Why is it so hard to admit a mistake?

We all make them. No sane person would pretend otherwise. We readily accuse others of error. But when it comes to ourselves, how often we insist we’re right, knowing we’re not, elaborating absurdities to explain the inexplicable.

I used to be like that – as a schoolboy. I had to be “perfect,” because I knew I wasn’t and my pride couldn’t stand it. I still blush at my prevarications, obfuscations, rationalizations. The Nameless One sustains his adolescent bravado. “Perfect” is among his few words. Can he really believe his nonsense, we wonder, or is he simply gratifying the degraded taste of his fans, who seem to enjoy the joke?

“Who we are” is a shaky structure, an elaborated fiction we affirm as fact. How often we surprise ourselves or aver “that’s not me.” Dreams astonish and the gusts of lust. If we don’t know who we are, how to know how to be? If we lose faith in our supposed self, how to restore it? Hamlet asks Laertes to forgive him for killing his dad and driving his sister crazy because he wasn’t himself when he did these things, “Hamlet is of the faction that was wrong’d.” Who can blame Laertes for not buying such bunkum! If Hamlet wasn’t Hamlet, who was he?

The contrast between who we are and who we claim to be embarrasses worse than halitosis so we deny it. The less we think, the surer we are who we “are,” the readier to revile our foes. When in doubt, assail your assailant, don’t attempt to explain. This is why it’s so hard to debate the MAGA crowd. Any information they dislike they denounce as fake, any critic as vile. Like their hero, they’re perfect, because they lack the mental capacity to be less.

Only humans behave so oddly. That’s because we compare our actuality to some imaginary status and the difference dismays. Other creatures inhabit the actual and that’s that. They’re not spooked by specters. “How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened,” observed Thomas Jefferson.

How liberating to admit screwing up! Oops, sorry, my bad. You disarm your accuser and earn credit for candor. If admission didn’t gain you forgiveness, well, whose fault is that?

Emerson’s famous words about doggedness, while true, are a brag in drag. (Emerson was very sweet on himself, almost as perfect as the Nameless One.) “A foolish consistency,” he intoned, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” (How, we gawk, could Emerson bracket himself with Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, et al., with a straight face?)

I pity stupid people forced by facts to recant, for they are backing off a cliff of confidence into a chasm of confusion. The Nameless One’s loyalists will end up loathing him for his failure shames them. Knowing nothing for sure, it’s easy for me to reverse myself. Don’t trust a word I say – because I don’t either.