“Maybe You Just Love to Yell”
Based on a story by Kapil Gupta, Illustration by Stefan Gasic
Social media—and I’d say Twitter, in particular—has exacerbated people’s need to feel like they’re right. This behavior comes in the form of “dunking,” or responding to someone’s social media post in a self-righteous and sarcastic way, usually in a drive-by comment.
The big issue here isn’t the sanctimonious snark of the dunk itself, but the fact that it’s a strategy for feeling right. Prioritizing the feeling of being right is stupid. It’s intellectual relativism.
Feeling right is exactly the problem of the mental prison. Despite all the contrary evidence in the world, a smart person can fully believe they’re a stupid idiot failure. Why is this?
The entire premise of Robert Burton’s book, On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When You’re Not, is that the brain is more than capable of feeling certainty even when there’s contrary evidence. In fact, it’s much more than a capability of the brain—it’s a subconscious, uncontrollable behavior.
Can the mind change? Can beliefs change? Sure, of course. But it’s not easy and it’s not always quick.
To change my prison behavior, I had to convince myself that the feeling of sufficient evidence is more important than the feeling of being right. More importantly, I had to learn to mistrust the feeling of being right. When I feel right, I know something isn’t right unless I can whip out enough meaningful concrete evidence (or counter-evidence) to justify that feeling.
FYI, this comic is one of several from my book Mental Prisons.
