Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Mistakes were made

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

We’re taking a short break from False Alarm! because your host made a big big mistake. More on that when we return to False Alarm next episode… In the meantime, we raid Benjamen Walker���s audio vaults for a show about making mistakes and being wrong.      

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. One of the really funny and fascinating things about being wrong is that it's actually impossible to be aware that we're wrong. Katherine Schultz is the author of Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error. If we knew that we were wrong, we wouldn't be wrong. Nobody's committing intentionally to a false belief about the world. If they are, they're not wrong. They're deliberately lying or pulling the wool over your eyes for some reason. But when we hold a belief that we're later on going to decide is erroneous, in the moment, we obviously have complete faith in it. I think of it as that moment,

if you grew up like I did watching the Warner Brothers cartoons, that's morning, the Sunday morning cartoon moment where the roadrunner is dashing off the cliff and the coyote is following him. And of course, the roadrunner can fly and the coyote can't. And there's this great moment where he's run off the cliff, but he has not yet realized that, you know, there's no solid ground underneath him. And the moment when we're wrong about something, but before we've realized it is like that moment, we think that our belief is rock solid, we think we have, you know, all of the the facts in the world bolstering us, and we have not yet looked down and realized that, whoops, that's not the case. And yet, no

matter how many times we have that experience of realizing that we're wrong about something, and we have them a lot, right? I mean, arguably, we have them at least in minor ways, every day, or at least every week. And yet, it's like, it's like our wrongness register is made of Teflon, it just slides off of it, we're incapable of retaining this notion that, you know, you know, we were wrong in the past. And hence, there is at least some probability that we might be wrong in the present. Wrongness in the present is incredibly hard for us to hold on to as a concept. And this inability to know that we're wrong in the moment, I think is part of why people really can get so defensive about error. Because, you know, we tend to think that it's a psychological issue that people can't face up to their mistakes, because, you know, their ego is either too huge or too fragile.

But in reality, I think for a lot of people, it's so structurally impossible to imagine that we're wrong in the moment before we've realized it, that it actually is almost a natural consequence of the structure of error, that feeling of rightness is almost inevitable. And we feel right because we take our beliefs to reflect the reality of the world. And we take our beliefs to reflect the reality of the world, because in some sense, we have to. I mean, it's quite difficult to get through daily life, kind of constantly undermining every single one of our own beliefs. Even if you're going to be a somewhat skeptical person, we're quite choosy about which of our beliefs we decide to really interrogate at any depth. And the more important a belief is to us, the more convinced we are that we hold it

because it reflects the evidence, that it is, that belief is carefully constructed out of real material facts about the world around us. Sometimes that's the case. We really have tried to create a, you know, foolproof, bulletproof belief about the world. More often than not, we haven't. We've inherited the belief from our family. We share it with our entire community. We don't even know that we have it.

It really is one of those things like, you know, I think this chair underneath me is solid. Or we hold it because we're exposed to some evidence but not other evidence. Or because the evidence we're exposed to, we saw it first, and it seemed the most compelling. And I think it's important to start recognizing our worldview as composed of all these kind of little atomic beliefs that, you know, individually and collectively can be an error. Once we start sort of locating ourselves in the middle of this universe of beliefs, it's a little bit easier to think about error. But eliminating error isn't the goal. I think the goal is not to cease to be wrong,

but to get better at being wrong. And by getting better at it, I mean, I don't necessarily mean committing more mistakes. We all do plenty of it as it is. I mean, learning to respond quickly and gracefully and with humility and with generosity in the face of our mistakes. Before The Theory of Everything, I had a podcast called Too Much Information. It was actually a radio show that ran on the station WFMU. So I had to fill a whole hour.

