There is a line often attributed to John Maynard Keynes: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ It is a wonderful line. It is also, as far as anyone can tell, something he probably never said. The earliest printed versions appear decades after his death, and similar lines were used by others, including the economist Paul Samuelson. I mention this partly to be accurate, and partly because I believed it for twenty years, and changing my mind about it was mildly uncomfortable. That small discomfort is what this essay is about.
Why it feels like losing
Public life treats a change of mind as weakness. Politicians who revise a position are accused of ‘backflips’. In meetings, the person who says ‘actually, you’ve convinced me’ can feel they have lost ground. In families, an old argument can run for decades because neither side can afford to concede it.
The reason, I think, is that we fuse our beliefs with our identity. A belief stops being something we hold and becomes something we are. Once that happens, evidence against the belief feels like an attack on the self, and we defend it the way we would defend ourselves: instinctively, and not always honestly.
A belief you cannot imagine giving up is no longer a belief. It has become a part of you that you are protecting.
A useful habit is to hold beliefs with a rough confidence level attached. Not ‘I’m right’ but ‘I’m about 80 per cent sure’. Then ask the most clarifying question there is: what would change my mind? If the honest answer is ‘nothing’, that is worth knowing. It means you have left the territory of evidence and entered the territory of loyalty.
The best objection
We should be wary of making a virtue out of flexibility. Someone who changes their mind every time they hear a persuasive voice is not open-minded; they are unanchored. Integrity means standing for something even when it is unpopular, and some things are worth refusing to reconsider.
That is right, and it points to a useful distinction. Our deepest values (honesty, fairness, care for the vulnerable) should be stable. Our beliefs about facts and methods (what works, what is true, what will happen) should move with the evidence. The trouble starts when we treat a belief about methods as if it were a sacred value. Then we defend a failing policy, or a broken plan, or an outdated assumption, as if our integrity depended on it.
Where this leaves us
Changing your mind well is a skill. It requires security, the confidence that you will still be you on the other side of being wrong. Perhaps that is the real courage involved: not the courage to hold a position, but the courage to let one go and trust that your character was never made of it.
To think about
- What is something you have changed your mind about in the last five years? What actually changed it?
- Which of your beliefs are values, and which are really predictions about how the world works?
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