23/08/2024
DO YOU PLAY THIS DESTRUCTIVE GAME: ‘I’M RIGHT AND YOU’RE WRONG?’
Being right and making others wrong is a zero-sum game with 100% predictable outcomes – everyone loses.
This piece is ugly, confronting and might be disturbing.
If you are willing to read it, it may challenge you to your core.
Writing this was challenging. And I felt concerned I might alienate family, friends, colleagues, and readers.
And maybe its message is no big deal. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong, thinking that it is too harsh.
You’ll be the arbitrator.
First, please consider this question: are you an innocent accomplice in creating humanity’s problems by believing you’re in the ‘right’ and others are in the ‘wrong’?
THE CONTEXT WE LIVE IN
On a global scale, in August of the year 2024, Putin and Zelensky, Netanyahu and Hamas are the most visible players in what is probably the most dangerous and destructive version of the ‘right-wrong’ game: war.
As with all ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ games, war has a 100 percent predictable outcome.
These two examples have thousands of losers, potentially millions more.
There are ultimately no winners in war – even though millions, even you, may think there are.
This right-wrong game of annihilation spreads like a deadly virus, with these two wars infecting more countries – maybe the world.
I trust that if you believe war ever has or ever will offer a sustainable solution, you are willing to consider the possibility that it doesn’t.
WE ALL PLAY THE ‘I’M RIGHT AND YOU’RE WRONG’ GAME
After President Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race, Donald Trump and now Kamala Harris continue prosecuting their ‘being right’ and making the other ‘wrong’ case for becoming the next President.
Boldly, both speak of uniting the country and their desire for the citizens of the United States to come together. They do so while expressing their views of the other in a demeaning, disrespectful, often hostile and sometimes cruel manner. Their respective running mates, Tim Walz and JD Vance for Vice President, are playing the same game.
Are they walking their talk of coming together as a nation?
They and we delude ourselves if we think sustainable outcomes come with that adversarial mindset.
Discourteous behaviour fosters disharmony and ruptures into the ‘right-wrong’ camps we witness drowning the United States in the sea of despondency at best and hopelessness at worst.
Both Democrats and Republicans will continue to see discord and disunion eating away at the social fabric of the United States, just like the flesh-eating bacteria necrotising fasciitis eats away at the human body.
Afflicted at the psychological, philosophical, and worse, spiritual level, tens of millions of Americans play this insane ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ zero-sum game.
DO WE SEE WHEN WE ARE PLAYING THAT GAME?
Blind to the reality of what we are creating, too many of us live committed to being ‘right and making others wrong’.
All the while, we are wrecking our relationships, mistreating our neighbours, exploiting our employees or our employer, ripping off our customers or our suppliers, and damaging our environment.
Whew! That doesn’t sound like a sensible way to live.
We are led by many managers and governed by too many politicians who believe it is their right to rule – to ‘be right and make others wrong’ – forgetting it is their job to be ‘in service’ to the common good.
Too many of us are unwilling to give of ourselves – expecting a free ride – when creating our home planet, Earth. And as it appears today, we are moving inextricably towards a zero-sum world.
And we don’t play this ‘bugger you, Jack, I’m okay’ game deliberately.
We play it because it is how most of us were raised and conditioned – to a lesser or greater degree – to live our lives with a ‘it’s right, we win, or wrong, we lose’ mindset.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
It’s easier to recognise this game in others.
We observe Putin and his followers, Zelensky and his, playing this game with grisly results.
Netanyahu and his, Hamas and theirs, are playing an equally sickening, abhorrent game.
As you read this, there are 28 other wars or war-like levels of civil unrest causing death and destruction in different countries around the globe right now – today! This minute!
And then, as touched on above, there is the mighty United States, a frightening example with tens of millions playing out, on a national scale, ‘being right and making others wrong’.
Consequently, the United States, too, is possibly only centimetres short of taking their deep civil upset to civil war.
What quality leadership do you think the Democrats or Republicans are demonstrating?
What leadership is the United States showing the world?
You may well be asking: what is the basis of my observations of that country?
I started visiting the United States as a businessman in 1971, importing US-manufactured products to Australia, and much later as a fly-in-fly-out student studying there for six years.
At last count, I’ve made 33 visits to that country, several with extended stays.
