Friday, April 16, 2021

Everyone wants to be right: This is number 620 of Chuck Lorre productions Vanity cards

 begin quote from:

http://chucklorre.com/?e=1165

People prefer to be right. Right feels good. It’s empowering. Wrong feels awful. And this is by design. Evolution rewards being right and punishes being wrong. The foraging monobrows who looked up from the berry bush and said, “That’s a predator, run away,” had a better chance of passing on their genes than the Alley Oops who said, “No, it’s just a big pussycat with an unfortunate overbite.” (They were more likely to become virgins tartare.) In other words, wrong equals death. If you’re wrong enough, you get excused from the planet. This explains why it’s almost impossible to change people’s minds. In order to have a shift in perspective, one must first admit to being wrong. That’s extremely hard to do. History is filled with people who chose to cause unbelievable carnage rather than consider the possibility that they’ve misjudged a situation (I’m talking about you Imperial Japan, Deutschland über alles, and The Confederate States of America). Which is why I fear for our future. None of us are willing to be wrong. The very idea of it is inconceivable. Unless, of course, some enlightened soul came along and proposed an alternative to the polarity of right and wrong. Perhaps the idea of Neither. A middle way leading to peace, serenity and joy. And if we were again to use history as a guide, we would most likely decide the Enlightened One was wrong, then we would kill Him, then we would worship Him, then we would kill anyone who didn’t agree that ours was the true faith. Which would allow us to be... yep, you got it... righteous.

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