He became huffy. “Well, he was known as Chris Balme when he played at Richmond.”
I said, “Mate, if you walk into a pub and Balmey is standing at the bar and you shout, ‘Hey, Chris,’ he won’t turn around.”
“Gone deaf has he? Poor fella.”
“His hearing’s fine. It’s just not his name.”
“Yes it is,” he assured me, before skating away across the Axminster in pursuit of a tray of drinks.
What was strange about this encounter was how disquieting it wasn’t. That man had come to me suffering a very obvious and easily disproven misapprehension and, being confronted with the truth, set off after the drinks tray, happier to believe I’d written a biography in which I’d misnamed its subject a thousand times than that he was a confused guest from Wagga. Or Wodonga.
Exchanges of this sort pretty much sum up the Homo sapiens psyche and confirm humanity’s eventual fate for me. We live in a world where you become invested in erroneous beliefs and cling to them like life. We shelter our own truths like ratbag sons, and we can’t, or won’t, see their flaws. This unreasonable ardour for our own beliefs explains flat-Earthers, religionists, climate deniers, nationalists, rugby league, Trumpists, the Q+A studio audience…
We live in a world where you become invested in erroneous beliefs and cling to them like life.
Beliefs become essential pieces of our mental furniture, yet plenty of them are inherited, evidence-free, and laughably wrong. But being confronted with incontrovertible evidence that you’re wrong about something you’ve believed forever is affronting, dizzying, and humbling. In a rational society we would welcome these moments as enlightening. A revelation of error is a step towards truth. Discovering you’re wrong is a type of self-improvement, a deviation towards rightness, correctness, and wisdom.
Recognising you’ve been entangled in a misapprehension is the only way to disentangle yourself from it. So shucking off a misapprehension should feel emancipating. We should all be boasting about our recently discovered misconceptions the way we do about weight loss or giving up smokes. “I used to be a three-pack-a-day guy.” “That’s nothing. I bought Rolf Harris’ Greatest Hits.” But most people are ready to spit lava in your eye when, like Mick Dundee pulling his Bowie knife on a shiv-wielding street punk, you say to them, “That’s not a truth. That’s a truth.”
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Ironically, it’s usually only born-again Christians and Sky News viewers who recognise their past errancy as a way of celebrating their present enlightenment.
I saw the man from Wagga, or Wodonga, standing by the door as I was leaving the party. He was flushed. He’d obviously caught the drinks tray, and looked as sinfully sated as Butch Cassidy after he caught the Union Pacific Flyer. Wanting to set our differences right I went over to him and said, “I just remembered – it is Chris Balme. You were right.”
He said, “Mate, I usually am.” And he put enough ironic emphasis on “usually” to make it mean “always”. That’s how I knew he was usually wrong.