As an adult, I have often heard people say that being right in an argument is about their values. One person’s values are right, while another’s are therefore, logically, wrong. Heads or tails. Who has the coin?

Dear Neighbor, 

I have vivid memories of when I was growing up, five years younger than my brother, getting (or not) first choice on the TV channel, the pick of desert, the biggest marble (yes, I’m old) with the toss of a coin. Heads or tails he would ask. Tails. Heads. Tails. It never mattered because he controlled the toss. Sometimes the pick would be decided by the paper-rock-scissors, or the hated slap-hands-first method. But it was always the same – Right or Wrong. No matter how much I screamed and yelled “It’s just not fair!” he would grab the big piece of cake and click the channel.

As an adult, I have often heard people say that being right in an argument is about their values. One person’s values are right, while another’s are therefore, logically, wrong.

Heads or tails. Who has the coin?

Sometimes politicians’ values are about BEING RIGHT, not about the “right” values. We could certainly hammer away for a very long time as to which of those IS right.

When my kids would press me to allow them to do something I absolutely did not want them to do, I learned that I had a better chance of diffusing a long argument by asking “Do you want to go to the mat for this?” That meant that I was not joking around about saying “no!” Essentially, I was going to win no matter how much time they wanted to waste arguing. They, of course, most often were determined to win the argument and persisted (to no avail).

What is it that is so viscerally satisfying about winning an argument?

What if, as part of our human nature, we simply have a high need to BE right? To “win” the argument? As our fight-or-flight instinct is hard-wired to protect us from real dangers but can also set off brain alarms for imaginary dangers, what if, in our nature as humans, we are hard-wired for bi-lateral thinking? Doesn’t thinking in that vein always, at the core, demand that we “be right” and any other “be wrong”? And, we just haven’t gotten that there is another way? Of course, we have many examples of individuals and companies, governments, and philosophers leaning out of the only-one-way thinking. If we didn’t, we’d still be in the Dark Ages. But, as a matter of every-day functioning, how  often do our knee-jerk reactions indicate that we are in the coin-toss mode of right-versus-wrong decision making based on bi-lateral entrenchment?

Must we always win or lose? Must we always be right or wrong? Nature is not dichotomous. It is made up of curvilinear lines and patterns, offering us endless facets, angles, phases, aspects, and perspectives as though to perpetually open windows into its own source. Every time we choose a hard, concretized right-or-wrong, we deny our innate ability to better know our own Source, or even just our own individual potential.

Could we consider a third option? An option to toss the coin, but to toss the coin AWAY?

Could we consider our nature and its basic drivers? Could we get about the business of recognizing where and how our nature as humans gets stuck and often predicts negative and adversarial behaviors? Because there’s a real difference between yelling and screaming about being right, and working with an understanding of our human need to be right in a way that others see as compassionate – not aggressive or bossy or arrogant – in a world that we may perceive is failing us.

“Dear Neighbor” authors are united in a belief that civility and passion can coexist. We believe curiosity and conversation make us a better community.

Whitney Peckman