One of the many boring things I told students in my electronics and mechanical repair classes was “If you want to be any good at troubleshooting and repair work, you have to get used to being wrong; a lot.” Of course, like students everywhere and always they thought I was joking. I wasn’t and as a result I expect fewer than 0.1% of those young (and some not-so-young) people spent more than a couple of hobby years earning little-to-no-money in the business I was supposed to be helping them learn. Being wrong is a pain-in-the-ass and it’s the reason that so many shade tree mechanics are awful and destructive and that many commercial products are lemons. The predictable and repeatable result is what happens when the people involved in the repair or design of a product are trapped in the belief that they are “not like everyone else” and won’t make the foolish mistakes that have trapped humans into making bad decisions, dangerous or undependable products, and following that with cover-ups that just make it all worse. Face it, you will fuck up and when you do the best thing you can do is admit it and move on to fixing the mess you made. The longer you take to do that, the worse the mess will be. History is littered with ruined reputations, notorious products that have disappointed or maimed or killed consumers, high flying companies that went down in flames, and governments and nations that took major wrong turns and kept going in the wrong direction until they became examples of how not to govern and notes in history books.
Lots of us have people in our lives who are not really in our lives today because those people joined the Trump Cult and can’t and won’t get out. Many of those people are still so cultified that they believe Trump not only won an election that he lost, for the 2nd time,by millions of votes, but they even wish his lame, failed attempt to destroy the already weak link to democracy our ancient and obsolete republic constitution cobbled together had succeeded. Chaos, in their cult-minds, is better than giving up on the weird dream that Trump is “the fearless leader” he clearly is not. The problem isn’t that they are stupid, although they clearly aren’t as smart as they imagine. The problem is that they have lived lives where it has been easy to avoid admitting they were wrong often enough to be good at it.
In his Atlantic Magazine article, What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of? - The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes, “We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.” The wronger these people become, our once-friends and neighbors and family, the more entrenched they become in their delusion and avoidance. Nichols makes a terrific statement about how to know when you are really wrong in his article, too: “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.”
That links to something I have witnessed and believed about most people who profess to be “Christians” for the last 60-some years. When my mother died at 34, when I was 9, I began questioning the “God’s wisdom and mysterious ways” bullshit. The more questions I asked, the more violent the responses became. My father, who was a relatively peaceful man, did what Christians did for several centuries to Native Americans, he tried to beat the doubt out of me. Or, as Captain Richard Henry Pratt's said in a 1892 speech to the National Conference of Charities and Correction: ‘Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’" We used the same “logic” in our terrorist approach to Vietnam and 30 years later in Iraq. “If you don’t admit that we’re right, we’ll bomb you into the stone age.” When that approach is the only option, you can always assume whoever is making the argument is not only wrong, but they know they are wrong and can’t admit it.
Christians have never dealt well with doubters. Many Christians are so insecure in their slight grip on any part of the New Testament that they have hung, burned at the stake, drowned, starved, torn apart limb-from-limb, castrated, tortured, and banished doubters for at least 2,000 years. Of course the Old Testament pretty much gives “Christians” a clear path to any mutant, deviant, perverted violence that is at hand. The problem is, there weren’t any Christians before Christ, which points out a flaw that will regularly inspire a violent response. Even as a 10-year-old kid, it was obvious to me that “No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view.” And so, I adopted a life-long perspective that no one actually believes this shit and their violent reactions to doubt proves it. That goes for Mormons, Muslims, Myanmar’s violent Buddhists, and every other cult that uses violence to silence doubt.
Which brings us all back to where we started. If the problem is that humans are often incapable of admitting they are wrong, often until they are forced over some kind of cliff of no return, what are we in store for in the (hopefully) aftermath of the Trump disaster? While many in the impatient and often childish Left are chanting “lock him up” and living in the delusion that a quick trial and conviction of the head fascist-of-the-moment will put an end to the latest awful period of American (USofA) history, the slow, tedious, detailed, and legal path the Senate’s January 6th committee is taking the right path: detailing the activities of the people involved in the attempt to overthrow our elected government and send the United States of America into a spiraling decent into lawlessness, chaos, and very likely dissolution. In other words, exactly the path Putin and his Russian “friends” have been planning for the United States since the 1950s. Giving those stubborn, intuitive (as opposed to intellectual and reflective) folks the time to stare into mirrors until they slowly build some kind of new story that clears them of responsibility for what they have done and what they want to do is the only path that has a chance in hell of working.
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