongness is to search for the point at which one's present model breaks—and to desire that discovery because of what may be built from the ruin.

This is why a person deserves respect, but their opinions do not. To respect a mind is to take seriously its capacity to withstand judgement, to change, and to create again. Protecting every opinion from criticism is not kindness. It is to treat the person as inseparable from their present contents—as though the death of one belief would require the death of the thinker.

But here we reach the greater trap: an immutable sense of individuality.

The phrase should sound contradictory. Individuality must occupy a higher field of vision than the opinions, understanding, and intuitions through which it presently acts. If it descends into any one of them—if it says I am this belief rather than I am the one capable of judging this belief—then it ceases to make self-overcoming possible. It becomes preservation. The faculty that should recreate the self is captured by one temporary version of it.

Metacognition is therefore not merely the ability to observe oneself. Its hardest demand is change: to recognise what one is, to understand the ethos from which it arose, and then to admit that even this ethos may have to be recreated. A person who cannot tolerate wrongness at the level of an opinion will never tolerate it at the level of a value. He will speak of growth while protecting the conditions that make growth impossible.

Those who possess a durable individuality do not merely endure being wrong. They hunger for the boundary of their present mind. They speak because they want their thought exposed; they question because an answer may wound them; they offer their ideas to others not as sacred possessions, but as structures whose weaknesses must be discovered before anything stronger can emerge.

Before an important discussion, ask yourself something far more difficult than Why am I right?

Ask:

What in me is permitted to die if I am wrong?

If the answer is nothing, then you do not possess your ideas. They possess you.

So seek wrongness—not with the humility of one who desires defeat, but with the greed of one who refuses to remain what he already is.

Let an opinion die.

Individuality is what must survive it—and what must create afterwards.