The Extreme Costs of Making a Stupid Mistake
I recognize that writing what appears to be a defense of yet another “Karen” using her racist privilege sets off the What the fuck are you thinking? alarms. I also recognize that not writing about the phenomenon of public outrage for stupid mistakes given the tendency of each individual having that dual side of Be Kind to One Another with a flip side of You Fucking Cut Me Off in a Traffic, You Fuckstain! is simply not an option.
Amy Cooper was wrong. I mean, seriously fucking wrong. Hearkening back to Emmett Till wrongness kind of fucking wrong.
She was confronted with a person who immediately started things off by filming her when she refused to leash her dog and, as she states in video, when she demanded he stop filming her and he refused, she went to a place that would inevitably destroy her ability to work in this country for probably five or six years. Unless she changes her name and hair color, no one’s hiring her.
When a police officer misjudges a situation and is completely wrong, it can have dire, life-ending consequences. That sort of wrong deserves serious response and accountability. The outrage expressed globally over these sorts of homicidal mistakes is an appropriate response.
When a surgeon makes a mistake in judgment and accidentally drops his vape kit into an old lady’s spleen, this is a tremendously dangerous sort of wrong. Medical malpractice.
When a politician or policy maker fucks things up (like using the COVID info to boost their stock portfolio or gassing peaceful protestors for a photo op) the blowback should be career-ending.
A sense of proportion seems necessary when what amounts to a moment of road rage becomes a metaphor for all the ills in the world. Everyone here has made and will make real mistakes.
"Mistakes can be hard to digest, so sometimes we double down rather than face them. Our confirmation bias kicks in, causing us to seek out evidence to prove what we already believe. The car you cut off has a small dent in its bumper, which obviously means that it is the other driver’s fault.
Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance—the stress we experience when we hold two contradictory thoughts, beliefs, opinions or attitudes. For example, you might believe you are a kind and fair person, so when you rudely cut someone off, you experience dissonance. To cope with it, you deny your mistake and insist the other driver should have seen you, or you had the right of way even if you didn’t.
'Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept—I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true—is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true,' said Carol Tavris, a co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).”
Source: "Why It's So Hard to Admit You're Wrong" — New York Times
There is nothing bad about being wrong. Admitting it has, however, become the worst possible thing one can do in today's punishment over rehabilitation society.
I don't think this is unusual or that it was brought on by social media or a generation of thin-skinned kids told that hurt feelings are cause for scorched Earth retribution. We all know the story about the carpenter-cum-Messiah who, when confronted with a crowd of angry moralizers setting to stone a prostitute to death. "He who is without sin, cast away" and all that jazz. We've always been like this.
The price for admitting a mistake today is almost always destruction and shame. Victims of crimes can't admit any culpability in the crime because that paints them as somehow responsible for it which is a ridiculous assumption in most cases. "He was asking for it" is as dimwitted a response as it comes. Even worse is when the mistake is owned, apologies are made, and it isn’t enough for the public. The cost is just as high.
Back to Cooper. Given the fact that her ‘crime’ created no damage to anyone—at all—is it then justified that she be destroyed because she was wrong? Those who would say “Fuck YES!” are in no way different than those who think a black kid caught with some weed deserved to spend ten years in the slammer (he doesn’t). Petty, unforgiving, unwilling to reflect on the times they were wrong, so filled with a need to control others via shame and destruction they resemble no less the Inquisitioners of Spain.
Does this woman, caught in a moment of fury because some random busybody decided to film her as he chided her for breaking a minor regulation in a park, deserve to live the rest of her life accused of being an avatar of racism? Does that Scarlet Letter placed upon her via social media ever come off? Christ, they even named a law after her when there is no such law named for Carolyn Bryant Donham.
Here's the kicker (from the same NYT article above):
"Another study, from the Stanford researchers Carol Dweck and Karina Schumann, found that subjects were more likely to take responsibility for their mistakes when they believed they had the power to change their behavior."
Cooper will never be given a chance to change her behavior. She will never be given quarter for the rest of her life. She, guilty of her worst impulses in a moment of rage and helplessness, which harmed no one, has been sentenced to life without parole.
I could be wrong but it seems that pulling out a phone to record someone in public is in itself an act of aggression. It seems that our collective impotence in ridding ourselves of the Donald and his cronies is turning us on ourselves. Perhaps this is exactly the course correction needed—to destroy one another using the power of public trolling and maybe Twitter has exposed how truly hateful we all are.
Perception of one another grants that power to change behavior. Shame and retribution solidify the concrete of cognitive dissonance and, in many ways, leaves the mistake-maker no choice but to fight back, stand her ground, and refuse to recognize their responsibility. Without that belief in the power to learn from a mistake, no wisdom can be achieved.
If you want people to see the good in you when you fuck up, you need to do the same to others when they blow it as well.
Empathy is fine but compassion is better.