One of the great things about podcasting is, of course, that I don't have to worry about that anymore. But when I don't have an episode, I do have to have something. So I've turned to the DMI archive for the broadcast that needs to go out right now. I'm a bit in a bind because I messed up the next episode of the current series I'm doing, False Alarm. I made a really wrong decision. More on that next episode. But it got me thinking about this episode that I produced for TMI on being wrong. In 2010, when I met writer Katherine Schultz, she'd just published her book, Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error. Since then, she's joined up with the New Yorker, won a Pulitzer

Prize for her story about the upcoming earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. That one's called The Really Big One. Considering her concerns about climate change, it makes sense that she wrote a book on understanding what it means to be wrong. Because as she notes, it's kind of the best place to start from if you hope to make sense of the world. One of the really interesting questions about wrongness is what exactly it takes to get us to realize that we're wrong. And the answer is that it can take staggering, staggering, staggering amounts of evidence. In fact, sometimes we just never get there at all. But amazingly, there's a lot of situations where essentially no amount of evidence is sufficient to

overturn a belief. And once you're in a situation like that, you're talking about denial. You're talking about someone who, for whatever constellation of reasons, is not going to be brought to believe that they were wrong. And denial is an astonishingly powerful force. In 1844, this religious group, it wasn't particularly a cult, this religious group numbering in the hundreds of thousands

all across America gathered together to wait what they were certain was the end of the world. This was the Millerite movement. And so they've fixed upon this date based on incredibly elaborate biblical interpretations on which the world is going to end. And they all get together and gather and wait for this date. And they're really very deeply committed to the belief in, not simply in the emotional and psychological sense, but materially. A lot of these people, they have given up their land, they have paid off their debts, they've paid off their neighbors' debts, they've given up their money, they have failed to plant their crops. They've

just, they're wholeheartedly committed in every imaginable sense to the proposition that the world is going to end on October 22nd, 1844. Needless to say, as we know, it did not. And this poses a real problem if your fundamental, central, organizing belief in life has been that the world is about to end. And there's many, many amazing things about the story of the Millerites, but one of the most amazing is that not all of the Millerites accepted that they had been wrong. In fact, arguably not even a majority of the Millerites accepted that they had been wrong. A remarkable number of the one-time true Millerite believers found some way to kind of write out of existence the failure of the world to end, which is pretty stunning when you think about it.

I mean, there's not really any more dramatic piece of counter-evidence than the continued existence of the world when what you had believed in was the end of the world. The most dramatic example is the folks who claimed that Jesus had actually come down to earth, which was the whole plan, right? Like Christ was going to return and the whole eschatology would commence. These folks claimed, oh Christ actually had returned, he was alive in all the hearts of the saved, and everyone else was just kind of getting ready to wither on the vine and die off. They somehow kind of rewrote their past history to create this

new belief that things had actually gone precisely as planned. And as dramatic as this sounds, it's not terribly unusual. I think a lot of people in the face of the flat disconfirmation of their beliefs find a way to either go back and say, well, it's not exactly that I believed X, I believed X and a half, or Y, and Y actually did happen, and here's my case for it. There's a lot of rewriting of memory that goes on in these situations. And, you know, there are instances in which denial, like any kind of wrongness, can be trivial,

but on the whole I think most of us find it really troubling. It feels like such an absolute refusal to cope with reality and to confront reality that it's really maddening for an outsider watching it happen. And you can only imagine that for someone experiencing it, someone really trapped in the throes of denial, that it's actually a very emotionally frustrating and difficult and constraining situation to be in. I'm quite fascinated by denial. And I think it's fed by our dread of being wrong, by our sense that it's somehow abhorrent, that it speaks to the worst things about us,

that it's an indictment of our overall worth. And I think in cases of extreme denial, we see people get so entrenched and dug in that it's almost like they can't find a way out. And they haven't had the experience of learning that backing up and saying, you know what, I was wrong, is actually a move that can look really graceful and really strong and that can elicit a lot of acceptance and admiration. I think the sense is everything's going to hell.

All I can do here is like Stonewall, right? I'm just gonna stand here and swear up and down that I was right, I was right, I was right, because I cannot. It's like a rat trapped in a maze, like I can't find another way out. And the other way out is obvious and easy, and that's what's remarkable about people's inability to find it. Really all you have to do is say, you know, I blew it. Mr. President, in talking about the continuing recession tonight, you have blamed mistakes of the past, and you have blamed the Congress. Does any of the blame belong to you? Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.

As I've stated previously, I believe our policy goals toward Iran were well-founded. However, the information brought to my attention yesterday convinced me that in one aspect, implementation of that policy was seriously flawed. And now I'm going to ask Attorney General Meese to brief you. Do you still maintain you didn't make a mistake, Mr. President? Hold it. Did you make a mistake in sending arms to Tehran, sir? No, and I'm not taking any more questions. I took a risk with regard to our action in Iran.

