Hey!, Wanna See Some Sin?
"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet and show my people their transgressions and . . . their sins." Isa. 58:1.
22. Lies
22. 14a. Page 1. We lie to ourselves.
"The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that." --Bailey
"Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self, for what we wish we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with heredity of things." --Demosthenes
"To be deceived by our enemies or betrayed by our friends is insupportable; yet by ourselves we are often content to be so treated." --Francois de La Rochefoucauld
http://www.madwed.com/quotes/"It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I’m looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling." --Robert M. Pirsig
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I can quit (drinking, smoking, drugs, etc.) anytime I want to.
I am the way I am. I cannot change.
She will come back to me.
I have friends.
I will do it (whatever) tomorrow.
I'm not that fat.
I'm over him/her.
I'm not getting older.
Someday my dreams will come true.
I have a better chance at winning the lottery than others.
"I never really wanted to be that anyway, so it's good I didn't waste time trying." ("Give up now, before you actually believe in yourself, before you fail, before you get hurt.")
Mothers tell themselves: it's not my child's fault, it's my fault (or some other justification).Part of the difference between our self-image and how others see us is due to misunderstanding on their part. But part of it is due to our own self-deception. The truth lies somewhere between our self-image and the one others have of us. The more aware we are of how others really see us, the more accurately we can see ourselves. It is said that the eyes are the window to the soul. We should constantly be aware that the eyes of others are mirrors in which we can see ourselves, if we are willing to look.
I am not self-centered.
I am a good person.
Everyone likes me.
No one likes me.
I'm truthful, like most people I know.
We tell ourselves that we want to hear the truth, but knowing that others lie to us, makes it easier to justify our own lying to others, and so, we lie to ourselves about wanting to hear the truth.
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Living a lie:
"Self-defensive lies can permeate all one does, so that life turns into "living a lie"."Professionals involved in collective practices of deceit give up all ordinary assumptions about their own honesty and that of others. Individual who feel obliged to pass as a member of a dominant religious or racial group in order to avoid persecution deny what may be most precious to them. Political beliefs or sexual preference unacceptable to a community compel many to a similar life-long duplicity, denying a central part of their own identity."
Includes:
False fronts
Keeping up appearances
Co-dependency
Moles in espionage
Fraudulent impersonation
Escaping reality through popular psychological frameworks
Self-deception
Blaming victims
Defensive life stance
Social disguise of ambiguity
Being fallacious
Having false friendshipshttp://www.uia.org/index.html, Mar. 2002
© Union of International Associations 1997 - 2000
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"self-deception"
"Avoidance or outright denial of unpleasant aspects of reality, especially those which might otherwise warrant an unfavorable opinion about ourselves. Thus, for example, the wishful thought, "I'm not really addicted to nicotine; I could quit smoking any time." is clearly self-deceptive.
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre condemned self-deception as bad faith, or an inauthentic response to the anxiety produced by contemplation of human freedom.
Although most of us retrospectively acknowledge the role of such a practice in our own lives, it isn't clear what makes it possible for a single person to be both deceived and deceiver. How can I both know the truth and yet keep it from myself at the same time? Unless the deception is entirely unconscious, there must be some degree of willful disregard of the evidence that I suspect would lead to the unpleasant truth I would rather not face."
Philosophical Dictionary
©1997-2001 Garth Kemerling
http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/s4.htm
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"The Malady of Self-Deception"
'. . . the capacity for human beings to lose touch with their actions can be truly remarkable. A true story which illustrates this took place in a suburb of Warsaw about 70 years ago:
A woman had come from out of town, bringing her family's meager savings with her, searching for profitable business transactions. As it happened, while she was staying at the local Jewish inn, thieves stole her money. When the local rabbis saw how distraught the woman was, they hit upon an unusual plan - to talk with the "leading" thieves in the area, whom these rabbis knew, and see if the money could be retrieved.
Surprised at being summoned by the rabbis, the thieves agreed to a meeting. One of the rabbis explained to them the difficult straits the victimized woman was in, and, though he was not at all certain what their response would be, suggested that the thieves keep 30 percent of the loot and give the rest back to the poor woman. Upon hearing this, one thief fell in to a rage, shouting, "We worked hard for the money! It belongs to us! We're not going to keep less than 60 percent!""
by Rabbi Yehuda Appel
http://www.aish.com/torahportion/appel/The_Malady_of_Self-Deception.asp
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An unsolveable paradox?
