The price of being right

It’s like a recurring nightmare - it has happened before, then again and is happening now. Unfortunately it is no dream. We can’t just wake up from it, get a cold glass of water and slumber on. Once more the citizens of Georgia are splitting up along the political lines. This is not a type of split which promotes diversity and constructive dialog, it is a type of split which destroys mountains, breaks apart continents and goads nations into civil wars.

I was very young when it happened the first time. We had a leader then – a son of a respected writer, symbol of Georgian identity, himself a long time dissident armed with nothing but a pen against the mighty powers which petrified many sovereign states. The man is gone now - his memory is a bleak reflection in the hallways of history. But he was the very first man elected by the will of majority, the very first man entrusted with the fate of the nation, the very first man ubiquitously admired and cherished. Two years into his rule the country was in ruins - civil war raging across the capital, nervous men screaming for revenge from TV-sets, tanks trampling the same avenues the very first heroes of anti-Soviet movement once gave their lives. It was a pandemonium.

What brought this blight upon us? Looking back the answer seems now obvious – it was the rhetoric of divisiveness, of segregating the country into “us” and “them”, of hating everything which didn't fit the views of a handful. The leader started it and surrounded himself with the men of similar mindset. Soon some of those other men rebelled against his rule deepening the crevice and in a few short months the society was inflicted a long, gashing wound across its fragile body. The leader fled then and died in a foreign land as a common thug but the wound stayed – it was too deep to heal, too wide to stitch, too painful to ignore. The country broke into two groups – the ones supporting his legacy and the ones embracing his ousting. This is the first time we invented this horrible concept of applying “ist” to someone’s name and branding people with it as some shameful stigma. We stopped being Georgians, we became Zviadists and Eduardists.

What a blow this was! Twenty years to recover! And now, when we again have a political force brought to power by the will of majority, we are doing it again. The same mistake, the same treacherous divisiveness, the same mortal blow – we are again labeling ourselves into Mishists and Bidzinists. Are we doomed to repeat the same mistake? Are we destined to wonder in this condemned labyrinth forever? Why are we so locked up in our views? Why is it so difficult to reach across the aisle? What makes so many otherwise intelligent men and women defend the positions which have by now become apparently fallacious?

While some of this can be written off as ordinary hypocrisy, fanaticism and Milgramian submissiveness to authority, a good chunk of it is caused by common pride. It is a social disease – we grew up in an environment where being wrong was considered equal to admitting being weak. This applies to both Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Once we attach ourselves to a certain position, it is difficult to disengage because stepping back, admitting our errors, looking weak sounds petrifying. So we march on – trying to prove unprovable, scrambling to look right, ignoring that quite voice of opposition coming from the back of our mind. We will continue defending the indefensible as long as someone is listening, as long as someone is comforting our sense of being right, commanding our persistence despite the growing mountain of evidence.

This pride is a true weakness, true failure, true collapse. For while we stand on our little pedestals, talking and talking, stretching all the possible arguments to the furthest corners of ridiculous there’s less and less people listening and finally only emptiness echoes our voice. Most of the listeners had moved on, forgotten what the argument was about in the first place. And then the painful realization arrives – in our quest of being right we ended up on the wrong side of history. Life is complex and wonderful, it never stays the same - people change, minds evolve, ideas mature, new facts come to light – every day, every months, every year we move through this evolving marvel of creation. How can we expect today to be certain we were right yesterday? Isn't such claim an ultimate act of arrogance?

If you know what I am talking about, if you have felt the burden of having to be right as I have many times, if that quite voice of opposition is telling you to stop and take a step back, please, listen to it and do the right thing - be wrong today.