It did not work. We did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so. But in debating the past, in debating the past, we must not deny ourselves the successes of the future. Let it never be said of this generation of Americans that we became so obsessed with failure that we refused to take risks that could further the cause of peace and

freedom in the world. Mistakes were made is one of Ronald Reagan's most famous phrases, but as you just heard, the great communicator couldn't even say it without screwing it up. Today, Ronald Reagan is considered America's greatest president, which drives journalist William Kleinick kind of nuts. The way he sees it, all of America's current major problems are Ronald Reagan screw-ups. Ronald Reagan believed that if we emancipate corporations, emancipate free enterprise by stripping away all of the checks and balances on the operations of free enterprise, we would be a more prosperous country. But in the 25 years since he did that, or almost 30 years, we see that the result has been disastrous. We talk about the BP oil spill was because of lax regulations on offshore

drilling. The financial meltdown was because of deregulation of the financial sector. We had roving blackouts in California. We've had blackouts on the East Coast. We've had the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina because of the stripping away of FEMA and things like that. There's just been a whole litany of disasters that have occurred because the role of the federal government was diminished in these very important sectors. In his book, The Man Who Sold the World, William Klanick doesn't just make the case that the Reagan administration screwed America, which it did. By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted, or were the subject of official investigations for misconduct and or criminal violations. But for Kleinick, the man himself, the man most Americans think is the greatest president ever, also screwed America. His advocates like to portray him as a man of character. Peggy Noonan actually wrote a book

about her years in the White House called When Character Was King. But there really is not much evidence in the public record that there was anything extraordinary about Reagan's character. I believe he was a pleasant person to be with, and he came off as a very kind, jovial person, but he never put other people's interests ahead of his and never sacrificed anything for friendship or for a cause. He watched out for his own interest and the people in his administration watched out for their interest. I mean, that's the ethos of Reagan's philosophy, self-interest. Well, the people in the Reagan administration pursued their own self-interest. There's cases in Reagan's diaries where he specifically can be seen turning a blind eye to it. So the idea that Reagan was completely in the dark and didn't know that

these things were happening in his administration just doesn't hold water. For his book, Klanick traveled to a number of American small towns, towns decimated by Reaganism, including Reagan's hometown of Dixon, Illinois. But most of the folks Klanick spoke with couldn't connect the dots. If you ask them about Ronald Reagan, they'll tell you he was the greatest thing that ever happened to that town and that he was a great man of character. They just are not able to connect this to the Reagan administration's policies. So for me, then, the big question is, can America ever really move forward, though, if we can't admit who's responsible? There's a lot of people out there like the

Tea Party movement, which is an enormous amount of people who still don't get it. And yeah, I don't think we can solve the nation's problems until more people do get it. No, mistakes were not made. We made mistakes. One of the things that wrongness calls on us to do is make sense of our own identities in new ways. And historically, there's two kind of interesting and competing ideas about what it means to be radically wrong about ourselves. And one of those ideas, which I find very fascinating, but a little bit troubling, is that we weren't actually wrong. We finally figured out who we are. This narrative is incredibly common. One of my favorite examples of it, because it's one of the most beautiful, comes from Augustine, the philosopher and eventual saint who famously wrote these confessions about his own conversion to Christianity. He'd been very, very anti-Christian in his youth. And he converted

to Christianity. And he wrote of that experience that until he found God, he had placed himself behind his own back, refusing to see himself. And there's this notion that there was always this real self that wanted to be Christian and wanted to believe in God. But he had hidden it, he'd obscured it, he'd refused to see it. And in finding God, he hadn't changed. He hadn't even been wrong. He had just suddenly come to embrace his real essential self. We actually hear this narrative all the time in everyday life. We tend to construct these stories that suggest that our identity is totally stable and fixed and can never change because it's really reassuring in the same way that we want the world around us to be stable and fixed. And another kind of amazing example of that idea about wrongness comes fromounced the entire thing, went to the State Department,

