Mistakes and criticism

The first of the following excerpts is on the making of mistakes and the learning from it. The second one is on the kinds of resistance against the latter process.

Uit: Wendell Johnson, People in Quandaries, p. 158, 159:

Someone has said that it is all right to make mistakes, so long as you don't make the same fool mistake twice. The implication of this is frequently expressed in this way, that it is all right to make mistakes because that is how we learn. We seem to be talking about the same thing essentially when we say that experience is a great teacher.
    As everybody knows however, experience does not necessarily teach us anything. Sometimes we do make the same mistakes over and over again, and it apparently does not always occur to use that there is anything to be learned from our blunders.

In our culture, consistency is highly respected, so much so that most people even feel self-conscious for some time after they stop using ain't. "Self-improvement" requires considerable "will-power" and a thick skin in our civilization, if one is to remain poised and and undiscouraged when greeted with: "You think you're pretty smart don't you?" ... . Perhaps the most obvious form which this general tendency takes is to see in the fact that very few people can take criticism. That, in fact, is the secret of the appeal which Dale Carnegie makes with his "psychology" in which the basic tenet is "never offend anybody" or "never criticize." "The customer is always right."

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