Published on Substack, October 2023

WHEN I WAS A SMALL CHILD, my sister and I were in a car crash with my granny. A spider crawled out from under the sun visor and my granny, shrieking, drove into a ditch as she tried to swat it away. I can remember the place where it occurred, the shock (it all happened so fast), the car (it was maroon coloured Holden Gemini) and the spider.

But it didn’t happen.

I was in a small prang with Granny but there was no spider involved and it was in an entirely different location. It was such a minor accident that I have no real memory of it. It was my grandfather who rolled the maroon Gemini as he swatted away the spider.

If I think about it there are clues. The spider in my memory is large, black, and hairy. A childish spider. Not a real spider.

I was so certain of this event that when my mum and my sister said it didn’t happen, I felt like I was being lied to. It still makes me deeply uncomfortable. How much of my past is misremembered, fabricated, counterfeit? I’ve always felt I had an excellent memory. I rarely forget things, facts, people but as an adolescent I did develop what you might call strategic memory loss. I would pretend to be vague and forgetful to get out of doing things and people would usually accommodate my asinine performance.  

If there are things in my past that I actively forget and other things that I misremember, either deliberately or subconsciously, how can I be sure of any part of myself? I wonder about the aspects of my character that I don’t like or that are not socially acceptable: selfishness, arrogance. And the other parts that I am scared of: laziness, narcissism. We all have bits of these in us. Each of us is complicated and yet our culture demands that we accept or deny certain parts of ourselves, certain memories and motives. A kind of cultivated self. “I am like this,” we tell ourselves and those around us. We see ourselves as victims and only remember the times when we were victimised or see ourselves as generous and forget the times when we were stingy.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, focus on, interpret, and recall information and evidence that fits with our existing beliefs. We do this in our private lives, our work lives and on a much larger socio-cultural scale. When we submit to confirmation bias everything is accepted or denied in accordance with our beliefs. It prevents us from recognising problems and from seeking solutions because everything we believe about the world is confirmed again and again. It’s also deeply seductive because confirmation bias gives the illusion of knowledge, which increases our confidence in the stories we tell ourselves.

Hubris, or dangerous over-confidence in ourselves and our abilities, leads to confirmation bias and confirmation bias leads to hubris. In Ancient Greece, hubris referred to excessive attitudes such as passion, pride, outrage, crime, transgression. It is the opposite of temperance and reason. As Elisabeth Roudinesco writes in La Monde:

The man who indulges in excess is condemning himself for having defied the gods. Therefore, hubris is inseparable from Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, charged with punishing whoever has indulged in such intoxication in any form. But things are not so simple, since the Greek who is affected by excess is also the victim of fate – Moira – which commands that everyone hold their place in the universe and respect their share of good and evil, of fortune and misfortune.

When my mum and sister laughed and said my memory of the car crash was false, that it didn’t happen as I remembered it, I felt for a moment a kind of vertiginous flailing. It was self-doubt, but not the quasi-psychological self-doubt that you read about on the internet. In a way it made me free. I might be wrong about everything. All my memories could be confabulations. We might all be misremembering all the time. It was liberating.

How can we be certain of anything? I remember boarding school as horrific. I hated it. I think of it as one long painful memory. But if I think very carefully, I can also remember late night giggling, long conversations in dorms, a very kind tutor, a house mistress who gave me hummus for the first time. There were moments of supreme homesickness and loneliness, an aching kind of loss. I feel that in my body, and I know it is true. But life is expansive and complex, and my memory of boarding school is very simple: it was shit. And perhaps, because it is so simple, my memory of boarding school is not entirely whole or true.  

It feels unfashionable to talk about uncertainty when everything is supposed to be a confidence trick. People fall hard on their opposing sides. And it seems unlikely that many of us are spending too long with the opposing view, especially when it is so abhorrent and difficult. But what if we existed in a world that flexed, that exalted a willingness to be wrong about things, that celebrated being uncertain, that didn’t have all the answers?

What if we practised holding carefully to both sides? The part that is selfish and the part that is open. The simplicity of ourselves and the complexity of ourselves. The ways that we are victims and the ways that we are not. The world feels like it is hardening, stiffening around its collective suffering, its vengeances and its fallacies and I think if we want to be OK we must do the opposite.