"Self-deception" by Francis Moorcroft
"When I deceive you then I know the truth about something and you don't; what's more, I deliberately try to conceal the truth from you, telling you lies if necessary. That is, I try to get you to believe something that I know to be false. So deception is a matter of: I know something, you don't; I hide the truth from you. But with this understanding of deception, how is self-deception possible? Do I have to know the truth about something and then, simultaneously, hide the truth from myself? How could this be: how do I know the truth and yet tell myself that it isn't the truth?"
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/paradox7.htm
Philosophers and students of philosophy argue this question often. The answer appears to be that we select the "truth" that appeals most to us, and label all other possibilities as "untrue". We then proceed to accept only those "proofs" which support our choice of "truth".
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Victimizing ourselves:
The Great Scam: Self-Denial and Self-Deception
"What a scam. Self-denial and the self-deception it requires are supposed to make life easier and safer than confrontation and accountability and the courage they demand. The protection of hiding from reality appears innocent enough. Maybe it will go away if we pretend it's not real. Maybe it will change if we just wait it out while denying its presence. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Doing life passively waiting for "maybe" to become a reality is to abandon ourselves to chance, to others, and to self-deception. That is hardly a formula for a sense of well- being. Rather, self-denial feeds on fear, anger, and self-doubt. It requires self-deception, manipulation, and flat out lying. The result is anxiety, depression, alienation and oppression. We become a distortion of ourselves in this process, and our integrity is compromised as we become mired in our own lies. We lose touch with the truth. Rather than being protected, we are at great risk. We are not capable of intimacy and we have lost our integrity. We have definitely been scammed."
© 2000 Michele Toomey, PhD, April 26, 2000
http://www.mtoomey.com/commentaries/greatscam.html
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Hiding from the truth:
"Each of us has our own favorite way of avoiding unwanted information. Watching TV, smoking, alcohol abuse, surfing the Internet, overworking, shopping, gambling, (name your own if I missed it) are all convenient ways of fogging out. They provide temporary relief from facing some of the seemingly overwhelming challenges of life.
The trouble comes later; when those challenges are ignored, they grow and grow until they get too big to ignore. Drastic action may be required to fix something that needed only minor attention in the beginning, and sometimes the problem becomes unsolvable.
-The oil leak in the car that is ignored until the engine damage costs hundreds of dollars to repair;
-The manager who is too uncomfortable to talk to an employee who is doing sloppy work, until the employee alienates a valuable customer;
-The husband who doesn't have time to be with his wife until she has him served with divorce papers;
-The new business owner who doesn't want to think about how long it will take for her business to become profitable, until she can't pay her bills and loses the business;
-And, tragically, the young woman who ignores her friends' pleas to see a doctor about a rapidly growing mole, and dies of cancer two years later.Fortunately, we can learn to tune into important problems, before they get out of hand. It takes a little practice and determination, but you can learn to use your favorite self-deceiving behavior as a signal that something is wrong instead of as a way of avoiding (discounting) the truth.
