We are "doomed" to be wrong. Learning from the mistakes that we have not been able to avoid making is the smartest position to take.
We are all warned from childhood: we must not make mistakes, mistakes are paid. The most sensible defend that each choice supposes a risk that must be considered, bearing in mind that success will accompany those who make the least mistakes or do so in the least relevant aspects.
The most practical version of this philosophy of life, and more comprehensive with human weaknesses, holds that, since we are condemned to be wrong, the intelligent position consists of learn from mistakes that we have not been able to avoid committing.
I would like to reflect on the positive aspects of certain issues that were once considered mistakes, recognizing that, thanks to them, our well-being is possible.
The biologist Jacques Monod assigns 2 properties to our cells: the emergency and teleonomy.
The first allows it to multiply, without variations: repeating its structure; the second allows errors to exist in this copying process, thus allowing variations that, repeated later again by emergence, make possible the persistence of forms capable of adapt to a changing world.
The ability to make mistakes.
According to genetic capacity, it was this ability to "make mistakes", and the persistence of the error, which allowed the appearance of algae, then mosses and insects, later reptiles, and then birds.
The coexistence of these living beings led to the era of dinosaurs, followed by mammals and finally man.
If only the copy had existed, the world today would be populated by an infinity of unicellular beings, equal to the first one that arose millions of years ago, or worse: they would have all succumbed together and at the same time in any of the great geological crises.
Every society tends to reproduce, without variations, generation after generation. For this, it creates myths, taboos, traditions, laws, educational systems; but if it does not want to perish due to maladjustment to changes, it is also obliged to generate dissidents and rebels; revolutionaries in the ways of interpreting reality.
Some of these revolutionaries coincide with a crisis and provide the necessary ideas to overcome each social stage: women's access to education, democracy or scientific advances would not have been possible without those people who insisted on their "mistakes" within societies that considered their proposals heretical.
Today maybe it is worth considering the positive aspects that "mistakes" can have and dissent. For example, decades ago some heretics advocated meatless eating and natural medicine. A more reasonable proposal every day.
Practicing tolerance consists not only in excusing something that we consider wrong, nor in insisting that it be learned and corrected, but in being able, before judging it as such, of try to understand and even consider whether the true error will not really be in our way of understanding things.
Fernando Torrijos for Body and mind.
To finish I leave you with a motivational video: