Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Szasz

Adulthood, Szasz suggests, isn’t a medal you earn for accumulating correct opinions; it’s a legal and moral status you claim by accepting the risks of your own agency. The line turns on a deceptively radical idea: being wrong is not merely inevitable, it’s a right. That word choice yanks the thought out of self-help territory and into the realm Szasz spent his career policing: the politics of expertise, psychiatry, and social control.

Szasz’s subtext is a critique of paternalism disguised as care. Children are managed under the premise that mistakes must be minimized because someone else bears the consequences. Adults, by contrast, are allowed to make bad calls precisely because the consequences are theirs. The quote dares you to hear how often modern institutions - especially medical and therapeutic ones - treat grown people like children: correcting them, protecting them from themselves, translating dissent into “symptoms.” In that frame, “right to be wrong” becomes a litmus test for freedom. If your errors are immediately medicalized, managed, or preempted “for your own good,” you’re not fully a citizen; you’re a client.

The intent isn’t to romanticize error. It’s to insist that autonomy includes embarrassment, regret, and the possibility of failure. Szasz’s provocation lands because it reverses our default moral hierarchy. We usually praise the right to be right as truth-seeking; he praises the right to be wrong as self-ownership. That’s less comforting, more adult - and that’s the point.