Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

by Shankar Vedantam

one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology or villainy.

seeing what we want to see, I slowly came to understand, is less a state of mind, or a reflection of one’s intelligence, and more a response to one’s circumstances. Foregoing self-deception isn’t merely a mark of education or enlightenment—it is a sign of privilege.

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 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.

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.

Natural selection isn’t really interested in the truth. It is interested in what works. And your odds of survival are better when you see the world through rose-tinted glasses.

Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. Ambrose Bierce

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. Attributed to Nathan Hale, hanged by the British for spying for the nascent United States of America in 1776

Without a sense of ourselves as a nation, we would never have commerce or currency or the rule of law. We could not generate revenue through taxation; we would not have a volunteer army. Without subscribing to the story of America, Americans would not have banded together to defeat fascism in World War II; they could not have built great works of public infrastructure such as the Hoover Dam or developed the technologies that took the first human beings to the moon.

A great book, therefore, is in part an act of deception, a tissue of lies: a trick. Indeed, it plays the fundamental human trick of finding or discovering, or imposing, meaning in the senseless, pattern in chaos, fish and princesses and monsters in the heavens. That act of deception is at root a self-deception, conscious and unconscious, and without it life would be—life is—a terrible, useless procedure bracketed by orgasm and putrefaction. Michael Chabon, in the foreword to Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. Oliver Sacks, “Altered States,” New Yorker