How will you know you are wrong?

How will you know you are wrong if you were never taught? If you never learned the right way, how will you know you are on the wrong path?

That's a question we rarely ask ourselves, especially considering that we barely like to admit we are in the wrong. A bigger question might be even knowing who determines what is right or wrong. Here, I am not talking about committing a crime or sin; I am speaking about things as simple as the way we deal with other people or the ethical and civic rules that aren’t written down anywhere.

When you take something as simple as saying “Good morning” whenever you meet a person, these are societal rules that we all learned from those before us and now perpetuate. Today I want to talk more about other things that might be controversial, and this write-up comes from an experience I recently had with my neighbor beating his kids. The punishment given to me seemed very harsh, and I wondered to myself: how could I make him see he was wrong, how could I tell him he was wrong, or how could he learn he was wrong?

How do you know you are wrong?

Our habits come from a combination of the information we receive and the experiences we have. There is often a false assumption that everybody is going to be the same or think in the same way. We might both be exposed to the same information but come to a different conclusion about it. That's one thing I had to come to terms with in my mind; it isn’t that people are doing the wrong thing, but rather that in their minds, their conclusion has been that what they do is the right thing.

Even though you may perceive it as something wrong, they actually perceive it as the right thing to do.

This could lead us to discuss what right and wrong are in the end, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Rather, the question is knowing how far is too far gone? And ensuring that we all abide in the constraints of the law. I could spend my whole day trying to explain to my neighbor why beating a kid isn’t the right thing to do, but that won’t change his experience, he is always going to come to that conclusion, ironically I am also stuck in one conclusion as well.

Learning the right way

The difficulty comes from the fact that our habits originate from our experiences and those experiences are constructed over a long period of time with a consistent amount of information getting into our brains, so don’t assume you can change a person’s experience just with a few words. You can always try your luck trying to convince a person with some inspiring words, but they eventually revert to what they know.

How could I have corrected my neighbor? I still wonder what I could have said or done to change his mind, to convince him that it wasn’t the right thing to do, going against all of his experience won’t have helped.

Knowing better

There is an outcome we are all aiming for, one that makes us happier, in the case of my neighbor, one in which his children were more disciplined. The information we have determines our experience, unfortunately we aren’t exposed to enough information, so our experience becomes a very limited one, in the case of my neighbor one in which he resorted to violence to get what he wanted because he was too afraid and lazy to think of any better solution. Knowing better goes through an education process and requires a person to be willing to learn in the first place, the only alternative to that is learning the hard way through failure.

To answer the question of how will you know you are wrong? It is by keeping an open mind and a will to always learn new things.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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