You know, I don't like being told I'm wrong when I'm wrong.

[conuly]

Oh, I'll suck it up, I'll educate myself and endeavour not to make the same mistake in the future, but man, I don't like it. (Mind, I prefer it to being ignorant, so please, correct me if I'm making a mistake.)

I really dislike being told I'm wrong when I am, in fact, right. I dislike it even more when the person ostensibly "correcting" me feels that her point will be better made WHEN SHE TALKS LIKE THIS!!!! And when that person has a note on her user info about how we shouldn't be condescending or belligerent... *sighs*

Actually, that part's pretty funny. Because, let me tell you, TALKING LIKE THIS is both in one swell foop.

Comments

"Project much?"

[dkmnow.livejournal.com]

Yes. All of us have this problem. Self-awareness is the only way out.

We almost always feel more drive to attack others ("in self-defense") when we unconsciously percieve them as displaying or threatening to reveal the behavioral traits that we are most afraid of acknowledging in ourselves. Almost all finger-pointing is a function of this ego-defense mechanism, and all the classic attributional biases and logical fallacies come flocking to its cause.

This is true of everyone - well, except for Me, of course!

In The Question of Evil (http://www.hoopandtree.org/qx_of_evil.htm), Chris Hoffman provides an unusually clear and concise description of how we "project our own shadow" onto others, and of the natural consequences of this.

(It's a great read for any number of reasons...psssst! Pass it on!)

Excerpt:

In shadow projection our own unacknowledged anger, hatred, jealousy, selfishness or lust are falsely experienced as qualities possessed by another person or group. This usually results in viewing the other person or group as morally “lower” than ourselves. Michael Daniels of John Moores University in Liverpool explains that when the “evil” shadow is projected onto others, “these people will be defined and experienced as our moral enemy and we will thereby feel consciously justified in the harm that we might cause them, which is cleverly interpreted by the ego as deserved harm. In this way evil (undeserved harm) is seen as good (deserved harm). Such is the moral double-talk that projection can produce.”