It’s surprisingly easy to make enemies.
I use the word loosely here… I mean people who simply end up disliking you. And I’m becoming more convinced that it doesn’t take much. One subtle way this happens, one most of us probably never notice in ourselves, is the need to always correct people. To always prove we’re right.
Last night I was reading How to Win Friends and Influence People – or trying to. My back was against the cushion, legs dangling off the couch, the book falling on my face every now and then because I was mostly woolgathering. I was skimming words without really reading them until a chapter title stopped me cold: A Sure Way of Making Enemies — and How to Avoid It.
By the time I finished it I was on my feet. It’s a thing I do when something I’m reading grabs me. I stand up without planning to or even noticing. I just look down at some point and realise I’m no longer on the couch.
Carnegie explains that even though most people say they’re open to being corrected, they rarely are. Not necessarily because your intentions as the ‘corrector’ are bad, but because it can feel like you’re trying to appear smarter than them.
Your intentions might be completely pure – you might genuinely just want to help – but their ego receives something different entirely.
As Carnegie puts it:
“If you are going to prove anything, don’t let anybody know it. Do it so subtly, so adroitly, that no one will feel that you are doing it.”
So does this mean we should never correct people? Not at all.
Most people are open to change, but they want to feel like they arrived at that realisation themselves. Not that it was forced on them.
I’ve seen this my whole life.
In most black families, at least where I come from, you could never – under any condition – tell a parent they were wrong. Even when they clearly were.
I remember one Sunday in Grade 10. I was going back to boarding school in East London after an exeat weekend. My dad was dropping me in Butterworth where I’d meet friends and we’d travel together. My hostel mates were already waiting, already panicking. He arrived two hours late. Out of frustration I told him, straight, that what he did was wrong.
There was silence for about ten seconds. He glanced at me over his glasses and asked me to repeat myself.
When a parent asks you to repeat yourself you already know what’s coming… you try to soften the words mid-sentence. I didn’t repeat the part about him being wrong. I just apologised.
The rest of the drive was about one thing: “Ndingakanani uba ndixelelwe nguwe uba ndi rongo?” How old am I that you think you can tell me I’m wrong?
Later my mother told me he regretted being late and raising his voice, but he couldn’t get past the fact that I’d told him he was wrong.
I saw the same thing in university. Lecturers who’d get visibly defensive when a student pointed out an error… not all of them, but some. You see it online constantly: adults who should genuinely know better – sending each other citations and links in arguments that were never really about the facts to begin with.
What’s the point?
The other person was never going to be grateful you corrected them anyway. By opposing their view you’d already bruised their ego, and a bruised ego doesn’t concede, it retaliates.
I’m not immune to this. I used to enjoy debates. I liked proving my point. But even when I was right, it rarely ended well. The conversation would shift from the topic to something like:
“I didn’t like your tone…”
My opponent would find something to hold onto – something to soften the blow to their ego. I’d apologise and life would go on. But something small and invisible had been damaged each time.
There was a guy in my res who was the undisputed champion of the TV room debate. He’d take on five people simultaneously, pull up research papers on his phone, call people to verify facts mid-argument. He was rarely wrong. He was also silently making enemies of everyone around him. People were always delighted on the rare occasions he got something wrong.
He was winning every debate and losing every room.
© Phumzile