Laurie Weiss, Ph.D., author of:
"What Is The Emperor Wearing? Truth-telling In Business Relationships" © 1998 http://www.womenofcolorado.com/Articles/p022398.asp
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Exposing Self-Deception, The Truth About The Lies:
"O sancta simplicitas! How strangely simplified and falsified does man live! One does not cease to wonder, once one has eyes to see this wonder!" [Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 28 (Chicago: Gateway, 1955)]"Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits." [Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious Studies 61 (New York: Harper & Row, rev. ed., 1978)]
"Opportunities for self-deception are never far away from any of us." [Owen Barfield, History, Guilt, and Habit 56 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1979)]
"[I]t is common indeed that you will be (1) persuaded to ignore obvious facts by social pressure; (2) trapped into undesirable commitments by calculated rewards; (3) deluded by suggestive propaganda or even a neighbor's back-fence rhetoric; (4) misled into addicted behavior, where the ruts of habit are so deep they form virtual blinders; (5) enticed to surrender your autonomy, before you have even possessed it, by dreams of an intimacy able to cure the pains and perils of loneliness; (6) beguiled by ‘reason' into believing, contrary to fact that certain kinds of thought and areas of consideration are invulnerable to disruption or contradiction by even small penetrations of new experience; or (7) caught up in a frenzy of antireason and persuaded, by your emotional identification with a certain mood or movement, that you have transcended your boundaries, and that you are somehow more important to all other people than each of them is to you." [Robert A. Lloyd, Images of Survival 39 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973)]
"Denial is one of the simplest and most common of the defense mechanisms and in fact may be present in some form in most of the others. It is, simply stated, a method of avoidance. It is a means by which the mind simply does not see that which is present by ignoring or 'forgetting about it.' On an unconscious level, when there are unpleasant thoughts or events that we would rather not acknowledge, we simply 'make believe they are not there.' In a sense we figuratively turn away from the unpleasant thoughts, sights, or feelings which may beset us. If a situation is dangerous or traumatic or disparaging to the self, we simply turn our attention elsewhere. We selectively perceive those situations which make us comfortable and fail to perceive those which cause us anxiety or pain." [Lou Benson, Images, Heroes, and Self-Perception: The Struggle for Identity--From Mask-Wearing to Authenticity 270 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974)]
"A state of self-deception cannot issue from a single decision...but represents a policy not to spell our certain activities in which the agent is involved. Moreover, once such a policy has been adopted, there is ever more reason to continue it, so that a process of self-deception has been initiated. Our overall posture of sincerity demands that we make this particular policy consistent with the whole range of our engagements. In this way, a specific policy leads to a pervasive condition called self-deception.... Our protective deceits become destructive when they begin to serve our need to shape a world consistent with our illusions.
The power of fabrication makes it that much harder to uncover our illusions by masking them with sufficient plausibility to render them acceptable. Occasionally we are fortunate enough to be forced to face our deceptions, but ironically the very same imaginative and intellectual skills which lead us to discriminate falsity from truth also empower us to create those webs of illusion that lead plausibility to our original deceptive policy." [Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics ___ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977)(with Richard Bondi and David B. Burrell)]
"To free ourselves from internal blindness we may have to learn to distrust ourselves in painful ways, ways that destroy certain kinds of happiness forever." [Robert Lloyd, Images of Survival 34 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973)]
"Our traffic with other human beings is an endless talk of the obstacles set before our seeing things as they are. We are all capable of a quiet devastating perversity of will in distorting the situations we encounter daily. A man may go through life side by side with people whom he never sees truthfully and whose real relationship to himself remains hidden. He believes he loves when he really hates, hates when he loves, and alternately makes too much or too little of either. So we go on in our blindness...." [Will Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization 237 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1978)]
"Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life." [Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? 91 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979)]
Archaeology of Criticism
http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/critproj/archaeo/selfdeception.html
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We lie to ourselves when we tell ourselves that we lie "for the benefit of others":
" As we begin, we must understand the definition of a lie. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines lying as telling untruths, defrauding another, and deceiving another for personal gain. Colloquially, lying has come to mean to not tell the “entire truth”, thus being economical with the truth. Lying typically has attached to it a rather negative connotation but let’s begin by looking at the benefit of lying and deceiving others.
Lying altruistically can bring about harmony in a relationship. This act of fibbing generally refers to telling “white lies” to protect the feelings of another. These lies are typically of lower importance. In Peterson’s Australian study, Deception in intimate relationships, it was found that couples closely involved tell predominantly insignificant lies to one another. It was also found that subjects, who reported telling such lies, did so as a means of conflict avoidance.""Lying and Deception in Relationships"
http://www.muohio.edu/psybersite/bars/lying.htx
We do not lie to "protect" others, we lie to protect ourselves.
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We tell ourselves that conforming to a lying society is necessary:
"People will claim that they lie because they do not wish to hurt someone by telling the truth. Such a statement represents one of the most common lies extant. Much so-called kindhearted lying not to harm others or to help others is really intended to obligate or tempt others to lie for you, if the occasion arises. The inescapable conclusion of this line of thinking is that it is all right to lie anytime it will benefit oneself or one's friend. But what if everyone used this standard? The danger in tolerating or institutionalizing lying is that sooner or later, when everyone thinks the other person will lie, you won't be able to trust anyone. Such a life would be scarcely worth living, or at least it would not be the sort of life that would be meaningful and enjoyable.
