Right should always feel this Wrong.

To all the awesome, daring, crazy people I've known through romping around in this crazy jungle of sex, drugs, rock n' roll (or electronic music, or Wagner, or whatever). I can safely say I do not know anyone who has lived their lives like my parents did. In the wake of failed marriages, used hearts, alternative sexual arrangements, post-traumatic stress disorder, social humiliation, body modifications, synthetic mental enhancement, voluntarily physical torture, long term sleep deprivation, streaking naked and other such self-deprecating acts. Despite it all, or perhaps, because of it all, you give me a reason to believe that the life of insanity is a life that is infinitely rewarding.

The following is an extract from a Paul Arden interview.

Hermann Vaske
Why is it WRONG to be right?

Paul Arden
Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. Knowledge comes from the past, so it's safe. It's also out of date.

It's the opposite of originality.

Experience is built from solutions to old situations and problems.
EXPERIENCE IS THE OPPOSITE OF BEING CREATIVE.

And if you can prove you're right, you're set in concrete. You cannot move, with the times or with other people.

Being right is also boring. Your mind is closed. You are not open to new ideas. You are rooted in your own rightness, which is arrogant. Arrogance is a very valuable tool, but only if used very sparingly. Worst of all, being right has a tone of morality about it. To be anything else sounds weak or fallible and people who are right would hate to be thought fallible.

So it's wrong to be right. Because people who are right are rooted in the past; rigid-minded; dull and smug. There's no talking to them. (nonononononononononononononononono)


Hermann Vaske
And why is it right to be WRONG?

Paul Arden
Start being wrong and suddenly anything is possible. The future opens up. Ideas are allowed back in. You are no longer trying to be infallible. Safety is out, excitement in.

You are in the unknown.

You're pushing the frontiers out, extending the imagination into places it's never been. There's no way of knowing what can happen, but there's more chance of it being amazing than if you try to be right.

No one can be be blamed if it doesn't work. Blame belongs to moral situations and being wrong steps outside morality. Also, blame is an attempt to back out of responsibility and what else is responsibility but the ability to respond? People respond much faster to temptation and excitement and other aspects of wrongness, than they do to people being right.

Of course, being wrong is a risk. Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up by having more.

Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past.

Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here. NOW.


Paul Arden was creative director of Saatchi and Saatchi in their most creative years in the eighties.