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We need hope in order to function, but the world gives us endless reasons not to be hopeful. For most people on the planet, to forswear self-deception is to invite despair and dysfunction.
If we were to speak truthfully, each of our lives is trivial, unimportant and easily forgotten.
If we are to roll the Sisyphean boulder up and down the hill, as required for our survival and the well-being of our progeny, it isn’t helpful to feel our lives are useless or unimportant. This is why, in every culture around the world, people reach for beliefs that tell them that their lives have purpose and meaning.
Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.
Our eyes and brain are not in the truth business; they are in the functionality business, and it turns out that discarding nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty bits of data out of every billion is extremely functional.
From the perspective of evolution, objective truth is not only not the goal, it is not even the only path to the goal.
To create a world that produces the best in human beings, we must certainly be informed by reason, rationality and science, but we must also deploy the insights of logic using aspects of our minds that are prone to storytelling, symbols—and self-deception.
Our minds are not designed to see the truth, but to show us selective slices of reality, and to prompt us toward predetermined goals.
Harmony in many settings is largely a consequence of the ability of participants to cushion their disagreements in a pleasant haze of humor, flattery and kindness.
In a 1975 paper titled “Everybody Has to Lie,” the sociologist Harvey Sacks, founder of a field called “conversation analysis,” detailed the myriad deceptions found in ordinary, day-to-day settings, beginning with basic greetings, usually some version of “How are you?” in which the person who asks doesn’t actually care, and the person who answers isn’t expected to be truthful.
Avoid mistaking showy love for actual love.
“It’s a domain of kindness to those we care about. It’s not that we don’t value honesty, it’s that we value something else more. The something else could be the other person’s feelings, your feelings of loyalty toward them.”
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.
It’s not a lie if you believe it. George Costanza, Seinfeld
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Naive realism is a powerful force in daily life, one that prompts us to question the actions of other people. It can make choices that are merely different seem absurd, or wrong.
Delusional self-confidence in the face of entrepreneurial failure can be a source of resilience. False beliefs about how you are going to do better than others when facing down a disease can be adaptive. But such beliefs are also helpful in general. A wide array of research shows that people who are delusionally optimistic tend to outlive people with more realistic attitudes.
He argues that, to make marriage work, we need to deal with the inevitable imperfections of our partners.
Perhaps the most important part of the study was that the researchers found that the couples who had the most inflated views of their partners—the ones who saw their relationships with the greatest degree of self-deception—were the happiest.
Benjamin Franklin once offered the advice, “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage—and half-shut afterward.”
Not all these illusions involve the supernatural: Sports fans will tirelessly review controversial plays in slow motion, and see completely different things depending on their team loyalties.
