Philosopher Charles Bernard Renouvier said “There is no certainty, only people who are certain.” And when it comes to contested issues, people tend to project absolute certainty in their opposing beliefs.
As humans, we like to think there is an absolute truth or correctness and while this may be so, only if we were omniscient could we know the absolute truth. Because we don’t know everything, we actually don’t know much of anything. So when we say “I am certain that gun control will save lives,” or “I know gun control will lead to the seizure of guns,” there really is no certainty or knowing. These are beliefs.
We assemble the facts we ‘know’ and arrive at a belief. We never argue about what we know, we argue about what we believe. The book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz does a great job of describing the idea that each of us is always right. If we learn that we are wrong, we quickly shift our ‘knowing’ and are instantly right again. Being wrong is always in the past. In the present we are right, even when we disagree.
Schulz spends some time in her book on confabulations (making stuff up), and this quote sums things up: “The striking thing about them (confabulators) isn’t the strangeness of their erroneous beliefs, nor even the weirdness of the confabulations they generate … rather the fact that these confabulations are uttered as if they were God’s word.” There are not just one or two confabulators in the community, we all confabulate at times. Why do we do this?
The reasons we make stuff up are without number. The author suggests one reason is that we aren’t very good at knowing that we don’t know. We automatically fill in the blanks of what we know and in telling the story, begin to believe the whole story we’ve created (both the real and the made up parts). Soon we don’t know the difference and the whole story we tell becomes what we know and we are, therefore, prepared to defend it.
The only way to get agreement about a problem then is to focus on the ‘facts’ each of us ‘knows.’ If we can begin to agree on what the facts are and how they lead to our beliefs, the community can start to create a shared belief about the problem.
This conversation about the facts requires one significant element, listening. Schulz’s thoughts on the subject: “Listening is an act of humility. It says that other people’s ideas are interesting and important; that our own could be in error; that there is still plenty left for us to learn.”
To close this post, I hope you listen to Paul Thorn’s song, “You Might be Wrong” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFRM4oJwLdc&feature=player_embedded
Bio:
John Blakinger began his career as a systems engineer for EDS. After recognizing that people need more than software to be successful, John began working on improving processes and leading people. Over the last decade he has focused on team/community achievement within corporations, government agencies and NGOs. John co-chairs the citizen advisory committee advising the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on groundwater issues in Central Oregon.
Greg Ranstrom brings over 25 years of experience teaching corporate, government, and non-profit leaders how to flip organizational chaos and conflict into creative cross-functional solutions. He runs several fellowship programs for the American Leadership Forum focusing on collaborative responses to community challenges. Greg has recently worked with technology start-up companies to foster vital cultures during fast growth.
John and Greg co-authored The Moment of Oh! Making Community Decisions, CivilSay Press 2013. They are also the co-founders of CivilSay™ (www.civilsay.net).