You’ve likely seen the XKCD that goes “Hooray, we’ve solved the problem of drama! I’ll go tell everyone! / Graph: drama over time… rules change… shloop! / Holy shit… guys… people are complicated!”
The comic has a safe, reasonable, motte interpretation that goes something like:
“People often underestimate the complexity of various problems or dynamics, and the degree to which existing equilibria are, in fact, pretty darn good, given constraints. Most of the times that people think they’ve spotted an easy, obvious better way, they’re wrong.”
This is a good moral. It’s in line with standard wisdom like Chesterton’s Fence, and not falling prey to fabricated options. It’s a good idea, when imagining oneself or one’s ideas to be possibly exceptional, to keep closely in touch with the fact that probably not.
Unfortunately, the comic also has an expansive, overconfident bailey interpretation, which comes up way too often:
“I thought there was a way to do this stuff better and smarter than everyone else, and it turned out I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is because it simply cannot be done better; anyone who thinks so is going to end up with egg on their face just like me, in the end.”
There’s a basic pattern that looks something like this:
A person has a belief that boils down to some kind of personal exceptionalism. They think that they can do a thing that everyone else has failed at, or they think they lack a flaw that everyone is supposed to have, that sort of thing.
That person turns out to be wrong; reality corrects their misconception, often brutally.
They react by updating to a belief that looks something like “it is not possible to be special in that way; anyone else who claims the specialness I used to claim is wrong in the same way that I was wrong about myself.”
Usually accompanied by a sort of smug, simpering, condescending forgiveness.
A couple of examples that inspired this essay:
“I thought my social media usage was healthy and balanced and not doing damage to my psyche, too. It wasn’t until after I’d gone cold turkey and detoxed for a while that I could really see how much it had been messing with me—you won’t understand until you do the same.”
“Yeah, I thought I’d never lie to my kids, either. Give it time, you’ll see.”
Thinking that you can do a thing which most people can’t, or that you can see a solution that everyone else has missed, involves something resembling arrogance.
But it is more arrogant, not less,
to respond to being humbled
by concluding
that everyone else who thinks similarly is just as wrong as you were. That your failure is proof that the thing can’t be done, that anyone who says the sorts of things you used to must necessarily be blind or ignorant or misguided in the same ways that you were.
And one final bonus example that didn’t inspire this essay but got glommed onto the end in the process of converting it into a speech: