A simple side-effect

We are reading and enjoying "Mennonite in a Little Black Dress", a memoir of 43 year old PhD in literature who reflects on her upbringing, her family, her thoughts and her failed marriage.  It is very well done.  Takes off a bit slowly.  I write that to advise sticking with it.  I am enjoying the rather silly "Supreme Courtship" by Christopher Buckley.  He is also the author of "Thank You for Smoking" and "No Way to Treat a First Lady".  Between books, I return to "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schultz.  I have many highlighted passages that strike me as wonderfully important and accurate.

Here is one such passage:

The certainty of those with whom we disagree—whether the disagreement concerns who should run the country or who should run the dishwasher—never looks justified to us, and frequently looks odious. As often as not, we regard it as a sign of excessive emotional attachment to an idea, or an indicator of a narrow, fearful, or stubborn frame of mind. By contrast, we experience our own certainty as simply a side-effect of our rightness, justifiable because our cause is just. And, remarkably, despite our generally supple, imaginative, extrapolation-happy minds, we cannot transpose this scene. We cannot imagine, or do not care, that our own certainty, when seen from the outside, must look just as unbecoming and ill-grounded as the certainty we abhor in others.

That's us, all right.  We are simply right.