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“emotional labor.”
In personal settings, the emotional labor needed to cushion the truth explains why long-married couples will tell you that marriage is work.
It has been theorized that this tendency to believe our own lies—which in turn helps us lie more effectively—is the evolutionary origin of self-deception in human beings. (An
Tell all the truth but tell it slant— Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind—
Getting along with others is absolutely vital to our survival. If you run roughshod over other people’s feelings and pride, saying you are speaking the truth—or defending reason—will not help you if the tide of public opinion turns against you.
sentido de pertenencia, tribus
some amount of deception is a necessary price to pay for entry into the human club. In turn, we expect such deception from others.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that we lie most regularly to those who are closest to us, to people whom we care about deeply. As DePaulo says, “Those caring lies, those kindhearted lies, are like gifts we give to the people we care about the most.”
sometimes, we have to lie in order to be kind.
It’s easy to tell the truth when things are going great, and it’s easy to be “brutally honest” to people you dislike. But when people we love experience setbacks, terror or failure, we readily reach for the comforts of deception and self-deception.
The universe does uncaring things all the time.
If you think of benevolent deception and optimistic self-deception not as vice and weakness, but as adaptive responses to difficult circumstances, it is not hard to imagine that many of us—confronted by immense pain—might choose the hope of lies over the despair of truth.
your odds of survival are better when you see the world through rose-tinted glasses.
Overnight, money was revealed for what it really is—a shared story whose value rests entirely on collective beliefs and mutual trust. (For a brief window, the government allowed people to trade their now-worthless currency notes for new legal tender—i.e., a new story.)
“Revenge of the Ignoramuses.”
“In other words, your expectations actually turn into reality,”
Psychological differences eventually produced physical differences:
Our attachments to brands—to a “Ford-tough” truck, for example, or the racially harmonious “United Colors” of the clothes maker Benetton—is testament to the power of storytelling in consumer life.
The dance of complicity between deception and self-deception often works best when neither party acknowledges it.
If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. W. H. Auden, The More Loving One
But love, like other emotions, is the product of brain chemistry.
pets fulfilled their purpose “to love and be loved.”
George Carlin once said, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
People with depression and some other disorders often see reality more clearly. What’s more, these studies have shown that as depressed people respond positively to treatment—as they get better—they actually become more prone to self-deception, to delusions of control and confidence.
it is simultaneously true that a generous sprinkling of positive illusions can help us perform better, stay happier, and avoid the pitfalls of depression and low self-esteem.
Our hopes, needs and desires shape what we see in the world.
They discovered that the brain is a story-generation machine, and therefore vulnerable to narratives—and red herrings. They realized that our expectations powerfully shape what we see, and that by manipulating those expectations, they could control how we think and what we see.
Rituals offer a way for human beings to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable world.
They generate community, conformity and courage.
In fact, the point of a ritual is that there is no obvious point. This is why the presence of the burned arrowheads around the Tsodilo Hills python were a clue that they were used in rituals. Why go through the trouble of making an arrow only to burn it in a fire?
Rituals ward off anxiety, they connect us to our history and to our cultural moorings, they bind us to our groups. As we will later see, one of the surest ways to eliminate “meaningless” rituals is to address the source of the threat or to solve the problem that the rituals were invented to fight.
Rituals are a powerful way to carve out an “in-group”—people who have been through an ordeal or unusual practice together—from the “out-group”—those who wouldn’t understand. The social-bonding effect of rituals can be observed even when they are stripped of the powerful cultural contexts in which they are usually found.
A certain level of commitment and complexity is needed for a ritual to be psychologically and socially effective.
In the face of uncertainty, the ritual gives me comfort.
Structured, repetitive behaviors can help to calm us down and to overcome anxiety.
As a species, humans are not the strongest or fastest. We don’t have sharp claws or teeth. Our muscles are puny compared to many other creatures. But what we do have is each other. Early humans learned this lesson over thousands of years of evolution. This is why the self-deceiving brain prompts us to band together, fight for one another, defend each other. It regularly overrules the logic of mere self-preservation because, in our evolutionary past, standing with the tribe increased the odds our genes would survive. Millions of people, many of whom know nothing of one another, can be bonded
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The truth is that the United States was a slave-owning country far longer than it has been a country where slavery was abolished.
The architect of America’s vision of itself as a land of equality owed much of his wealth and station in life to the institution of slavery.
If one of those proverbial “anthropologists from Mars” were now to visit Arlington cemetery, she might be forgiven for shaking her head in amazement: How did a country that subjected so many people to slavery, degradation and exploitation come to think of itself as a beacon of freedom and human dignity? The region where Arlington Cemetery now stands was once home to peoples called the Anacostank, Pamunkey, Mattapanient, Nangemeick and Tauxehent, all of whom were driven out or dispossessed in order to create “the land of the free.”
We think we are citizens of a nation because we have “forgotten many things.”
the political scientist Benedict Anderson.
A nation, he wrote, is a social construction—an “imagined community.”
All nations are collections of stories—stories about a shared past, stories we pass on about our heroes, and stories of failure, cowardice or cruelty that we ignore or suppress.
The stories of nations prompt us to act as if we were one large entity, instead of hundreds of millions of individuals.
National myths can be semi-truths or outright lies. They can be versions of invented or imagined reality. But once invented—and once millions of people collectively believe in them—they become real.
National myths have the power to construct nations because they seem like immortal truths—black-and-white answers in a world filled with gray. Change may be inevitable, but stability requires us to believe that change is impossible.
One influential school of thought along these lines is called terror management theory. It’s based on the idea that for much of human history (and for many people on the planet today) the world—perceived realistically—isn’t pleasant or meaningful, but depressing (when it isn’t terrifying). Humans, perhaps uniquely among all creatures, understand that they are mortal and that death is inevitable.
This, according to terror management theorists, produces incapacitating fear. Humans have adapted to such fear by turning to a variety of mental defenses, some of which involve invocations of supernatural forces.
When we hang our important diplomas on the wall, or buy fancy cars, or dress ourselves up in fine clothes and jewelry, we seek to show the world our status and communicate our high view of ourselves. But this view sits in defiance of reality: We are embodied creatures, intensely dependent on food and water, vulnerable to disease and injury, and fragile in the face of aging. Every aspect of our daily lives offers a screaming reminder: Without this gulp of air, this piece of bread, this sip of water, you are steps away from death and decomposition.
In Solomon’s words, every human being is really a “breathing piece of defecating meat.”
We become masters at managing our terror because to do otherwise is to invite incapacitation.
