Yes, that’s what I was looking for. Symmetry. Something to make sense of all the chaos. Generalizations may be a way we lie to ourselves because the truth is gross and messy and exhausting. Negative generalizations for me weren’t even the most insidious. The positive ones sometimes caused the most disappointment. “All women are trustworthy” was a generalization I started making early in life as a reaction to getting the memo that all men were bad. My nascent psyche probably couldn’t handle both men and women being bad, because that would mean feeling trapped in a perilous situation, so I deduced that since all men were bad, all women must be great. I really needed to believe that to get through the day. As a result, I put women on a pedestal, gave credit where credit wasn’t due, and got hurt a lot. It was so hard for me as a woman, a supporter of women, and as fragile person looking for loving friendships that I literally would rather have gotten hurt before detaching from my delusion that every woman should be trusted with abandon.
When I decided I wanted to detach from old belief systems, it was way harder than I thought. Gray areas make me almost as uncomfortable as watching Fifty Shades of Grey. I did some research to see if refusing to update old worldviews was a human nature thing or a me being witless thing, and it turns out the whole thing is somewhat universal. Thankfully Stephanie Pappas wrote an article called “Evolution, Climate and Vaccines: Why Americans Deny Science”:
. . . a 2010 study found that when people were shown incorrect information alongside a correction, the update failed to reverse their initial belief in the misinformation. Even worse, partisans who were motivated to believe the original incorrect information became even more firm in their belief in that information after reading a correction, the researchers found.
So, for example, if you know the shortest route to the airport and someone tells you they have the shortest route, chances are that will make you believe even more firmly that yours is the shortest. So apparently we Homo sapiens have some innate need to defend our opinions, regardless of how incorrect they are. I’m half embarrassed, half amused by all the times I’ve done this in arguments with guys where I’m blatantly wrong, but physically can’t admit it. Even when my brain says, “You’re wrong, Whitney, you have got to stop talking,” my mouth says, “No, you’re wrong!”
I think I probably got this way because in our culture we’re so shamed for being flawed or for making mistakes. This seems like another one of those nasty primordial needs to ostracize the weak for the good of the tribe, back when being wrong could have meant being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. But as long as we equate lack of knowledge with weakness, we’re all gonna remain very stupid. I saw a lot of pretending to know things growing up, which I blame on toxic masculinity and the generations before us having what seemed to be an allergy to vulnerability. My dad never asked for directions. My mom cooked without following recipes. And when people didn’t know statistics, they just made them up: “Well, most people don’t even care about politics.” I mean, that’s not a real statistic. When I bought my first piece of furniture from Ikea, it didn’t even occur to me to look at the instructions because nobody had ever told me it was okay to not know something. Trying to assemble an Ikea side table myself led to a pinched nerve, some pretty epic emotional outbursts, and a lot of splinters. Basically everything except an assembled side table.
Maybe I heard the platitude “knowledge is power” so often that I internalized it, and thought that without knowledge, real or fake, I don’t have any power. I was so embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know something that I preferred to just defend whatever misinformation I made up than capitulate to the truth. In hindsight, it’s so odd to me that I was insecure about not knowing things because when someone asks me “What does that word mean?” or “How do I do this?” I never think, “What an idiot!” In fact, the opposite is true. I’m always charmed and impressed by a person’s ability to admit they need help. The truth is that if I had just been comfortable saying “I don’t know” earlier in life, I’d actually know a hell of a lot more. Maybe even as much as I pretended to know. Case in point: Until I was twenty-six, I thought a 401(k) was a marathon. That’s the kind of stupidity that happens when you’re too afraid to admit you don’t know something.
? ? ?
For the longest time I thought if I couldn’t carry on a conversation about literally everything with authority, that I was an actual piece of garbage. The irony is we pretend to know things in order to be liked, yet nobody likes a know-it-all. They’re very annoying. So why do we try so hard to be one?
In my case, in addition to the primordial brain dynamics I’m not qualified to outline, I think it’s ego. Ego is a hard thing to explain, and there are plenty of therapists and books that are way better at doing it than I am. That said, I have a lot of experience with them, between having one and dating some big ones.
I personally see ego as a curmudgeonly middle-aged bouncer, hair frozen in pomade icicles, leather blazer down to his knees, standing outside a nightclub. When people walk by, ego yells “You can’t come in!” even though the nightclub has been closed since 2004 and it’s three in the afternoon. But for me, my ego thinks it’s protecting me. That said, since I’m not in any real danger when I’m having a conversation at a dinner party, it really serves absolutely no purpose but to sabotage me and weird people out.
My ego is like my hype man, encouraging me to make terrible choices. Yeah! You got this, Whit! Totally say yes to that job you don’t want just so people don’t think you weren’t offered it! Buy that overpriced ugly purse to impress shallow people! Pretend you know way more about the news than you actually know! Stay in that terrible relationship because you, my friend, do not fail at anything! Also, you can change other people with the powers of your mind even if they have no interest at all in changing! My ego is a mascot that mindlessly cheers on scientifically impossible ideas and lame bathroom selfies.
My ego is like a veil that protects me from getting hurt, but also isolates me, preventing me from having true connections with people or an honest relationship with reality. Maybe it’s my hijab, so to speak, that I use to hide and to carry on an ancient tradition in my family and culture. My ego is the armor that protected me as a child but now weighs me down as an adult. And sometimes it tells me to squat way too much weight, so it’s also starting to mess up my knee. I’ve learned that as much as we’ve been through together and as good as its intentions may have been, it’s time to break up with my ego.
These days it’s my goal to be wrong as often as possible. It’s my goal to say “I don’t know” as many times as I can in a conversation. If you’re not ready to flat out say “I’m wrong,” which I totally get, I have some other phrases that are a bit easier on the ego. Try “I never thought about it that way” or “I may have a blind spot in that area.” When we say stuff like this, something very magical happens: We start learning things.