House of Eratosthenes

I’ve occasionally noticed, when arguing with strangers on the Internet that I figure out are still in college or have only recently graduated (it isn’t tough), I can completely discombobulate them simply by admitting I’ve been wrong about something. Sometimes if I’m in an extra snarky mood I’ll tell them I make ten or more mistakes every day before they even think about getting out of bed, which in many cases is probably true. Trouble is, if this assault is fitting for the target, it’s difficult for the dialogue to proceed because it’s like introducing the concept of days-of-week to a barnyard animal, or depth to some kind of stencil-creature from a two-dimensional universe. Willing to admit you’ve ever been wrong about something? My professor didn’t teach me how to deal with this! What is this strange brew?

What’s really going on here is arrested development. No, that’s not a reference to a man in his fifties getting in Internet arguments with strangers…although that may apply too. No, I’m referring to the fastening of an identity, not so much to the specific assertion being made, but to the lofty goal of being right. Five-to-seven year olds argue this way: I’m smart-n-right, you’re wrong-n-dumb. They grow up, graduate high school, go to college which is supposed to be a proving ground for bold, diverse, innovative new ideas, and then graduate that. Still arguing the same way. I’m right you’re wrong, ALL the time…now what were we arguing about again? I forgot. But I’m still right.

And then…if they’re very unfortunate, they’ll achieve positions of leadership in some government agency. Which has some perks, but this way they might very well reach their coffins without ever understanding the virtues of being wrong about anything and having to admit it. Which is where the real learning begins.

As Thomas Sowell said,

Fiction and opinion are likewise dominated by the political left. If you can tell a good yarn, whether in a book or a motion picture, the only test you face is whether people will buy the book or go see the movie.

On TV talk shows, what matters is whether you can talk the talk that keeps people tuned in. You may scare the daylights out of them about fictitious dangers in apples or beef without a speck of evidence that you know what you are talking about. But, so long as it sounds good, that’s all that matters.

Any engineer, businessmen or athletic coach who knew no more about what he was doing than the talking heads on TV or foundation officials have to know would be heading for disaster in no time. When your bridge collapses or your business goes bankrupt or your team gets beaten again and again, you are history.

Nowhere are half-baked ideas more safe from facts than in government. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumes that statistical “imbalances” in a company’s work force show discrimination, the only test of that assumption is whether federal judges share it.
:
One of the reasons why government absorbs so much money and takes on ever-increasing powers is that it is home to so many people whose beliefs could not withstand the draconian tests of science, the marketplace or a scoreboard. What we the taxpayers are ultimately paying for is their insulation from reality, as they pursue the heady pleasures of power.

As if that were not enough, the left promotes the idea that there is something wiser and nobler about having decisions made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong. That is called “public service” and it will undoubtedly be hyped in college commencement speeches this year — as it is every year — despite scandalous revelations in Washington or decades of economic failure and monumental human tragedies in left-wing governments around the world.

There is that famous quote often linked, erroneously it would seem, to Robert F. Kennedy: “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Liberals tend to seize on that specific quote, or at least the sentiment behind it, in their attempts to prop up their own ideology as some sort of wellspring that is responsible for gushing forth all human progress. I myself see it as a scathing indictment. Those of us who are capable of admitting we’ve been wrong about something, understand it is the asking of “why?” that is the real wellspring.

The ceiling fan over my head wobbles a bit. I thought there was a problem with the blades, mostly because this would be the cheapest thing to fix. Well, after removing the blades I discovered I was wrong and now I’m going to have to shell out a bit more money. If I were a liberal, I’d have no problem with the shelling-out-money part, of course; but, it would be blades blades blades, all the time, because they ask why-not instead of why. I was wrong earlier this week when I had to get up early, and set up my cell phone with an alarm clock, anticipating this would wake me & not my wife. Well, I got up a little after three without the benefit of the cell phone, and it’s a good thing I did. There was nothing wrong with how I set the alarm. I tested the sound for volume, made a prediction about whether I’d be able to hear it…and I was wrong. A lot of “why?” led me to that realization, which I’ll be using later. I’m just glad we both slept through it.

The point is, when conservatives and liberals have arguments, often they’re really arguing about the very concept of being wrong. Liberals, having stopped maturing at age five in a lot of ways, fasten their identities to just-being-right, nevermind what the subject of the disagreement is. The goal is to reach the coffin, without ever having admitted to being wrong about anything. Oh sure, you can make a policy that turns out to be wrong, and Those Other People will suffer for it, that’s quite alright…just don’t ever admit it.

This final paragraph in Sowell’s essay is particularly interesting to me, the one that begins “…the left promotes the idea that there is something wiser and nobler about having decision made by third parties who pay no price for being wrong.” I’m reminded of the several-months-long tempest in a teapot that occurred on these pages, about “George Washington never said ‘government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master.'” It turns out, maybe he didn’t, but the leftward-leaners bringing it to our attention wanted to raise the solidity of the debunking to the “We shall rightfully mock you if you dare disagree” status…and, try as they might, they weren’t able to substantiate it to that level. It landed over the imprimatur of “the experts.” What experts are those? You know…experts. The experts of the Mt. Vernon society. Who are they? It mattered because much of the debunking rested on an assertion that this didn’t seem to be “something Washington would have said,” something one of these experts wrote down without any explanation of what was meant by that. This conjecture, the subsequent back and forth revealed, was reproduced across the Internet to all sorts of places where the Washington quote was debunked…interestingly, today, I can’t find a single instance of it. There never was an explanation of what the expert meant by this: Writing style? Opinion about government? Neither? Both? Anyway…