confessed his entire past. And one of the interesting things about the way that Whitaker Chambers tells the story of what seems from the outside like this radical change in belief, right? I mean, this guy starts out as the most fervent communist you can imagine, and he becomes about as fervently anti-communist as you could be. He doesn't tell it like, I was wrong about communism. He doesn't tell it like there was this huge change. He tells it like, all of those years that I spent being a communist were to serve this end, so that I could come forth, stand in front of you here at the State Department today and tell you the truth about the entire thing. He has this amazing line where he says, it's not so much that I changed, it's that I became who I had always been. That to me is an amazing sentence. I mean, first of all, it's actually a grammatical impossibility. Like I

became who I had always been. That's, it's sort of beautifully wrong and beautifully impossible. And it captures this idea that we have that we want to always be the same person. And I understand, as I said, where that comes from, because we all like stability in our lives and in the world around us. But I also find it a little disturbing, in part because I really believe that if we're not alive in order to change and to grow and to become someone who we didn't quite start out as the beginning, I'm not exactly sure what we're doing here. And I think one of the great things that Ranganas can call on us to do is actually accept that we aren't fixed, perfect, unchanging, immutable beings. We can change. We do change. And that's actually one of the most marvelous things about us.

And in a funny way, this is an idea that we've all known in this kind of surface, cliche way forever. This is what people are getting at when they say, to err is human, or they make a mistake and they say, oh, well, you know, I'm only human. But I want to push that idea a little farther. There's something about being wrong that is completely unique to the human mind

and the human imagination. And it is precisely the thing that enables us to do that other thing that animals and machines and arguably even God cannot do, which is invent stories about the world. You don't have to invent ideas or theories or stories if you already know it all, like God. And you aren't capable of it if you're a machine or an animal. We are, I think, unique among the creatures of the world in both needing to and being

able to create our's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Mistakes Were Made. Before we go, one more story about being wrong after the break. Support for this episode comes from Bombas. The folks at Bombas are serious about comfort, and Bombas socks are perfectly engineered to support your everyday hustle. Innovative arch support, seamless toes, super soft cotton, and cushioned footbeds all come together to keep your feet happy.

On top of providing you with serious comfort, each pair of Bombas socks sold equals one brand new pair donated to communities in need. To date, they've sold and donated over 7 million pairs. For 20% off your first order, go to bombas.com slash prx. That's bombas.com slash prx and you'll get 20% off your first order. I had friends from my life in New York who were like, join Facebook, join Facebook, and, you know, then I can share stuff with you. And I was like, okay, okay. But then one day, I got a friend request from somebody I thought I'd never see again in my life. When Cheryl Rogers joined Facebook, she reconnected with a few of her classmates from West Haven High School, class of 1975. But then, one day, Joey, the most popular guy from choir, reached out to her.

Joey was this six-foot-three, blonde hair, blue-eyed Italian boy, gorgeous, had the voice of life. He always played the lead in the musical. I had a crush on him for the last two years of high school. We were friends, but something happened one day to connect us even closer. In my junior year, my dad died suddenly. Of course, I mean, it was incredibly traumatic for me, but school was always a place for me where I could find comfort. You know, as this little group, this little group of kids who sort of ruled the choral department, we were in rehearsals all the time. It's just like it is on Glee.

We were together night and day. One night, we were in a rehearsal, and I think that the pressure and the sadness built up in me, and I just started crying. And Joey said, I'm going to take you out of here. And he put me in his car, a blue Skylark, and he drove me around and he told me, I'm going to drive you around, I'm going to let you scream,

I'm going to let you cry, I'm going to let you do whatever you need to do. And I did, and that's what I did. I really just allowed, I just released all the frustration and grief and anger I had at my dad dying. And all of that release of emotion eventually pulled us together and we started to make out. You know, racial tension was still very high and it was not going to be something that we were going to do just to walk around together and say, hey, look, black girl, white boy, we're going to start going out. Not in that town.

We kept that quiet. We stayed friends, but there was always an underlying tension that was sexual and emotional that we couldn't show and that we couldn't express to each other. After high school, I just thought I would never see him again. The friend request from him had a little message in it that said, After all of these years and still an absolute babe, so good to see you. I accepted it, of course.