There are not many forms of lying that the average child has not figured out by the time he is in the sixth grade. Unfortunately, his parents and the adult population as a whole will often fail to progress beyond the sixth-grade level in their own reasons for lying. Lying often results from a person trying to conform. To a considerable extent, such conformity is socially necessary and desirable, but conformity should not be confused with a necessity for lying. Doubtless there may be times when it might seem preferable to lie rather than not to lie, but there is seldom an occasion in the entire lifetime of a citizen living in a free country when he must lie to save his life, his country, or even his business."
Common Sense and Everyday Ethics, Part II
http://www.fea.org/ethics/sense2.html
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We seek validation for our lies to ourselves:
We want others to agree with us even when we are wrong. That is why we keep talking to others until we find someone who will agree with us.
"Truth is that which confirms what we already believe." --Northrop Frye
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media
"'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that' -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." -- George Orwell
Source: George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism," 1945
http://www.zmag.org/quotes/quotesResults.cfm?topic1=Media
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We want the truth, except when we prefer a fantasy:Perhaps the central truth about lying, the one wisdom we can take away from the last endless year of self-aggrandizing public falsehood [re: Clinton/Lewinsky], isn't that we all lie sometimes and want to be allowed to do that. It's that we want to be lied to sometimes, lied to by ourselves and by the world. We do not always like the world we live in, our place in the world, the world's demands. We substitute a preferred version. "He really is going to get a divorce." "I love my job." "She made me hit her; this is all her fault." With the lie, we can temporarily create a new world.
Tell me the truth -- but perhaps not every truth, all the time. We beg to be spared certain things. At the end of the day, most of us hope the world will lie to us with great skill -- decently, so we never have to wonder if what we're told is a lie. All these lies, this tissue of pretense we weave, are the desire to become that which we pretend to be: the desire for our lies to come true.
SECOND THOUGHTS, BY SALLIE TISDALE
Tell me the truth: OR IF YOU'RE GOING TO LIE, AT LEAST DO IT TRUTHFULLY.
SALON, March 25, 1999
http://www.salon.com/mwt/tisd/1999/03/25tisd.html
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We lie to ourselves by pretending that (he/she/they) will not lie to us again:
"Sometimes we render a lie innocuous by regarding it as an extraordinary event. Someone told a lie to promote a particularly important goal, but now that things have returned to normal he will return to truth and I can count on him.
The problem is that this flies in the face of human nature. Just as bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, liars who have succeeded in obtaining something important through a falsehood should be expected to utter another one when there is something else to obtain. Lies become habitual and the goals may be of decreasing importance.
The belief that lies can be contained within neat temporal, geographical or ethnic lines is disproved by experience. "[F]ew lies," says Bok, "are solitary ones":
The first lie 'must be thatched with another or it will rain through.' More and more lies may come to be needed; the liar always has more mending to do. And the strains on him become greater each time...
After the first lies, moreover, others can come more easily. Psychological barriers wear down; lies seem more necessary, less reprehensible; the ability to make moral distinctions can coarsen...
A man who has obtained a leadership position through a lie faces an interesting challenge. If he cannot convince the people around him that there was no lie, then he must try to persuade them that it was the last one; in other words, that lies can be contained. Since his entire authority, the position itself, was obtained by that lie, it will be a very difficult task. It is on a moral plane with: "We had to commit one murder to achieve our goals, but there will never be another." In life, as in the movies, everyone usually has their knives out a remarkably short time after this statement is made."
"Lying", by Jonathan Wallace
http://www.spectacle.org/0500/lies.html
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We lie to ourselves by making every lie, an exception:
". . . most lies are not "white" or gray, it's just wishful thinking, another lie on our part
"It's for his own good." "It's such a small thing." "Everybody does it."
