Shorter post today. Enjoy.
Making Mistakes
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
James Joyce, Ulysses
George Orwell states in Nineteen Eighty-Four that “the best
way to keep a secret is to hide it from oneself.” Which is bollocks, right? The
best way to hide a secret, as we all know, is to write that secret down, leave
it on the mantelpiece or coffee table, go for a piss and then come back and try
and find it.
It can’t be done, because the mind is as mischievous as it
is treacherous and so replaces the memory of the thing searched for with some
unpleasant image, like a large tax bill or a picture of Boris Johnson in just
his pants and socks, and so we skip over the form of the desired object time
and time again, even when it is starting us in the face.
This works well for drug dealers or spies. Keep a list of
your contacts in a little black book in plain view on the sideboard. Saves you
having to remember anything incriminating. Then when the police or intelligence
services break the door down demanding names, all you have to is get them to
help you look for the book. Bingo! They are quickly co-opted into a shared sense
of blindness for the thing searched for and desired.
I’m being factious of course (it’s a skill), but it’s a
source a continual fascination to me the way the mind works or doesn’t work. We
all make mistakes, it is after all the way that evolution works, through errors
in the duplication process copying strands of genetic material. Some errors are
beneficial to progress, others disastrous. One of the greatest errors in the public’s
perception of science is in misunderstanding the phrase, ‘survival of the fittest’.
It doesn’t mean the fittest in the sense of the most well-toned, or even the
sexiest (there’s that factiousness again), but in the sense of the most well
suited to survive in an ever changing environment. Today you may be top of the food
chain, the savviest with current technology, the richest economy, but who knows
what next week will bring. Adaption is as much about serendipity and making
mistakes as it is about forward planning. Without mistakes, we’d all still be a
pool of slime under a rock somewhere.
One of my greatest weaknesses is my ability to proofread my
own work. I still find typos in posts on this blog that I wrote five years ago
or more. It’s one of the reasons why I didn’t survive long in banking (aside
from the danger to my mortal soul). Banks externalise all mistakes to their own
staff, the public, the public purse, anyone but themselves. The kind of errors
that in the public sector or less carcinogenic elements of the private sector
would simply be regarded as part of human nature, in banking are instead
treated like the worst crimes imaginable. It’s the principle of judging others
by your own standards. Put the date in the wrong format, miss out the county on
an address, call someone Ms instead of Miss and you’ll be treated like you were
the one who mis-sold the PPI policy in the first place. By laying the blame for
mistakes squarely at the feet of their own staff, banks leave much to chance
and it’s no surprise they are still screwing people over and engaging in toxic
practices, even to this day.
I jumped before I was pushed, but I’m glad I jumped when I
did. As a writer, it was a useful experience and I gained some valuable
insights, but only in the same way as I would if I’d spent a year with the
Taliban. Yet I factiously comfort myself with the knowledge that my ability to
make simple mistakes does at least single me out as a powerhouse of evolution. Get
things spot on 100% of the time and you may have a glittering career in banking
ahead of you, but it’s also probably best if you don’t breed at any point. You’d
only be diluting the gene pool.
People will sometimes offer up a prayer to St Anthony, the
patron saint of lost things, when looking for something they’ve misplaced. As
an atheist it is all too easy to deride this type of behaviour, because no matter
what we atheists might like to think, atheism is a cult, filled with its own unique set of prejudices just like
any other religion. Scientifically speaking, the appeal to an external power definitely
does work, not because St Anthony or God necessarily exist, but simply because
the process removes ownership of the problem from the domain of the mischievous
mind to some unseen third person. Like with banking, externalise the problem
and it ceases to be your concern and you’ll soon find you find your
watch/wallet/car keys/phone.
It’s the same as when people say, “Look for something else,
you’ll soon find it.” Drug dealers and spies, be aware that you should under no
circumstances offer your unwelcome guests tea or coffee, or ask them for any
assistance in the kitchen. One quick fumble through kitchen cupboards looking
for the sugar is enough to dissolve the cloak of invisibility surrounding that
little black book on the sideboard quicker than you can say one lump or two.
I don’t really have an ending for this piece, so instead I
will close by saying that the writer has made eight deliberate mistakes. Can you
spot them all?
Get it done.
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