The Corrections
Our heritage of competition is holding us back from everything we really want.
(Expected reading time: 7-10 minutes.)
Dear Brilliant Reader,
Before we get started, a programming note: I will be sending Build Notes on a bi-weekly schedule starting from this edition.
Two weeks ago, we talked about differentiation in learning, and how we have moved from a world of binaries to a world of spectra. Today’s essay looks at another kind of differentiation, which is perhaps even more important to understand.
Lots of rules, and no mercy
Today is a beautiful day as I sit down to write this essay: The sum is shining, I have a cup of my favorite copy, and my brain is full of creative faults.
Are you feeling an urge to correct the mistakes I just made in that opening?
I certainly feel it. I am a fanatical reader and writer, a stickler for proper spelling and grammar. I have also spent my career in the technology industry, where I am often reminded that the scholar Joseph Campbell used to compare his computer to the God of the Old Testament: Lots of rules, and no mercy. Putting mistakes like this on the written page makes me feel itchy.
For most of my life, I have understood that I have a duty to factual truth. If I heard someone misspeak in conversation, my first impulse would be to correct them. This has remained true even when I have been pretty sure I know what the other person meant to say. You probably knew in my opening paragraph, for example, that I was trying to tell you that the sun is shining, I have a cup of my favorite coffee, and my brain is full of creative thoughts.
I know I am not alone in this sense of duty about correcting others. Social media platforms feel like they have been engineered to give us as many “well, actually” corrections as possible, from friends and strangers alike. The Internet made Grumpy Cat a celebrity, but it’s the grumpy neighbor on Facebook who has truly made online corrections a constant presence in our lives.
Why is it so important for us to correct each other?
A heritage of competition
Middle class Americans share a cultural heritage of competition. We learn from an early age that we are competing with everyone around us. We compete for grades in school. We compete for victories on athletic fields. We compete in spelling bees. We compete for placements in college. We compete for jobs, for promotions, for additional money in the form of raises and bonuses. We even compete for beds in care facilities at the ends of our lives.
We have built and funded a corrections system in the United States, which enacts mass incarceration on our behalf. This system enforces structural racism among us, by protecting the property of our competitive “winners”, and making it impossible for the “losers” of our capitalist competition to live in peace.
Within every form of discrimination that exists in our society, we have classified fellow human beings as winners and losers on the basis of their sex, their gender, their age, their appearance, their beliefs, their genetic makeup, and the circumstances of their birth.
We have created an entire academic field, economics, which takes as its starting point the assumption that we must live in scarcity and compete for resources - that the very existence of winners and losers is as much a part of nature as gravity. Never mind the growing reality that in every part of our lives, we are experiencing a bounty of abundant productivity. Food and basic needs are actually becoming cheaper to produce, not more expensive, over time. We now carry around the sum of human knowledge in our pockets. Still, we pretend that we do not have enough.
Competition costs more than we think
Meanwhile, we bear real costs for our commitment to competing with each other. I am fortunate to have someone in my life who is dyslexic. They are a brilliant and creative thinker, and have been a guiding light on my lifelong journey of discernment. Yet a few years ago, this person told me tearfully that my constant corrections of their word choices, even when we both knew what they really meant - their sums instead of suns - was hurtful and wrong.
It had never occurred to me that a factual correction could be morally wrong. Yet here I was, causing pain for someone I loved and respected, because I was more committed to an abstract ideal of “rightness” than I was to the care and support of this person in front of me. I vowed to break that habit, and I have been practicing every day since.
When you do less of a thing, it frees up space for you to see it happening around you. I can now report that I used to get corrected in my work life all the time, which makes sense, because it was a competitive for-profit environment. When I am at family gatherings, I get corrected on my opinions about professional sports teams, by people who think of themselves as “real” fans.
Is all of this correcting turning me into a better person? It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t much enjoy being corrected, and I don’t know a lot of people who enjoy it either. Whatever I am gaining in factual knowledge, I feel like I am trading away in terms of feeling less welcome, included, and heard.
Compulsive differentiation
Here again, I might not be alone in my experience. The Quaker activist George Lakey reports in his activist organizing guidebook, How We Win: “When interacting with one another, people do one of two things: join or differentiate. … In my experience, professional, middle-class, highly schooled people are the most vulnerable to compulsive differentiation, because of the function of their class and the nature of their schooling. Professional, middle-class training has a predictable result I’ve seen hundreds of times: even easy decisions take enormous amounts of differentiating discussion. Another predictable result: people brought up working class find such groups a turn-off.”
The truth is that the costs of competition are growing beyond what we can bear. The crises of our age are problems of coordination. We simply cannot hope to solve for structural racism, climate change, and public health within a framework of competition. This may be why we feel despair in the face of these problems: We know on some level that our competitive worldview is not helping us to organize or prepare for this work.
Joining true community
If we can wake up to this dynamic of competition and correction, and how it saturates our lives, then we can truly practice joining in solidarity - not with faceless others at a distance, but the real, imperfect, radiant people right around us.
We should not expect that we will always agree with each other on every choice we make as living, evolving communities. In fact, we would be denying ourselves the real benefits of inclusion if we traded endless competition for a false unity. We may genuinely wonder sometimes which way the truth is attempting to lead us. We may have moments when we feel that we must risk speaking our own truth, even at great personal cost.
This is why we must work constantly to recognize our habits of correction - so that we can make ourselves ready to hear not just the words that other people are saying, but what they really mean for us to hear. In reducing our commitment to competing, we must increase our commitment to listening, both within ourselves and to the people around us.
As adrienne maree brown observes in Emergent Strategy, “We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.”
I believe that we have a moral obligation to offer each other the grace and humility of true listening - because the sum of us is longing to shine.
Yours in joining, Michael