Be Wrong Right: Ask a Genie

Well, the end of March is here already, and it's time for a front-page article! By popular request, our featured columnist is once again our genie-in-residence, back this month to serve another dish of piping-hot advice.

Dear Genie,
Hello again! It's, me, Predictably Regretful, your former client, hoping for some help with a—situation. You'll remember my wish, of course. I know you warned me not to do it, but that's all water under the bridge at this point. Suffice to say, the crabs have become very good at sneaking through the security fence. We're talking coconut crabs! Volkswagens with claws! And these ones are smart. They stare at me through the window like they know what I did. God help me if they get inside.

Any advice would be appreciated.
Signed, P.R.

Dear Predictably,
I distinctly remember saying, "If you're going to rule an island of hyper-intelligent creatures, make sure you are one of those." If in doubt, it might be time to sell the villa. Should you need an objective assessment of your performance as emperor, your mutant macaques would surely offer their opinion.

But that's not useful advice for my general reader, so I'll aim at the larger subject of wishes gone wrong.

I know a wise man who likes to say, "If you're going to be dumb, you'd better be tough." This is very true of wishes, and worth bearing in mind. Yet the phrase on repeat in my head these past few months has been this:

If you're going to be wrong, be kind and wrong.

For sure, when you can help it, try to be right. But this is harder than most people realize. To be right, one has to wriggle past gut instincts and prevailing assumptions, dodging the pratfalls of groupthink on one side and "common sense" on the other. Being right requires good information, which is annoyingly complex and confusing. More annoyingly, it's hard to get and hard to test. And most annoyingly, good information can't be twisted to fit our desires. Which explains why people, even smart ones, are wrong so much of the time.

Now consider your manner of being right or wrong, on a spectrum of kind to cruel.

It's possible, on rare occasion, to be cruel and right. "Lifeboat politics," as the aforementioned wise man describes it. When you're in a lifeboat with a friend and a week's supply of food, and three weeks of rowing to the nearest shore, and you don't have a fishing pole but you do have a gun, and you know for a fact that you can row further, on less food, than your companion, there is an argument to be made for a cruel, decisive action. But foolish won't be the word for it, when you're rescued by a fisherman the very next day.

If you're going to be cruel, you'd better be right.

Which, I'll warn you, is a terribly uncommon combination. Cruelty and rightness tend to cancel each other out. More so, cruelty loves to be wrong. Cruelty will abduct such virtues as justice, valor, even love, and string them up as gruesome puppets in a play of wrongness. Believe me, if you're cruel and right at breakfast, you'll be cruel and wrong by lunchtime.

Cruelty magnifies wrongness, and wrongness magnifies cruelty. I might even say that cruelty times wrongness is the formula for evil.

But kindness—kindness goes a long way to smooth out a mistake. Say, for example, you get lost on your way to the Colosseum, and you ask a stranger for directions. Would you rather get sent down the wrong road by a friendly young priestess, or an aggravating wanna-be caesar? You'll end up on the far side of Rome either way, but in the first case you're whistling all the way there.

Kindness may not erase wrongness, but you'll be on much better footing being kind and wrong than merely wrong. To err is human. Presuming you're human, dear reader (with apologies to any crabs or macaques), I suggest you avoid cruelty wherever possible, and err on the side of kindness.

I say this knowing how tempting it is to fight cruel wrongness with cruel rightness. Kind rightness is your best move every time. Cruelty likes to tell the lie that it alone is prepared to be firm, but kindness and firmness are good old friends. If you want to build something transcendent, be kind and firm and right.