It's Hard to Disagree

Ever notice how everybody is right? When they’re talking about themselves, of course. Anytime a person is talking about someone else, however, that someone else is always wrong. So, somehow, everyone is always right and everyone is always wrong.

Of course you’ve noticed this. It’s been the backbone of politics in this and every other country in the world for the last 5,000 years. And it’s not a philosophy that’s limited to just politics. We’ve all been behind a lady in Starbucks who tells a story to her friend that goes something like this:

“Oh! You’re never going to believe this. The other day I was reviving an unconscious puppy while giving a homeless man $100, when out of nowhere this jackass on his cellphone drives by and throws a dirty diaper out his window that hits me in the head! The doctor said I may be permanently blind in my left eye.”

Around that same time, on the other end of town, somebody is behind that jackass in line at Starbucks and hears this:

“Oh! You’re never going to believe this. The other day I was driving down the road with a bomb in my hand that was left outside an orphanage. I was trying to get the bomb as far away from the orphanage as possible, when all of a sudden this crazy woman runs into the middle of the road and starts stomping on a puppy and yelling at a homeless man. I swerved to miss her and when I swerved, my son, who was brilliantly changing himself, lost his grip on his diaper and it flew out the window. I think it landed right in a trash can, but can you believe that crazy woman?”

Regardless of which version of the story you hear, your initial reaction is most likely, “Oh my God! That’s terrible.” However, your initial reaction should always be, “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” And really, that should be your reaction to every story that someone tells you involving them and another person in a conflict. Do you know anyone who speaks objectively about the “other party” when they retell a story about a dispute?

I know a woman who does in fact tell the other person’s side of the story, only she tells it as if the other person talks like Beaker from the Muppets. Not only does she mockingly talk in a really high voice, but she purposefully does not use actual words. Example:

Person I know: “So I told Jane that I thought the customer needed more information, and then Jane said, ‘Be be be beeeeee be be be beeeeee.’”

My first thought is always, “Really? That’s what Jane said, huh? When she started to say something you didn’t agree with, Jane broke into squeaky gibberish to try and convince you she was right?”

And I shouldn’t leave out that this person I know also moves her hand really fast in a puppet-type fashion to add a visual of Jane’s stupidity. So you can see how hard it is to side with Jane. That is unless you’re Dr. Bunsen Honeydew – the green professor with glasses but no eyes who somehow understands everything Beaker says.

There’s no great mystery surrounding why we do this. We want the person hearing the story to agree with us, not the other guy. And it wouldn’t hurt if the person listening to our version of events eventually grew to hate the other guy; maybe even hate him more than we hate him. It’s reassuring, even empowering.

So, does it work? Depends. It rarely works when we first start out doing it. Our methods are far from refined.

“Mom! Johnny took my crayons!”

“Then why is he the one crying?”

No response.

“Did you hit him?” asks mom.

Then with the most pathetic eyes and the softest voice we can summon, we try repeating our original statement, “Johnny took my crayons.”

Our biggest mistake as toddlers is that we try to convince the third party (mom or dad) while the other toddler embroiled in the controversy is standing right next to us. As we grow older, we learn that by recapping the series of events when the other person isn’t around, it’s much harder for that person to defend themselves. Then, after a little more practice, we learn to leave out key factors and embellish others. We might even act as if our enemies talk like Beaker from the Muppets, but for me, this isn’t effective. I always found Beaker to be a sympathetic figure. He was a kind-hearted soul that got forced into questionable experiments. Poor Beaker. How was it that a dude with no eyes always got the better of him? Couldn’t he have handed Dr. Honeydew a rubber chicken and told Honeydew it was him? He never would have known the difference!

Anyway, eventually we save enough money until we can create TV ads and buy airtime to tell people how worthless our opponents are. This is often much more effective than whining about Johnny taking our crayons, but the messages always sound eerily similar.