We can get used to lying awfully fast. "This time it's different," we tell ourselves. "That person wouldn't understand." "That rule doesn't apply here." Step by step: the lie, the excuse, the next lie, each one requiring us to make an exception to a rule, until everything is excepted. Until the rule catches up.So many ways to fail here. We lie by commission, by omission and with silence. We lie to get and to avoid having to pay the various prices extracted from us, to punish others and to avoid punishment. We lie to stay safe. Everyone lies"
SECOND THOUGHTS | BY SALLIE TISDALE
Tell me the truth, OR IF YOU'RE GOING TO LIE, AT LEAST DO IT TRUTHFULLY.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/tisd/1999/03/25tisd.html
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We lie to ourselves when we accept the lies of advertisers:
"If you're like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you," Kilbourne writes. "This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising?"We end up buying into much more than we purchase, Kilbourne contends, as advertising "sells values, images, and concepts of love and sexuality, romance, success, and, perhaps most important, normalcy.... Far from being a passive mirror of society, advertising is an effective and pervasive medium of influence and persuasion, and its influence is cumulative, often subtle, and primarily unconscious."
http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=680
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"To thine own self be true …"Here is a nagging question for which I do not have the answer. If you lie to yourself, as we all do when we are "in denial" (as psychologists call it), or if we are "rationalizing," who exactly is telling the lie, and who exactly is believing it? Are there two of me … one who is the liar, and the other who is gullible? Does the act of lying to the self and then believing the lie represent a form of mental illness? Whatever the answers to these and to other related questions, it is an interesting process that gives rise to interesting questions, and it is a phenomenon which I hope someone else will fully grapple with."
The bottom line for us novice [truthtellers] is that while it is relatively easy to stop lying to others (if we’re vigilant, honest with ourselves, and get used to it), it is a great deal more difficult to stop lying to ourselves, because there are no "out loud" words to consider, and no external "witnesses" to deal with. It all happens inside our heads. My initial reaction to the questions in the paragraph above is that lying to oneself is extremely irrational, and quite possibly qualifies as a form of insanity. So that there is no misunderstanding, let me make clear that when I asked if there was two of me, or two of all of us, that was what is called a rhetorical question, not meant to be answered.
There are not two of me, or two of anyone; what there is is a flawed creature, . . . [one which lies easily], a creature who is adept at deceiving him- or herself and not even realizing that he or she has done it … and that is something which I think needs explaining as much as it needs fixing. It does not, I might add, need explaining before it can be fixed. It can be fixed by an act of will (unless we are talking about a person who is afflicted with a serious mental illness). And while lying to ourselves may help us block out anxieties or avoid the unpleasant experience of "cognitive dissonance," I am reminded of the famous words of William Shakespeare: "To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not be false to any man." (Hamlet, Act I, scene iii.) As I see it, that was pretty good advice back then … and is still good advice today … advice that we as a species have yet to take."
http://www.human3.com/link7.htm
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"All dishonesty is only self-deception."
"Honesty is a very delicate subject to talk about. In some circles, no one would be so tactless as to even bring it up. Pirates, convicts, swindlers, bankers, lawyers, and politicians often proclaim loudly their honesty.
Let's look at the definition of the word Honest:
Having a sense of honor; having honorable feelings, motives, or principles; free from deceit or hypocrisy; true, candid, upright or just in speech and action; fair in dealing, or sincere in utterance; worthy to be trusted
All dishonesty is only self-deception.
Sometimes to avoid or lessen our sense of guilt when we are dishonest, we create the identities of others who deserve to be cheated, robbed, or lied to in some way. Then by the denial of responsibility for these creations, we reinforce the illusion that these identities are "real" and exist separately and independently out of our control.
When we deny our own creations, we pass negative judgments. Our lives go out of control and become subject to fortune and fate.
The good news is this! When we drop the pretense of who we are and what we are, we can start a course in the direction of becoming more honest with ourselves.
As we begin revealing to ourselves the patterns of our own self-deception we may want to change directions. In some instances it will mean breaking old habits and replacing them with new constructive actions. For awhile we might feel out of control and swept along. But if we persist, we will discover we travel the path of mastery.
Here are 5 signals that tell me I am losing my integrity.
1. When I am quick to find errors in others, (I have failed to correct myself.)
2. When my acts are designed to persuade another, (I have doubted myself.)
3. When I experience struggle with the world, (I have denied responsibility for my own creations.)
4. When I feel separate and alone, (I have failed to forgive.)
5. When events repeat themselves in my life, (there is a lesson I need to learn.)
In Summary, the key is taking responsibility for you! Not being responsible for one's own creations is self-deception.
Honesty determines the willingness to integrate with others. To make the connection! Life is about connecting with others.
Any individual can become more honest. To become more honest with ourselves is also becoming more honest with each other and is an honorable goal."
