Why We Don’t Deserve Selective Memory

I can think of few things more dangerous to one’s well-being, relationships, and future than selective memory.

Simply put, selective memory is the ability to only remember the things that one wants to remember. So, why is this so dangerous to your well-being? A wise man told me that the human mind is never more creative than when trying to justify its own actions. I think that the core aspect of that self-preserving behavior is emblematic of the issue with selective memory. In many cases, people can end up leaning into selective memory as a self-preservation measure. It may be that the truth is too painful to accept, would cause too much harm to their sense of self-image and subjective reality, or more nefarious reasons such as attempts to harm or malign others with their supposed recollection of events.

Admittedly, memory is inherently subjective. It’s been said that there are 3 stories to any occurrence: What you think happened, what they think happened, and then what actually happened. While there may be things we can do to strengthen and solidify our memories and ability to remember, we cannot give absolute guaranteed without this fun little thing called “facts”, or perhaps even his friend ”evidence”.

I think of the truth as a piece of glass that gets broken when something happens.

Once it breaks, the involved parties will try to grasp the pieces and put them back together to form a mosaic that most accurately depicts their recollection of how it looked before. Facts and evidence are fragments of the big picture truth, which can point us toward what the original image was, but will always lack the perfect clarity that the truth is, all in one piece. These glass fragments that we call facts and evidence are sharp and can be used as weapons against those around us when wielded and manipulated into being tools for harm. They can also be used to cut through lies, as efforts to bring order.

On the note of evidence and memory, I can (ironically) recall that when I was reaching the tail end of my pre-law degree, I felt my mind begin to swirl around the idea of truth, relative to evidence. The entire judicial system (when actually properly utilized) centers around the concept of truth and how we can reach it. The prosecution and defense will each present the facts (fragments of the truth) of the case from an angle that most favors their desired outcome, and the judge will try to ascertain the truth based off their subjective understanding of the evidential fragments handed to them. The picture that the judge puts together of the accused determines their fate.

My grasp of this judicial reality made me wonder what the truth really is, as defined within what is provable. If we look at the truth through the lens of absolutes and inerrant consistency, the bottom line is that we will be left with nearly nothing that is true. For this reason, we have to understand the plasticity of our own understanding, especially as pertains to our own judication of how things happened in our pasts. Our memory is fallible, just like everyone else’s, making it a less than perfect guide to how we believe our world to be. When we start to see things this way, we can begin to understand why selective memory poses such a threat to the truth.

We cannot afford to underestimate the power the mind has the future.

We don’t deserve selective memory because we use our memories as judicial tools in determining how we ought to act, view and treat others, view and treat ourselves, and pave the way for the future we all end up in. To opt in to selective memory is to deny the procurement or approximation of the truth by discarding fragments of truth, or worse yet, weaponizing them toward others. We don’t deserve the ability to act freely as judge, jury, and executioner, let alone when we obstruct justice by hiding facts and evidence that disagree with our preferred worldview. The notion that one’s own “truth” (subjective perception) trumps over a communal, empirical reality is tremendously harmful to not only the self, but also the collective.

We don’t deserve selective memory because we simply lack the right to obfuscate the truth to our own liking. Wrongs yield a debt to be paid, whether we like it or not. We cannot simply pivot to portraying ourselves in a light that highlights only our good qualities, tricks others into thinking we are something we are not, and steals the spotlight from those that are presenting facts that are much more accurate to reality than the sort of shined-up, slimy marketing product we can make of ourselves. Justice is inevitable in one way or another, and time is never a permanent friend to the liar.

Thanks for not reading.