And I wrote him a very breezy note that went back with it and said, how are you? I thought I'd never see you again. And, you know, I heard that you had an opera career and I'm really proud of you and tell me about your life. And I was anxious to hear about his life because I had heard through mutual friends, high school friends, that he had become a relatively successful opera singer in Europe. I got a response back the next day. And the response was jaw-dropping, to say the least. It was a long, long, long email. And it was a long email that detailed that once he saw my face,

it brought back all the memories of that night that we had. And he felt so ashamed that he had never pursued it because he wanted to pursue it. And had continued to think about me. And when he saw my face, it just all came rushing back. And he actually apologized because he said he didn't know what my life was at this moment and it might have been inappropriate for him to be saying all these things to me now, but he just wanted me to know what an impact I had had on his life and still do. I am not married. I don't have a husband. I've never been married. I don't have a boyfriend.

I'm a free agent completely. So I wrote back to him and I said, of course, I remember that night. And I don't know if you called it or even knew it, but I certainly was enamored of you too. And then he wrote back another really, really long letter. So this is now three contacts he's had and he's ramped it up now from be my friend on Facebook to I had a crush on you in high school, a big crush on you in high school to now I want to share all of that with you.

I want to share all these great feelings that I still have for you and tell you about my life. And, and, oh, and by the way, he's setting the stage to tell me about the bad marriage that he's in right now. But he told me, you know, he's got kids and, you know, he's the woman he, he called his wife the woman I'm married to now. And I thought, well, nobody refers to their wife as the woman I'm married to.

They don't like them very much. And so I decided that he was still in love with me and that that made me happy. And I decided that I was going to reciprocate. And I wrote him back a letter saying, I love you. I wish I had known all of this so many years ago, but I now love you too. We moved the relationship off of Facebook to our personal email account. And we emailed each other once a day. I suggested that we move to the phone, but he wrote me a very involved letter saying that he hated the phone. And so, and he was also afraid of what the trail of a phone calls would be.

And so we basically continued this email, this relationship through email. And that went on for the next six months. I mean, that's basically how it stayed. And it never graduated to Skype. It never graduated to the phone. And I talked to him about when we might see each other and that I was ready to come over to Europe and, you know, try to arrange for us to meet. But again, he was afraid. I find out eventually why he feels he can't leave.

And it's kind of shocking to me. His wife is the breadwinner. So he doesn't want to leave her because she's his financial support. You know, he is no longer singing opera and his wife is the breadwinner. So he is afraid to do anything to end that relationship. Well, if I was rich, I would have sent him money and I would have said, come on back home and let's figure out what, you know, what to do. I just wanted to be with him. I wanted to be in love.

And that's and that's what I was getting. I was getting love, which is something I never really had before in life. And so I was getting it from him. But then one morning, I got my normal email from him and I opened it and I read it and I enjoyed it. Then about 10 minutes later, I noticed that I had another email that came in from him. And I wondered what it was that he had still to say. And I opened it and it was not to me. It was to another woman. And the title of the email was, Just Need to Touch You. He wanted, had been meaning to send her a song that his daughter had written.

And every time he listened to this song that his daughter had written a while ago, it reminded him of our relationship. And the name of this song was Absence of Time. And he had attached the song was absence of time and he had attached the song. Even though the email wasn't to me, I recognized it because he had sent a very similar, if not exact, email to me about three weeks after we had declared our love to each other. With that song attached to it.

And then I see a name to a woman named Stevie. And I know this woman. Stevie is a woman that Joey and I went to high school together with. It's not some woman in Europe that I'm competing with. It's some stupid woman from my high school. And I think seeing that this is what I was up against,

it allowed me to have, I think, a much faster understanding. But it didn't minimize the pain of feeling that I had been very, very wrong. But the more I think about it, the more I'm glad that it did happen because I think that certainly people should be willing when presented with affection and emotion to react to it and emotion to react to it. And I certainly reacted to it. And even though right now I think I might not, I say to myself,

that's it, I'm not doing this again, I'm sure that when true love and emotion presents itself to me again, that I will consider it with an open mind and with an open heart. of a show I made in 2010 for my old podcast called Too Much Information. It was produced with help from Bill Bowen and Laura Mayer. It featured Katherine Schultz, William Kleineg, and Cheryl Rogers. The Theory of Everything is produced by me and Andrew Calloway. TOE is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at Radiotopia.fm.