Last month I trailed the forthcoming publication of The Failure Files (Triarchy Press), the product of an RSA Fellowship project, which includes a short chapter by myself exploring the importance of failure to learning and the creative process.
The book is now out and a series of public events are being held to encourage debate around its themes. I will be one of the speakers at the London event, on Tuesday May 24 at the House of St Barnabas in Soho.
I have been following this concept for a long time, writing for Prospect in June 1999 that the public expectation of perfection can invite permanent disappointment. Why try to define an ethical foreign policy, when there might be inconsistencies? Why trust any profession, when some practitioners have erred? The Winnicottian concept of the ‘good-enough mother’ says that to develop, the infant must learn the mother is not infinitely controllable and the early, blissful illusion of perfect mother and baby cannot be sustained. ‘Societies that are rigid in finding perfection, like the former Soviet Union, get into trouble because mistakes go uncorrected. But so do those which rigidly find awfulness in everything. That way leads to paralysis, a refusal to make any diagnosis and take any action.’ We should argue whether a policy is right, but we should not expect it to be perfect.
I would add now, in response to a growing mood of paranoia, that rigidity also feeds the growth of conspiracy thinking, in which the messiness of life is not enough; everything must have a reason – the old choice between the conspiracy theory and the fuck-up theory.
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