The 5 "Signs" You're About To Give Away Your Integrity, by Larry Nelson
http://www.topachievement.com/LarryNelson.html
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"Unsolveable Problems" are a sign of self-deception:
"To give you an idea of what's at stake, consider the following analogy. An infant is learning to crawl. She begins by pushing herself backward around the house. Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the furniture. There she thrashes about-crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the pieces. She is stuck and hates it. So she does the only thing she can think of to get herself out-she pushes even harder, which only worsens her problem. She's more stuck than ever.
If this infant could talk, she would blame the furniture for her troubles. She, after all, is doing everything she can think of. The problem couldn't be hers. But of course, the problem is hers, even though she can't see it. While it's true she's doing everything she can think of, the problem is precisely that she can't see how she's the problem. Having the problem she has, nothing she can think of will be a solution.
Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true cause of problems, and once blind, all the "solutions" we can think of will actually make matters worse. That's why self-deception is so central to leadership-because leadership is about making matters better. To the extent we are self-deceived, our leadership is undermined at every turn-and not because of the furniture."
Leadership and Self-Deception
© 2000 The Arbinger Institute
http://www.arbinger.com/org/index.html?about+3
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"Self-deception", weakness, ignorance, laziness, or incompetence:"Ninety-four percent of university professors think they are better at their jobs than their colleagues.
Twenty-five percent of college students believe they are in the top 1% in terms of their ability to get along with others.
Seventy percent of college students think they are above average in leadership ability. Only two percent think they are below average.
--Thomas Gilovich How We Know What Isn't SoEighty-five percent of medical students think it is improper for politicians to accept gifts from lobbyists. Only 46 percent think it's improper for physicians to accept gifts from drug companies.
--Dr. Ashley Wazana JAMA Vol. 283 No. 3, January 19, 2000People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains....This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
--"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," by Justin Kruger and David Dunning Department of Psychology Cornell University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134.""Self-deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. Self-deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves.
. . .
Fortunately, it is not necessary to know whether self-deception is due to unconscious motivations or not, in order to know that there are certain situations where self-deception is so common that we must systematically take steps to avoid it. Such is the case with belief in paranormal or occult phenomena such as ESP, prophetic dreams, dowsing, therapeutic touch, facilitated communication and a host of other topics taken up in the Skeptic's Dictionary.
In How We Know What Isn't So, Thomas Gilovich describes the details of many studies which make it clear that we must be on guard against the tendencies to
1. misperceive random data and see patterns where there are none
2. misinterpret incomplete or unrepresentative data and give extra attention to confirmatory data while drawing conclusions without attending to or seeking out disconfirmatory data
3. make biased evaluations of ambiguous or inconsistent data, tending to be uncritical of supportive data and very critical of unsupportive data.It is because of these tendencies that scientists require clearly defined, controlled, double-blind, randomized, repeatable, publicly presented studies. Otherwise, we run a great risk of deceiving ourselves and believing things that are not true
. . .
Many people believe, however, that as long as they guard themselves against wishful thinking they are unlikely to deceive themselves. Actually, if one believes that all one must be on guard against is wishful thinking, then one may be more rather than less liable to self-deception. For example, many intelligent people have invested in numerous fraudulent products that promised to save money, the environment, the world, etc., not because they were guilty of wishful thinking but because they weren't. Since they were not guilty of wishful thinking, they felt assured that they were correct in defending their product. They could easily see the flaws in critical comments. They were adept at finding every weakness in opponents. They were sometimes brilliant in defense of their useless devices. Their errors were cognitive, not emotional. They misinterpreted data. They gave full attention to confirmatory data, but were unaware of or oblivious to disconfirmatory data. They sometimes were not aware that the way in which they were selecting data made it impossible for contrary data to have a chance to occur. They were adept at interpreting data favorably when either the goal or the data itself was ambiguous or vague. They were sometimes brilliant in arguing away inconsistent data with ad hoc hypotheses.Yet, had they taken the time to design a clear test with proper controls, they could have saved themselves a great deal of money and embarrassment.
. . .