As a fascinated explorer of that culture ever since, I am somewhat qualified, as an outsider looking in, to share my limited experience.
With friends and colleagues both to the right and left of politics in the United States, I have found the US culture, as diverse as it is, collectively embodies the ‘we’re right – you’re wrong’ mentality. This way of thinking is embedded more firmly there than in any other culture I’m familiar with.
Gripped with the erroneous belief in US exceptionalism, Americans – per se – display the ultimate ‘we’re right, you’re wrong’ view of themselves and the rest of the world.
Fox, on the one side, and CNN, on the other, are two mainstays of the media that are masterful perpetrators fanning the flames of the ‘right-wrong’ mentality dominating US culture.
Once a leading example of the value of democracy and fair play, in 2024, the righteousness camps infect both sides with the ‘we’re right and you’re wrong’ chaos that thinking creates.
Even speaking from firsthand experience and continuing to take daily interest from afar, I acknowledge my perspective is limited.
And worse, I, too, have fallen into the ‘right-wrong’ pit with my analysis of the current state of the United States. As a consequence, I will not, as the best-selling book by Dale Carnegie emphasises, ‘win friends and influence people’, but what I have said about the United States and its people conveys, at my expense and credibility, the point.
As a husband twice married, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, counsellor, coach and author, I’m deeply concerned about what I see and hear unfolding there, given the United State’s powerful influence on the world.
That’s my feeble excuse for ‘being right and making the United States wrong’.
WHAT ABOUT AUSTRALIA?
Those old enough to witness Australia’s culture over eight decades will, like me, have seen it changing dramatically since the end of the Second World War to mirror the United States.
We copy and are in lockstep, only a decade or two behind our friend and ally – a country that seems to be consumed by the ‘right-wrong’ game.
Fox in Australia and our national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, are two increasingly biased examples of the influence the US culture exerts in Australia.
Fox is blatant in ‘being right’ and makes everyone else ‘wrong’, with the ABC, which is mandated to be unbiased, increasingly so.
And like the United States, our politics, talk-back radio, social media, and the opinion columns of the press drive home the ‘right-wrong’ mentality daily, tightening its divisive grip on Australians.
As willing co-conspirators, we partner with the media to further condition ourselves in this right/wrong game through the press we read, TV and movies we watch, the radio we listen to, and the social media we indulge in.
It seems we cannot save ourselves from emulating the lack of kindness, understanding, wisdom, and common sense we witness in the United States.
That fate will swallow us if we don’t wake up and see the cancerous nature of that way of thinking.
Globally, millions, if not billions, overdose daily on this ‘mad versus mad’ media reality.
Beyond the confines of the United States and Australia, as a collective, humanity appears to be living at the expense of others – other sentient creatures and nature – driving relentlessly towards the concept of, or maybe the reality of, Armageddon.
Millions worldwide are living in these extreme psychological conditions – many mindlessly barracking, as if in a Roman Colosseum, for one side or the other – throwing fuel on the fire of ‘being right and making others wrong’, bad or evil, simply because they see and live life differently.
And still globally, falling between the cracks in most societies are the homeless, hungry, ignored, destitute, flotsam and jetsam of humanity as a shocking, pitiless example of our ‘rightness and their wrongness’.
We see this lack of kindness everywhere. At sporting events, even at our children’s under-nines football matches, when we make the umpire, or the other side’s players, or supporters ‘wrong’ with our ‘rightness’ over a penalty – throwing verbal abuse at each other and, increasingly, resorting to physical violence.
What are we thinking?
Are we going stark-raving mad?
And is it any wonder that when that happens at such a juvenile level, with such verbal intensity and physical violence towards the umpire or between the parents and their children, it occurs when there is so much more at stake – such as world peace?
You might think: you are doing precisely that in this article, John – making yourself ‘right and others wrong’.
So, I ask you.
Can we have an ‘I am right, and you are wrong’ mindset and be loving towards each other?
It appears to me to be a psychological, philosophical and spiritual impossibility.
What do you think?
Either way, I’ve painted a grim picture.
WHAT THEN, IS THE WIN-WIN ALTERNATIVE?
First, you and I must see that both sides of a conversation, discussion, debate, disagreement, argument, or war have some validity.
Both sides have their reasons and motivations for holding the position, the stand or any actions they may take.
Second, we must see that only through our kindness towards another, our understanding of the other, and our inner wisdom and common sense can you and I create a win-win relationship with another human and, therefore, personally initiate and live in a win-win world.
Third, we must see within our mind and therefore come to understand that everyone – including you and me, Putin and Netanyahu – is born with innate kindness, understanding, wisdom and common sense, and what we portray is not our true selves if not expressed from that place within.
The exceptions are psychopaths, sociopaths or others who have mental disorders.
How do we achieve those three steps?
THE WAY FORWARD: SEEING BEYOND BEING RIGHT AND MAKING OTHERS WRONG
As claimed, each of us has an accessible, innate, transcendent state unless born with or develop a mental malfunction.
That state of unconditional harmony and peace is accessed and lived to whatever degree we do when we recognise and, at that enlightening moment, surrender ‘being right and making others wrong’.
That is, when looking into the eyes and hearing the voices of our relationships, we realise that our need to be ‘right’ and, therefore, make others ‘wrong’ is a cost too great to bear.
We achieve that state of actualisation when we abandon all certainty in our beliefs, opinions, judgements and knowledge as being the truth and, in doing so, make ourselves ‘right and the other wrong’.
Before we can ‘love thy neighbour as thy self’, we need to access that spiritual place within – that inborn state – our inner world of Possibility.
That numinous experience occurs when we transcend every aspect of our conditioning – every belief, opinion, judgement and shred of knowledge – all the stuff we spend our lives ‘being right about’ and ‘making others wrong about’, including what I write in this article.
This piece is not the truth! It is my attempt at creating a signpost pointing to our inner peace and, thus, our inner peace on Earth.
Ask yourself: what happens when we consider our religion, philosophy, politics or knowledge as being ‘the truth’?
Are they not the most visible examples of humans ‘being right and making others wrong’ and the hatred and destruction that those ‘truths’ have caused throughout human history and are still causing today?
To take this as ‘the truth’ would be just more conditioning and equally as useless.
It is a simple signpost pointing to our inner world of Possibility.
From personal experience and the many experiences of others, Possibility exists within our mind.
We need to discover it for ourselves.
Surrendering our ‘knowing’ to the ‘yet-to-be-seen’ releases us from our life-long prison of the impossibility of believing ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’.
Experiencing that inborn human state of Possibility manifests as a feeling of unconditional love for all and contributing to the wellbeing of our fellow humans and nature in all its manifestations.
It’s that simple. And it’s that challenging.
Yes, seeing beyond our ‘rightness’ and others ‘wrongness’ requires us to surrender to the unknown.
SO, WHAT IF?
What happens if we unconditionally relinquish ‘being right and making others wrong’ about anything and everything and surrender ourselves to the yet-to-be-seen?
We enter our inherent transcendental state – The Realm of Possibility.
In doing so, we understand how to live in harmony with others.
In that Realm, we see each aspect of our own and each other’s conditioning for the illusionary prison in which we and they live.
We are free from our self-created prison of ‘being right and making others wrong’.
And we do not put on rose-coloured glasses when entering that Realm. We see what is. We call it as it is – but with a blending of kindness, understanding, wisdom and common sense.
In a state of Possibility, we are our true selves – unconditionally kind, imbued with understanding and growing in wisdom and common sense.
We are home – free to love unconditionally – walking the path of peace; the path to peace on Earth!
And we are not perfect – far from it. We stuff up from time to time. But we see it is us, not the other, causing our disquiet, disharmony and upset.
We have discovered the problem, and it is us – not them. We see that ‘being right’ and making the ‘other wrong’ is a zero-sum game.
And some final questions:
What if enough of us take that step of surrendering ‘being right and even those of us being right about us being wrong’?
What if you and I stop playing that lose–lose game right now?
What if?
Would we start healing our relationships?
Would we support creating peace on Earth?
Warmly … John"No way! I say you're wrong..."
Being right and making others wrong is a zero-sum game.
With 100% predictable outcomes – everyone loses.
This month's article is intense and may be unsettling.
It could deeply challenge your perspectives.
Writing it was difficult for me. I worried about alienating family, friends, colleagues, and the reader.
Its message may not be as significant as I think, or I may be too harsh.
Regardless, it's important for you to read.
I'll leave you to decide. Click here to read.
Warmly ... John