Two things here. First, on Planet Liberal, the lack of identity actually enhances the credibility of the experts. Look around awhile, you’ll find many examples that reveal this is a love-of-big-government thing. “President Smith said” or “Senator Jones said” such-and-such a thing…lovers of big government will go, who? What? Even if Smith & Jones are their guys, still it’s just the word of a mere mortal. But — “The blue-ribbon commission issued a finding,” that’s wisdom from heaven. Who are you to disagree with the experts?? There is a psychology involved in this, one so well-established that our politicians started long ago to pander to it. And so you’ll notice everything’s a board, or a committee, or a panel, or a commission. It’s that “pay no price for being wrong” thing. Anonymity is a way to enhance the immunity, and as an additional benefit, in a perverse upside-down way of dealing with opinions, we the unwashed masses have shown we’re more likely to accept an opinion without a name attached.

Second thing: A conservative is going to wonder if the quote is genuine, and more importantly than that, what would Washington have thought of this warning. And more importantly than those two, what should the rest of us think about it. Whereas a liberal is going to scratch & claw for an opportunity to call someone else a big dopey doo-doo head who don’t know nuthin’…like a five-year-old. This doesn’t actually solve problems or make life better for anyone, whereas the realization that government can’t fix everything and isn’t motivated or positioned to fix anything, if given proper respect, just might do that. It’s said that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, well, it might be more accurate to say a conservative is a liberal who put in his time waiting in line at the DMV. A lot of conservatives who are opposed to state-run health care used to have faith in government providing services and solving problems, before experience forced them to change their minds. You’ll notice liberals who insist they’re liberals because of their prior experiences, if you listen to those experiences, you’ll find they’re make-believe. It’s usually “If it were not for that government program, we would have starved to death.” They don’t actually know that. Here is the tragedy: They think they’ve been learning new things from their prior experiences, but they didn’t, they just kept on believing what they wanted to believe in the first place.

““The blue-ribbon commission issued a finding,” that’s wisdom from heaven.”

Yes, but…(There’s always a butt where liberals are concerned…pun intended.)

They go to great…and I do mean GREAT lengths to ensure that the entire Screech knows what boards, committees, panels, and commissions are CONSERVATIVE and therefore the collective wisdom can safely be ignored, discarded, and shat upon. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve posted lengths to researched, factual arguments and have them immediately ignore it (not that they ever read anything but the link to see where it actually goes). Of course, if I have a counter-argument with factual evidence from a “neutral” site, they’ll research the link, someone will say “probably a conservative site…” and they’ll all start agreeing with each other and it will be discarded as a nothing. Linking to a LIBERAL site with arguments counter to what they’ve accepted as a narrative approved by HuffPo, Daily Kos or Daily Show will simply get you IP-banned. WAY too complex for those minds to deal with.
- P_Ang | 10/01/2017 @ 08:10
But of course. That’s that legendary courage they uniquely have, to boldly grapple with innovative new ideas…

…which were last updated during the Bolshevik revolution.
- mkfreeberg | 10/01/2017 @ 08:14
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but just this morning I managed to enrage a liberal (BIRM) over at our other site, who set about proving your thesis in the comments.

Turns out that I made my “quite puerile” (as opposed to “moderately puerile,” I guess) attacks on Michel Foucault because — get this — I don’t understand him. Also I lack “emotional openness,” but whatever, point being, I’m dumb. It’s unpossible that I understand Foucault just fine, but disagree with him, because if I did understand him, then I’d agree with him. The Fundamental Paradox of Internet Liberalism strikes again!

For such deeply nuanced freethinking intellectuals, Our Betters sure do have a black-and-white view of things, don’t they? If you really understood X — like they do!! — then you’d have to believe X, every word, down to the last stroke of the last letter, world without end amen…

….even if — especially if!! — X directly contradicts Y, which, if you truly understood it like They do, you’d also have to believe, every word, down to the last stroke of the last letter, world without end amen.

Out here in the real world, of course, “I understand what you’re saying, but I disagree” is the cornerstone of conflict resolution. Combined with “I agree with this part of your argument over here, but not that part over there,” you have 99% of interpersonal relations. Anyone who has ever had a girlfriend would…. oh, wait.
- Severian | 10/02/2017 @ 08:04
The Robert Kennedy non-quote bears a small resemblance to something that he is known to have said: “And if you do not do this, then who will do this?” As an appeal to action rather than flapping gums and “raising awareness” and all the other blather that passes for activity, it is an admirable sentiment.

I’ve run into folks like you describe, Ang. They feel like it all must hang together with no flaw, no exemption, no caveats or “on the other hand.” It gets to the point that if someone they usually agree with says something “off the reservation” they repudiate the person, as well as all the stuff that they once agreed with; then the target usually recants the wrongthink in order to remain Of The Body.

Those who don’t? They see firsthand a behavior I once compared to a school of fish trying to fend off predators: when the fish condense and form a swirling ball, the ones out of step are the ones who are most likely to be gobbled by sharks – so the impulse is always to go deeper into the center, more into lockstep, at the expense of one’s fellow fish. THEY ARE NOT ON EACH OTHER’S SIDE. Most redpilling is done quite effectively by the former fellow travelers. You can actually see the light come on: “Holy crap, everything those guys were warning me about is true.” They move right, not because they agree 100%, but because they see that they no longer have to.
- nightfly | 10/04/2017 @ 13:15

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Making Mistakes and Being WrongSunday, October 1st, 2017

Making Mistakes and Being Wrong
Sunday, October 1st, 2017