In short, self-deception is not necessarily a weakness of will, but may be a matter of cognitive ignorance, laziness, or incompetence."The Skeptic's Dictionary ©copyright 2002
Robert Todd Carroll
http://skepdic.com/selfdeception.html
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"Deception: the myth of sincerity"
""The more common everyday self-presenter who wants others to perceive, validate, and be influenced by his selfless integrity, even though he might vigorously deny such motivation and, indeed, be unaware of it" (Jones and Pittman, 1982, p. 246). "A tantalizing conspiracy of cognitive avoidance is common to the actor and his target. the actor does not wish to see himself as ingratiating; the target wants also to believe that the ingratiator is sincere" (p. 236).I believe that self presentational concerns and preoccupation with saving other people's face prevent us from seeing the pervasiveness of deception. Furthermore, our egocentrism provides us with the wrong model of human behavior. Intuitively, we seem to think that human biology and social dispositions made us apt to be rational scholars in a just and free society. Evolutionary theorists point out that our phylogenesis should have provided us with very different dispositions. Their most extreme proponent, R. D. Alexander states that "human society is a network of lies and deception, persisting only because systems of conventions about permissible kinds and extents of lying have arisen" (1975, p. 96). Lazarus (1979, p. 47) notes that there is a "collective illusion that our society is free, moral, and just"
Evolutionary theory can causally explain why humans tend to deceive themselves and others about the fact that they are deceiving. It can tie together all the topics of this paper: deception, irrationality in human impression management and social influence techniques. It can elucidate why we are willing to pay such a high cost for impression management. Jones and Pittman (1982) state this last point very candidly: "For many of us, self-promotion is almost a full-time job.""
"This paper endeavors to point out that the selfish interests of individuals caused deception and countermeasures against deception to become driving forces behind social influence strategies. The expensive and wasteful nature of negotiation and impression management is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this arms race between deception and detection. . . .
In a competitive, selfish, and war-prone world, these techniques, proven in billions of years in evolution, still are optimal. Therefore they are reinforced by cultural selection and learning. Conscious awareness of deception and countermeasures is not required, often even counterproductive. This is so because conscious deception is easier to detect and carries harsher sanctions. Humans not only deceive, but also deceive themselves and others about the fact that they deceive, into believing that they do not deceive. This double deception makes the system so watertight, that it tends to evade detection even by psychologists.
. . .
If we believe our own lies it is much more difficult to be caught, because we are not making conscious efforts to lie. Furthermore, moral codes and laws punish the conscious lie much more stringently than the "honest" error.Gur and Sackheim (1979) defined self deception as the motivated unawareness of one of two conflicting cognitions. They required that (i) the individual holds two contradictory beliefs (p and notp) (ii) these beliefs are held simultaneously (iii) the individual is not aware of holding one of the beliefs (for example p) and (iv) the mental operation that determines which mental content is and which is not subject to awareness is motivated.
They managed to prove the existence of self deception even according to these stringent requirements. It surprises me that knowledge of the repressed truth (not p) remains stored somewhere in the brain.
. . .
D. The cost of impression management. . . I am concerned about people wearing Armani suits in a tropical climate with ties strangling our throats, when a four dollar thrift shop outfit would be more comfortable and appropriate to the climate. It is obviously wasteful to drive an expensive 50,000.- dollar car, when a bicycle or simple 2,000.- dollar car would do. But, a high powered real estate broker would undermine his power would he dare to drive a 1983 Ford Pinto or come to a board meeting dressed in bicycling shorts. It is important to note that price, not age or functionality of the car count, because he or she could get away with driving an antique 1935 Ford.
. . .
People tend to influence others for selfish reasons. They tend to hide this fact from others and even from themselves. Targets of influencing attempts act as if they knew the influencing agent cannot be trusted. An extraordinary amount of effort is devoted to impression management, the effort to establish credibility.The arms race between influencing agent and target, between deceiver and defenses against deception, is very expensive. Impression management is a full time job, and the other full time job in life serves to acquire the finances needed to buy the paraphernalia (like designer clothes, car, condo and prestigious schools) to impress with. The very fact that these items are expensive and difficult makes them hard to fake and therefore more credible.
. . .
Deception will be used whenever useful. This fact should be hidden: one's reputation is enhanced by being seemingly altruistic. We would want to deceive others about our selfishness and deception. Furthermore, we can deceive better when we ourselves are convinced of what we say. We tend to deceive ourselves, but often a part of us knows the repressed truth.After all this pessimistic outlook, is there any reason for optimism? Maybe we can change if we become aware of our unawareness, if we stop deceiving ourselves and others about the fact that we are deceiving. . . ."
