Humans are frail, fallible, mortal and limited creatures. This is a timeless observation that we have not, despite our best efforts, managed to disprove in over six thousand years of written history. We have a limited mind and incomplete information with which to make decisions, our emotions sometimes get the better of us, our brains are wired for certain kinds of bias... even when doing our absolute level best to do right by the world and the people around us, we are constantly at risk of making serious, irrevocable fuck-ups. This is as close to an innate part of human nature as anything can be.
Which makes it unforgivable that the culture we've built for ourselves in the global north makes absolutely no space for this. By contrast, even communities and people who really should know better have largely bought into a pretty cruel, unsparing way of treating human mistakes: even the minor one. This is, I think, mostly unique in history thus far (maybe John Calvin's Geneva, some American Calvinists and some of the more fundamentalist Salafi states might match the energy, but I can't think of many other examples). In short, we demand infallibility of everyone to a degree unprecedented in human history, and find it acceptable to treat people who've made mistakes with the most heinous levels of cruelty, aiming in most cases to destroy them rather than to help them contribute more effectively to the society we've built together. Even when wrongdoers (or, often enough, "wrongdoers") don't break under the strain, forgiveness and reconciliation with the community may as well not exist as a concept. In doing so, we've elevated "not doing anything wrong" to a paramount virtue, above any possible positive action.
I'll not mince words: this is a grievous sin, and if there's a just God anywhere out there, they are not looking at all kindly upon this.
Infallibility in politics
The demand for infallibility above all else is at its worst in our politics. While our political environment naturally harbours a wide range of epistemic standpoints and corresponding political views, there is a consistent inability to forgive even small mistakes across all of it. Our first instinct (and I'm acutely aware that I'm pretty guilty of this at times) is to strike out and destroy our political enemies, often without checking first whether the people in question are actually enemies or whether they might be friends and allies trying to point out that what you're doing is counterproductive. Small mistakes can terrifyingly easily blow up into mass accusations or rumours of grievous bigotry, and any real good that the people being accused have done tends to get shoved under the rug: the transgression, in these cases, is the only thing that matters. The dynamic was described as early as the 1970's in Jo Freeman's masterwork on trashing, but the dynamic's existed pretty much as long as humans have existed in their modern form (c.f. the Torah's repeated denunciations of lashon hara, or negative or degrading speech that happens to be true).
The degree to which so much of our activity and organising has been pushed online has only exacerbated these tendencies. Social media has a way of bringing us into contact with a wide range of people whom we would, in the usual course of our lives, never have met. While this can of course be a massively enriching experience, it also means that we come into contact with people with whom we violently disagree, often without the mediating factor of people whom both parties can agree with and understand. Furthermore, rumour spreads like nobody's business on the internet and context is very easily stripped from things that people might have written or said. All of this tends to exacerbate the consequences of making a mistake, but (and this is important), not the benefits of getting something right, creating an environment that insidiously pushes people into demanding infallibility above everything.
Given this kind of environment, most people tend to default to attempting to avoid doing wrong rather than trying to positively do good. This makes a certain amount of sense: trying to make positive change means making yourself vulnerable to criticism and abuse, and being a fallible human, you will inevitably fuck up sometimes and hurt vulnerable people. This is inevitable and unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but in the environment we're in where our every action is subject to withering judgement potentially followed by even worse punishment, trying to do good and exposing yourself quickly becomes an untenable risk. It's far better, in such a case, to simply not do whatever is considered to be wrong, try and signal your lack of wrongdoing ostentatiously and publicly judge other wrongdoers in an appropriately obvious way.
Unfortunately, this approach has serious flaws. First, and most seriously, in order to change real injustice, you absolutely must do positive good. You must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner and advocate for the oppressed. No matter how risky it is, or how high the chance is of you fucking up, if you don't put some effort into making a positive change, nothing will change, ever. An ethics that discourages positive good at the expense of negatively judging people who try and make positive change, even clumsily, is thus condemnable on those grounds alone. Secondly, in a space where ethics of this kind is regnant, the way to prevent yourself from being condemned is to condemn other people as loudly as possible and police the lines of "not-doing-anything-wrong" as hard as you possibly can. This, in turn, encourages a rather unpleasant kind of personality: habitual gossipers, people who gain pleasure from trashing other people and people who enjoy forming mobs to persecute others. In an environment that demands infallibility, these are the people who win. This ethics is, therefore, encouraging people to become morally worse and harder to be around (because if you've spent any time at all in a social sphere with chronic gossipers, you know exactly how unpleasant it is), and thus indirectly causes political movements to fall apart. I don't believe any politics, no matter how important, justifies any of this. The cruel demand for infallibility hurts people, destroys lives and even cuts down the political movements that we so badly need in order to make our world a better place.
The corporate leakage
If this demand for infallibility were limited to our politics, this would be more than bad enough. Unfortunately, we aren't that lucky: it's leaked into our workplaces as well. And while I care deeply about politics and the world we live in, and am upset that this dubious ethics has made political work a lot harder than it needs to be, I actually think that this ethics is more dangerous in the corporate world.
To start with, let's look at the dynamic observed about who succeeds in political movements fixated on infallibility. Now, to be clear, this is very bad in a political context: however, the worst that they can really do in a largely non-hierarchical space is make the place obnoxious to inhabit, hurt some people and make political organisation a pain in the ass. In the corporate world, by contrast, the demand for infallibility plays heavily into deciding who gets promoted, who gets fired, and who gets to lead. A corporate environment fixated on infallibility thus selects exclusively for people who can appear infallible. This would be bad enough as it is, but in the words of Adolin Kholin:
"My father... is the best man I know, perhaps the best man alive. Even he loses his temper, makes bad judgement calls and has a troubled past. Amaram never seems to do anything wrong. If you listen to the stories about him, it's like everyone expects him to glow in the dark and piss nectar. That stinks, to me, of someone who works too hard to maintain his reputation."
Those of you who've read Words of Radiance will understand the issue here, but for those of you who haven't, Brightlord Meridas Amaram is categorically not infallible, and in fact has the personality traits that we usually label as psychopathic (he's also a war criminal, a mass murderer, a traitor and makes deals with the world's equivalent of demons, but that's beside the point here). The point is obvious: an ethos that demands infallibility will primarily promote people who are willing to do anything (lie, embezzle, take credit for others' work, sabotage progress on other projects) in order to appear infallible to their superiors, at least for long enough. Thus, while leaders in the corporate world have always been kinda shit, this makes them a whole lot worse, as it takes away any demand that might be placed on them to actually do something useful and replaces it with a whole lot of incentives to be even more awful.
For people who don't exhibit the whole laundry list of dark triad traits, the pressure to be infallible instead has a chilling effect. Projects and work in corporate spaces tends to be de-risked as much as possible, as the risk of a project that does something new failing might lead to a firing and the loss of livelihood. This inevitably means that nothing that actually needs to be done (codebase refactors, unit tests, important bug fixes) actually gets done, and effort instead gets spent on projects that are largely useless but that nobody can be blamed for.
Finally, while a lot of corporate work is useless, some of it is vital. Building bridges, maintaining roads and other public transit, running power generation systems and hospitals... all of these things are vital to our communities and if people get them wrong, people die. They're also largely run along corporate lines, meaning that these dynamics apply. And while hiring people who have made no mistakes to run these kinds of projects might sound appealing, it is, in reality, a profoundly bad idea. First off, we've already established that the people who are best at looking infallible profoundly aren't, so we wind up putting incapable sociopaths in charge of our most vital infrastructure: I don't think I need to tell anyone why that's a terrible idea. Even without that though, almost all of the truly good professionals I know have made a few pretty serious mistakes in their practice, and then learned from them. There is a reason, after all, that breaking prod is a rite of passage among software engineers. Moreover, some of these lessons you can only learn from fucking up: therefore the professionals who have made those mistakes know important things that the infallible ones don't. Excluding them from positions of power is thus roughly akin to shooting yourself in the foot.
Sin and forgiveness
So, we've established that this cult of harshness, infallibility and mutual destruction is profoundly destructive and corrosive in a lot of ways. How might we work towards changing that? There is a lot of talk about being more forgiving, maintaining blame-free cultures and all that stuff, but honestly, without a rethink in how we think about fallibility, I don't think that any of that is likely to work. This is, oddly enough, a place where I think we might be able to learn from my Catholic and Jewish forbears.
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a mention of John Calvin in the text above: this is no mistake. I think a lot of this culture of infallibility comes from the regnant Protestant assumptions about sin: sin is profoundly individual and between you and God. Moreover, the Calvinist doctrine of election suggests that sin is more than human nature: it's a sign that you're not one of the elect and thus damned. Therefore, there's no point talking to or attempting to bring sinners around: their sin is simply a mark of their damnation (or, if you like, them being "problematic"). Naturally, the demand on faithful Calvinists is thus not to sin at any costs, even if it means forgoing the chance to do good. I'm sure you're all seeing the parallels with the cult of infallibility right now.
Both Judaism and Catholicism, by contrast, take more of a collective view of sin: while it is something that individuals do and have to be held responsible for, the focus in many ways is on how sin affects and poisons the community. Sin is something that, while very serious, does not always come from a human's individually corrupt nature (though a lot of it does), but is shaped and amplified by social structures. We can see, therefore, the aforementioned focus on lashon hara or the similar Catholic sin of detraction, which are sins committed by individuals but fundamentally rooted in the community. In both Catholicism and Judaism we also see collective rites of repentance having top billing in community practice, whether that's the recently-passed Yom Kippur or the collective confession of sins that happens at each Catholic mass. I can speak much more effectively to the Catholic aspect of this, as I was raised Catholic, but I think that publicly acknowledging that we are sinners (or, in a more secular phrasing, that we all fuck up) and publicly asking God and each other for mercy did some good in terms of moderating expectations about each other and ourselves. We are sinners, and that's not good, but... not sinning isn't going to happen. It's not how humans are built. When we do fuck up, therefore, we have to make restitution and try and repair the damage we did as much as we can, but it's certainly not grounds for expelling us from the community or holding us to be permanently tainted, and the expectation is that people who have fucked up, even in truly serious ways, will still be able to contribute positively to the world in future.
Obviously, there are serious problems with the above: the Catholic doctrine on forgiveness has been used to bury some truly heinous crimes, and I had to unlearn a lot of it in order to be able to hold my abusers to account. That said, I think we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because as mentioned above, we do fuck up, and it's not something that we can avoid. This world being how it is, and us being how we are, perhaps we could try and think of others a little more kindly when they fuck up, be less scared of making mistakes and rather than consuming ourselves and others with loathing when people do make mistakes, try and make restitution and allow others to try and make restitution to us.