Learning from Our Mistakes

When I was about six year old, I watched as my father and grandfather worked on a carpentry project. Eager to join them, I badgered my dad for a chance to cut a piece of wood. Eventually he decided to placate me by putting a straight saw in my hands. I immediately set to work, but failed miserably because every time I attempted to make a down stroke, the saw bent.

In short order, my father pushed me aside and finished the cut himself. His philosophy was that if you have a job to do, you should do it right from the outset. He did not have the patience to tolerate mistakes, nor would he instruct me on a skill I was already supposed to possess.

What my father did not understand is that we can—and should— learn from our mistakes. Whenever we enter new territory, we must be prepared for potential errors, and equally prepared to correct them. If we are, we can expand our repertoires and do more than we were originally able to manage.

Today, we as a society are entering new territory. Never has a nation been as rich or complex as ours. But never before has our government been so over-extended. By now, anyone who has been paying attention to current events knows that we have largest budget deficits ever in our peacetime history—and that these promise to grow larger.

In previous columns, I have argued that our president and the candidates to replace him must learn from their mistakes. I have contended that Barack Obama would be wise to acknowledge the errors of the Great Depression so that he does not lengthen our economic downturn. I have also suggested that Mitt Romney must accept the fact that Romneycare was a mistake so that he can develop more appropriate health care policies.

But now I wish to propose that this attitude applies to the public as well. In a democracy, important changes do not occur unless there is a rough consensus has to what should happen. Unless people are prepared to move in a similar direction, our system of checks and balances is such that paralysis results.

Today we are facing an enormous crisis. In little more than a decade the interest that we must pay on the loans we have made will be so costly as to swallow up the rest of our national budget. Likewise, the amount of money we are committed to spend on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is so vast that the bill will be greater than our gross national product.

Rahm Emanuel advised that a crisis should never be allowed to go to waste. He hoped to pass Democratic reforms by scaring voters into accepting them. But a crisis is an ineffectual motivator if it is not perceived as a crisis. People who are convinced that things are not terribly bad are liable to keep kicking the can down the road in the expectation that what seems like a dilemma will eventually disappear.

Only the current budgetary problem won’t go away. Sadly, it is destined to grow worse—much worse. Overspending has become a social mistake of epic proportions. Not long ago, we collectively imagined that we were rich enough to afford any government program we desired, but time has revealed we were not.

As I said above, we need to learn from our mistakes. Then, once we have recognized an error, we can fix what is broken. But this presupposes that we are prepared to admit we were mistaken. If we are not, we are liable to do nothing.

The question then becomes how bad must things get before we are ready to be honest about our blunders. In the case of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for many people the answer is: Not yet. So entitled do they feel to their benefits that they cannot admit these will disappear unless something is done.

But this is more than a mistake. It is a disaster in the making. We cannot wait for Armageddon to arrive before fixing what is broken. No longer can we treat this as a political football in the optimistic expectation that what we refuse to see cannot hurt us.

Most of us are not children. Certainly those of us who can vote are not. Consequently, it is time that we stop acting as if we were. Let us not wait until our mistakes are so great they cannot be rectified.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University