Social evolution and social influence: selfishness, deception, self-deception
Mario F. Heilmann
University of California at Los Angeles
http://www.a3.com/myself/ravenpap.htm
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Is Self-deception Possible?
"Self-deception is tricking oneself into an unquestionable trust. Hoping, believing or having faith in something that cannot be tangibly proven, are all forms of manipulating one's beliefs. Therefore, I believe it is possible to deceive oneself. The real dilemma in the question of self-deception is whether one does it consciously or subconsciously; that is, whether or not one takes an effort in convincing himself of something he would not ordinarily agree with.
Methods of consciously manipulating one's self are often used in types of therapy. These methods are consciously utilized because the subjects are in therapy to fix, change, or improve who they are, and they know it. Stuart Smally, the character that started on Saturday Night Live, for instance, provides ways one can obtain "good" self-esteem. He tells people to look in the mirror and say things like: "I'm good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me." With this quote and others like it, Smally tries to make people convince themselves that the things they are saying are true. Although this example is based on comic character, the whole point is that it is a satire of some modern psychology. It screams out that we can, or at least we believe that we can, deceive ourselves into thinking that we are something we are not.
Another sort of clinical example is what doctors call hypochondria. That in itself is defined as imagined ill health. Patients who have this subconsciously scare themselves into believing that they have one thing or another wrong with them. It is a legitimate diagnosis that doctors use for people who have convinced themselves that they have an illness, or illnesses, that they truly do not have. Therefore, any physician who diagnosis a patient with this disease is flat out admitting that self-deception is possible.
One can also subconsciously deceive himself by something like a defect in his personality. For example: a personality trait as simple as arrogance is often initiated by preconceived ideas about oneself. Those ideas create an illusion in one's mind of how perfect he or she is (and as we know, nobody is perfect). If one could not deceive himself, how then, could he be mistaken in his beliefs about the world, himself, or others?"http://www.ags.uci.edu/~mzyoung/page7.htm
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Avoiding Self-Deception, Recognize your motive and defenses:
"Recognize unconscious motives and defense mechanisms.
There is no doubt that sometimes we are not realistic. Not all of our actions are rational and intentional. Sometimes we avoid reality, we deny the truth, we fool ourselves. We may see the world the way we want to, not the way it is (example: a person falling in love or going through divorce). We may use excuses or rationalizations for avoiding an unpleasant but important task (example: procrastination instead of studying or self-indulgence instead of thinking of others). We may seek hidden payoffs through some action (example: fat helps us avoid sex or putdown games build our ego). The purpose of these distortions and self-cons is to make us feel better about our behavior, to defend ourselves against anxiety, and/or to conceal an unworthy purpose.
The self-evident solution to this self-deception is to be honest and realistic with ourselves. But how do we do this? There are powerful reasons for our distortion of reality; how can they be overridden? How can we deal with our own unconscious?
This is much too large a topic to be covered in one method. Chapters 14 and 15 help us understand unconscious factors. If we understand our unconscious motives and distortions, we can intervene and counteract these forces. The intention here is merely to draw your attention to a complex array of ideas and self-help methods that may need to be considered if you have an unwanted behavior that persists:"
http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap11/chap11f.htm
--------------------It is the easiest lie:
Lying to ourselves is easier than lying to others. We have a sympathetic audience. We receive instant, positive reinforcement with the fantasy we have just accepted. It offers us escape from having to deal with realities that we would rather not accept. When we lie to ourselves, we do not tend to feel fear of being caught.
At the same time, self-deception requires more maintenance than most other lies. It requires more follow-up lying as contradictory information is received, it must be rejected, modified, or twisted until it conforms to our structure of deceit. In it's mildest form, it might simply be called foolishness, but taken far enough, it becomes a form of insanity.
"The person easiest to fool is yourself. Many sincere people are honestly self-deceived. They "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Rom 1:18). Self deception is a self-inflicted blindness. "If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" (Mt 6:23) "A deceived heart has turned him aside, and he cannot deliver himself, nor say, 'Is there not a lie in my right hand?'" (Isa 44:20) The self-deceived is unable to find truth! At least not until he is honest enough to acknowledge that he is engaged in self-deception."
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