Stop Cherishing Your Opinions
A few years ago I found myself at a group therapy session. At the time I had recently become a dad and was frustrated that my anxiety and tension was making it hard for me to relax in to the experience.
I didn’t expect to get much out of the therapy which was quite New Age. (A factor which, at the time, usually guaranteed a dismissive eye roll on my part.) At the end of the session I was handed some literature. Later on I read through it and found a question which stopped me in my tracks. Here’s the question:
Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?
Weird to say, but up until that point I had never considered the implication that needing to be right and being happy might not be compatible. But seeing it framed that way I suddenly understood how much I had made myself miserable in my endless pursuit of the ‘truth’.
In a famous commencement speech the writer David Foster Wallace talked about a misguided idea we have about belief. We think that living in a post-Nietzschean landscape where God is dead and all ideas are up for grabs puts us beyond the need for belief.
But, as he points out, this is a fallacy. We all have beliefs and we’re all, in our own way, consumed by them. For most of my life I’ve worshiped at the altar of knowledge.
I believed that if I were just to educate myself with enough data I would be able to move invincibly through the world. For a while this seemed to work. It got me into a good university, it got me started in a career in journalism. It got me the respect of peers.
But knowledge doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s always being filtered through our subjectivities. For me that meant using it to furnish my ego. In other words, the more I knew the more I felt sure that I was right. And the more sure I was of my righteousness the clearer it became how wrong others were.
I literally could not understand how these others could have gotten themselves in to such wrong-headed positions on things. The truth was so obvious. Why didn’t they see it?
As I went around judging the ignorant masses once in a while someone would challenge me on my opinions in way that I found hard to refute. When this happened I would deploy some kind of diversionary tactic in an effort not to lose face.
In the aftermath of these encounters I would go around for days inwardly reeling at the humiliation. But it never occurred to me that the other person might have a point.
Nor did I stop to reflect on what a brittle state of mind ‘knowing you are right’ puts you in. Because so long as I swam around in this sea of self-righteousness I lived in constant peril of being snapped at by the sharks of contrary opinion.
My sense of self was so rigidly tied up in needing to be right that I actually cut people out of my life, people who in all other ways were good influences on me, simply because I couldn’t tolerate how they contradicted my ideas.
It’s ridiculous to be so tyrannized by your own opinions. Yet it’s how many of us live. It’s why the other side are always wrong and will stay wrong because we’ve decided that they can’t be reached so there’s no point even trying.
Why are we like this? How does it serve us? One possible explanation is in the psychological concept of projection.
Those whose opinions don’t chime with our own become the psychological dumping ground for all the negative aspects of ourselves we don’t want to deal with, what the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung termed the shadow.
Here’s a quote from Jung that neatly encapsulates it.
“Anything that disappears from your psychological inventory is apt to turn up in the guise of a hostile neighbor who will inevitably arouse your anger and make you aggressive. It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart.”
This is certainly how it has been for me. I’ve frequently found myself projecting all kinds of dark motives on to those who don’t share my viewpoint. Things that I can’t possibly know and which only make sense as a projection of the more unseemly parts of my unconscious.
So, am I saying give up your opinions? Not at all. Have all the opinions you want. Just stop treating them as if they were ultimate arbiter of moral authority in the world.
To help loosen their hold on you it’s maybe useful to be reminded just how contingent the things we believe really are.
While we might kid ourselves that we have arrived at our opinions by the simple act of applying reason to the phenomena of life, the truth is far more complex. You think the way you do because of all sorts of factors specific to you, many of which lie beyond the realm of your conscious awareness.
Someone’s political beliefs, for example, might have as much to do with how they were treated in eighth grade English class as anything else.
And there’s no use trying to justify yourself by claiming the mantel of common sense. Because common sense is as contingent as everything else when you really dig in to it.
Five hundreds years ago, for example, it was common sense to hold the opinion that the world was flat. Fifty years ago common sense told you that men were men and women were women and never the twain shall meet.
So maybe ask yourself once in a while: what common sense opinions do I hold that might in the fullness of time be proved wrong?
Because while the popular conception is that the truth can set you free, maybe it’s through accepting just how vague and amorphous truth really is that you’ll find true liberation.
The author and self-help guru Byron Katie has a really simple process for helping people unhook from their negative thought patterns. In a nutshell it involves examining each thought with the question, Is that really true?
Try this out in full sincerity and you’ll be amazed at how often you fool yourself in to believing things that have no basis in fact.
For my part I know that when I stopped imagining that I needed to have all the answers a weight lifted. Don’t get me wrong, this article is mostly aspirational and I still have a hard time hearing my opinions trashed. But I’m getting better at it.
I take inspiration from a woman down the street who has a bumper sticker for a political candidate from the last election. Next to it she’s added another sticker as a caveat. It says, ‘I could be wrong.’
