User-Friendly Self-Deception: Philosopher Amélie Rorty on the Value of Our Delusions and the Antidote to the Self-Defeating Ones

“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?”

“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote as she considered how our illusions keep us alive, shining a sidewise gleam on an elemental fact of human nature: We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the eviden...