Why Admitting a Mistake Is Harder Than Making One

If we don’t know who we are, how to know how to be?

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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 f…