You Were Wronged
Someone wronged you.
A driver cut you off. A coworker was rude to you. One of your employees didn’t do their job correctly. One of your friends didn’t reply to your dinner party invite. Your partner didn’t do the dishes.
And now you’re upset.
They don’t care about me, you think. No, it’s worse than that. They’re trying to hurt me. What an asshole!
Although this line of thinking is understandable and sometimes correct, it’s usually mistaken and almost never helpful. It’s a classic example of how you shouldn’t believe everything you think.
It would be far better to give the person who wronged you the benefit of the doubt. More specifically, you should give them the benefit of the dumb.
Idiots vs. Assholes
Supposedly there are highly enlightened humans who can be wronged by someone and look upon them with love and kindness, passing no judgment whatsoever. Folks like the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr.
For the sake of this article, I’ll assume that you – like me – are not one of these enlightened people. Thus, when someone wrongs you, you’ll judge them in one of two ways: You’ll either see them as an asshole or as an idiot. Let’s clarify what those things are:
- If someone is unkind to you on purpose, they’re behaving like an asshole.
- If someone is unkind to you on accident, they’re behaving like an idiot.
The latter is more forgivable, and it is also far more common.
Occam’s Razor
Occam’s razor states that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true, and it applies beautifully to this case.
If someone wrongs you on purpose, then there must be a story behind that behavior. Perhaps they hold some kind of grudge against you for something that happened in the past, and that’s why they’ve gone out of their way to make your life more difficult. Or perhaps they have a rare psychological disorder that inclines them to treat other people poorly. Whatever the story is, it’s complicated.
The far simpler explanation – that they were just being dumb – is much more likely. Half of all people are below average intelligence, and everyone is ignorant of a great many things. Many of us are easily distracted and prone to blunders large and small. We all make silly mistakes and do stupid things from time to time.
In other words, idiots are far more common than assholes. So when someone wrongs you, you should give them the benefit of the dumb. As Jesus said of his persecutors, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Don’t Feed the Donkeys
The jackasses of the world get a lot of press (and craving attention might be what’s driving their behavior) but they’re actually quite rare. Most people are pretty nice most of the time.
However, uncommon is not the same as nonexistent. There are assholes out there. Some people, for whatever reason, do go out of their way to make your life more difficult.
I have two strategies for dealing with such people: preventative avoidance and reactive avoidance.
Preventative avoidance means steering clear of situations where I’m likely to encounter such people. To avoid internet trolls, I don’t post about politics on Facebook and I have disabled comments for this blog. To avoid belligerent humans in real life, I don’t go to rowdy bars.
Reactive avoidance means bailing when I do encounter assholes, whether online or in real life. I know that I’m not the jackass whisperer, so I don’t try to change their mind. I don’t try to “win” the argument or get my way. I just bail.
To Dumb is Human
Giving someone the benefit of the dumb doesn’t mean labeling them as permanently stupid. Acting like an idiot from time to time doesn’t make you an idiot – it makes you a human. So forgiving people for acting stupid is really a special case of giving folks permission to be human.
We’re all dumb sometimes. We space out. We forget stuff. We mess stuff up. We misunderstand each other. We misspeak. We make illogical assumptions. We fail to think about the needs of other people and just grab what we want.
So when someone is accidentally unkind to you – and remember, it was probably an accident – forgive them because, soon enough, you may need them to give you the benefit of the dumb in return.