Right to Be Wrong [Pehme köide]

“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies,” Nietzsche declared. Religious or secular, born-again Baptist or the recently woke — fundamentalism is not unique to any particular political persuasion nor is it exclusively political. To those in narrow-minded pursuit of ideological purity, their narrative is the only narrative, and any disagreement is tantamount to treason and punishable by censure, ostracism, or cancellation. But when did moral certainty and intellectual omniscience become compulsory? How does this increasing trend toward reactionary thinking and an intransigent, us-versus-them mentality change the way we engage with contemporary politics, public opinions, or art? What do we lose if we lose the freedom to disagree and learn from our mistakes?

Passionately argued, coolly critical, irreverently humorous, Ray Robertson’s The Right to Be Wrong is a vigorous defence of independent thinking in an increasingly polarized and ideationally intolerant society.

• A concise, insightful, and at-times humorous indictment of our increasingly polarized world, with a passionate defence of the necessity of free speech and critical thinking.
• A blend of social observations with political histories, theories, and philosophies, influenced by the writings of Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
• Ray Robertson has won the Independent Publisher Book Award, has been a finalist for the Hillary Weston Prize for Non-Fiction and the Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction, and has been long-listed for the Trillium Book Award.
• The Globe and Mail praised Robertson as “a moral writer and a bitingly intelligent one, a man who writes with penetrating insight of what needs to be written about: beauty, truth and goodness.”
• The National Post described Robertson’s book Why Not? as “intentionally provocative, stirring readers to vehemently agree or disagree. But this is Robertson’s point: to be stirred at all, regardless.”