I was part of a men's club in college, kind of like a fraternity. During a basketball game, our athletic director got in a heated argument, a shouting match really, with two of the refs. He was ejected from the game and given a three-game suspension. A real black mark for our atheltics-focused club.
At the next club meeting we expressed our displeasure with his conduct, and reminded him that the athletic director is speaking for the whole club at a sporting event. Even though his complaint had been valid, it had hurt all of us for him to let his temper fly. We discussed it for a while, accepted his apology and promise to do better, and moved to skip any externally facing punishment.
It was the right decision, but the VP of the club was livid. He'd been the athletic director before the current one's predecessor, just 10 months previous, and had an almost identical incident. Except that we voted to remove him as athletic director, a role he'd wanted for years and loved, and bar him from the rest of that season of basketball.
"How is this fair?" he asked. "Why does he get off with a slap on the wrist, but you publicly humiliated me, didn't even let me play?"
It went around in uncomfortable circles like that for a while, with people awkwardly defending the minimal differences in the cases. Then someone stood up and said, "Because we were wrong to do it to you. And doing it to him isn't going to undo that wrong."
In the classical narrative, we all would have enjoyed a dramatic moment of silent elightenment. Then the VP would seconded the motion and we'd have adjourned to go out for pizza. But we awkwardly took the vote, which passed 22-1 with three abstentions, and then quietly went home after a prayer. It took some time for those relationships to heal.
But it was still the right decision. And admitting that we were wrong freed us to learn from our mistake. He was right to feel wronged, not because we didn't do it again but because we shouldn't have done it even once. But taking our licks freed us to learn from the mistakes we'd made instead of insisting against reason that we'd made almost none.
Our leaders today too often act like admitting they were wrong is worse than lying to the people that trust them. As if being right about everything is a sane standard in any field, let alone the squishy realm of public policy. America has kicked ass not by being consistent, but by being right. And we usually get to being right after a handful of failures and incomplete successes. We make bold gambits, we take risks, but we also we cut our losses unashamed and try again.
And because our current political leaders tell each other and us that they can't have been wrong, they wallow in their wrongness, an emperor with no clothes.
It's cool. You're human, it was worth trying. Trickle down economics looked logical on paper. The War on Drugs seemed like a decent public health initiative. It seemed like the ground we left unpaved would soak up enough rainwater to keep low-lying communities safe from floods. I wouldn't have guessed that widening a road increases congestion. Bernie Madoff seemed like another straight-forward Wall Street suit.
But these were mistakes. And that's okay. Unless we insist the people that made them are superhumans incapable of error and double down on them. We have to value being right above being consistent.
