Useful Delusions Quotes

“Our minds are vulnerable to myths, falsehoods and fictions not merely because we are dumb or stupid, but because we are frail, flawed and easily afraid. Advocating fearless rationality—an end to myth-making and myth-believing—is not just about being smart. It is a matter of privilege. If you don’t lack for food and water, for physical security or a police department that comes when you call, you might not feel the need to turn to myths, rationalizations and rituals. You may have no need for fellow members of your tribe to come to your assistance when you are sick, because there are doctors and hospitals who will do a better job. If you think of yourself as a citizen of the world because borders are illusions and people everywhere are the same, you probably haven’t lived through the kind of persecution that makes you desperate for the protection of your fellow tribesmen. It’s fine to hold secular, cosmopolitan views. But when rationalists look down on people who crave the hollow panaceas of tribe and nation, it’s like Marie Antoinette asking why peasants who lack bread don’t satisfy themselves with cake. They fail to grasp what life is like for most people on the planet.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“A wide array of research shows that people who are delusionally optimistic tend to outlive people with more realistic attitudes.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Many people hold false beliefs not because they are in love with falsehoods, or because they are stupid—as conventional wisdom might suggest—but because those beliefs help them hold their lives together in some way.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“People with depression and some other disorders often see reality more clearly.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“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.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” he said, referencing the tribes that once flourished on the geographical boundaries of modern France. We think we are citizens of a nation because we have “forgotten many things.” Since Renan, others have tried and failed to establish a good definition of a nation. There really aren’t any objective criteria that can explain the diverse origins, functions and commonalities of different nations. Perhaps the most accurate definition of a nation was put forward by the political scientist Benedict Anderson. His conclusion was that we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian simply because we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian. A nation, he wrote, is a social construction—an “imagined community.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“The philosopher Alain de Botton has written that we will all “marry the wrong person.” It’s a claim that often provokes a strong reaction. But de Botton is not making a case for divorce. Quite the opposite. He argues that, to make marriage work, we need to deal with the inevitable imperfections of our partners. De Botton wants us to reject the “founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last two hundred and fifty years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.” In reality, “every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us—and we will (without any malice) do the same to them.” How to solve this unsolvable problem? An array of psychological research studies show that in most healthy relationships, people see their partners through rose-tinted glasses: We see them as better people than objective analysis would justify.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“It’s a grave mistake to think that evolution is remotely interested in helping us perceive reality accurately. Natural selection has one simple standard: Evolutionary “fitness” is about whatever helps us survive and pass on our genes.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“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.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“What if false beliefs help people live longer and connect better with their families? What if myths help communities thrive? What if fictions allow nations to come together? What if self-deceptions prompt people to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of others, and thereby help their communities, tribes and nations?”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Costly rituals make free-riding difficult. If I merely want the benefits of religious affiliation, would I really be willing to undertake a costly pilgrimage or walk over burning coals? Probably not. On the other hand, if you see that I am willing to do those things, you can be fairly certain that I am indeed very religious. To put it another way, the more pointless the ritual, the more painful, the more valuable it becomes as a signal of authenticity.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Soldiers inspired by religion were more likely to defeat their enemies than those who were not.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“every human being is really a “breathing piece of defecating meat.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“generations: Rituals offer a way for human beings to deal with a dangerous and unpredictable world. They generate community, conformity and courage. Asking whether they “work” in a literal sense misses the point. They work at a psychological level, and sometimes—as in the case of the Congolese village that fought off the Hutu militants—psychological reality turns into actual reality.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“If sacrificing the facts can ease the unpleasant feeling, the facts turn out to be expendable.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“If drama and theater and expectations can change the outcome of patients suffering from arthritis, can’t it do the same for diners in a restaurant?”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“If I think something is amazing and am willing to pay top dollar for it, does it really matter that you think it’s “bullshit”?”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“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.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye Jorge Trevino is a professional liar. When we hear the word “liar,” the image that usually springs to mind is of a malevolent schemer whispering lies, deceits and half-truths from the shadows, like Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello. Trevino is nothing like that. He is friendly and good-natured, one of the”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“If self-deception is functional, then it will endure, regardless of all the best sellers that criticize it. Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“I realized that 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.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote, “One can try to recreate the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness . . . becomes a madman.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“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.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“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”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“As you slowly take in the movie, however, you start to see that behind the seemingly absurd attachment of people to their animals lies redemption: Yes, life may be bleak, but we can impose meaning on that bleakness. The intense love that people have for their pets, initially presented as silly and absurd, gradually becomes sympathetic, even beautiful. Ultimately, Ebert came to see the film as being about the “hope held by the loneliest people who have ever been seen on film” and “the deepest of human needs, for human companionship.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“(In general, it’s easy to see the delusions of our opponents for what they are, and very hard to see the myths of our own groups, teams and nations with clear eyes.)”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“I once asked a linguist what the difference was between a dialect and a language. “Languages,” he quipped, “are dialects that have armies.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“A great deal of the suffering caused by disease is caused by our own reactions to illness: Our anxiety and worry about the ailments we have, and what it means to be sick.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“This is why every person knows today, when they or their children are sick, that illness and injury can draw families and communities together.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

“Delusional overconfidence is very bad for many men as individuals, but the researchers found that as a group, it helps men succeed.”
― Shankar Vedantam, Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain