Being Right. Making Wrong.

Complaining as well as faultfinding and reactivity strengthen the ego's sense of boundary and separateness on which its survival depends. But they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how complaining, say, about a traffic jam, about politicians, about the "greedy wealthy" or the "lazy unemployed", or your colleagues or ex-spouse, men or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why: when you complain, by implication, you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against, is wrong.
There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. Being right is identification with a mental position - a perspective, an opinion, a judgment, a story. For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. In other words, you need to make others wrong to get a stronger sense of who you are. Not only a person, but also a situation can be made through complaining and reactivity, which always implies that "this should not be happening". Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.
Facts undoubtedly exist. If you say: "Light travels faster than sound," and someone else says the opposite is the case, you are obviously right, and he is wrong. The simple observation that lightning precedes thunder could confirm this. So not only are you right, you know you are right. Is there any ego involved in this? Possibly, but not necessarily. If you are simply stating what you know to be true, the ego is not involved at all, because there is no identification. Identification with what? With mind and a mental position. Such identification, however, can easily creep in. If you find yourself saying, "Believe me, I know" or "Why do you never believe me?", then the ego has already crept in. It is hiding in the little word "me". A simple statement: "Light is faster than sound," although true, is now in the service of illusion, of ego. It has become contaminated with a false sense of "I"; it has become personalized, turned into a mental position. The "I" feels diminished or offended because somebody doesn't believe what "I" said.
Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense. The light or sound does not care about you or anybody else thinks. You are defending yourself, or rather the illusion of yourself, the mind-made substitute. It would be even more accurate to say that the illusion is defending itself. If even the simple and straightforward realm of facts can lend itself to egoic distortion and illusion, how much more so the less tangible realm of opinions, viewpoints, and judgments, all of them thought forms that can easily become infused with a sense of "I".
Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness - not through thinking - can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see: there is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realize there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing it and dealing with it. Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective.