Stubbornness is not conviction
Just as the title says, stubbornness is not conviction, yet it is often mistaken as such. In a world (or at least a nation) that has been transparently overtaken by corruption, people crave conviction for celebrities and politicians that seem to be guided by something other than greed.
I find myself in this emerging faction. I am hungry for authenticity. Truly random photo dumps. People giving unpopular and not "unpopular" hot takes. If someone is authentic, we should be able to find their guiding principles; their convictions. This is where many people go wrong. A thriving democracy requires everyone who participates to be able to accept the best argument, even if that results in their own argument being defeated.
One of the best convictions someone can have is one for the truth. If majority of the evidence shows that a thing is bad, they must accept that the majority of the evidence shows that it is bad-not necessarily that it is bad.
A recent political example I can point to is an ad that Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate for Ohio's governor, put out. His team produced and aired an ad that showcases his opponent, Amy Acton's, mother. Acton's mother has been estranged from Amy for decades, after running away with her husband (Amy's step-father) because he was indicted of raping Acton when she was a minor (however, court records redacted the victim’s name). This context was missing from the ad, in which Acton's mother called her daughter a liar, and more specifically that "she lies about her past." TL;DR: Ramaswamy fucked up.
As you can probably imagine if this is your first time hearing about this event, people have been shocked and angry at such an ad ever being conceived to begin with. But guess what. Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Ramaswamy himself have all stood by the ad. They are being stubborn, and we must not confuse stubbornness with conviction. If you have convictions of truth, accountability, and justice-which the Republican party is always claiming to hold-you apologize when you are caught doing something wrong. And, maybe, you don't run an ad with your political opponent's estranged mother in the first place.
It's OK to be wrong. Life would not be fun if we knew everything from the start. But this message also has to apply to the observations we make about others. If someone never admits to being wrong, and especially that their point of view is always the right one, we must be suspicious. If one of their convictions is not the truth, what's in its place instead?