Wrong

By Ryan Clark

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This week is more downgrades and more political ranting. Recriminations, spin, more assertions. Calls for confidence. Portents of disaster. This is our economy and its stewards, for better or worse. 

As an editor, I spend the majority of my day asking myself the same question in one form or another: “Is this correct?” or if you’re negatively attuned: “Is this wrong?”  As managing editor of a website, naturally, I receive some correspondence indicating answers to these questions to varying states of certainty—to my amusement or embarrassment. I am, therefore, keenly aware of the myriad ways one person can be wrong and for what reasons during the course of a single day. I spend a lot of time thinking about wrongness and I wonder about our government and our economy.

The hardest thing to get past when dealing with mistakes--yours or someone else’s--is hubris. As half our country goes through a crisis of confidence, while the other half goes through a chest-pounding call to arms, I keep returning to two things I have read over the last year: Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed:The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Managment and Kathryn Shulz’s interview with safety expert James Bagian, from her phenomenal series “The Wrong Stuff” on Slate.

They are, at their hearts, examinations of hubris. Long Term Capital’s insistence that it was right where other people were wrong and Bagian’s attempts to keep personnel solutions out of systemic problems are not stories of outliers, but common problems on grander scales. To reach a real solution, you need to drill deeper than blame or intelligence.

There is too much money in appearing right that it has become increasingly harder to get people to admit they are wrong--it's never been easy to do to begin with. The result is ‘gotcha’ questions, endless spin, melodrama and a downgraded opinion of news in general. Sound and fury has become job creation. And our country is sinking. 

So, when we ask questions, why are we asking them? When we create a solution, are we solving a symptom and creating another problem? We’re going over a cliff and arguing about the size of the steering wheel. Something has to change, somewhere.

Complain all you want about one half or the other of our government, but our government is a reflection of ourselves, not some foreign entity existing outside our own personal ethos and we have made it a textbook Dunning-Kruger rubric. Because that's how we want it. It’s easy to see another person’s mistakes. It’s time we all ask ourselves the hard questions.  

What are you doing wrong?

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