Part of my view on this is that people self-deceive for basically sympathetic reasons, and that those reasons are important to our agency. As an analogy, people steal things sometimes, usually for sympathetic reasons, such as the local economy being dysfunctional and their family starving, or even being very bored and finding shoplifting to be a thrill. In an important sense it is antisocial, but the motivations behind it are good, and disowning them would be cutting out an important part of one’s self. It would literally be discarding some of your values.
If self-deception is a choice, then it is not simply part of our nature. It is a strategy we use to achieve things, and we will use different means to achieve those same things if we anticipate them working better.
Humans are monsters, but humans are not demons, not even the part that chooses to self-deceive. The demons are the collective hallucinations that compel humans to harm themselves and each other.
(Amusement at your last sentence!)
Part of my view on this is that people self-deceive for basically sympathetic reasons, and that those reasons are important to our agency. As an analogy, people steal things sometimes, usually for sympathetic reasons, such as the local economy being dysfunctional and their family starving, or even being very bored and finding shoplifting to be a thrill. In an important sense it is antisocial, but the motivations behind it are good, and disowning them would be cutting out an important part of one’s self. It would literally be discarding some of your values.
If self-deception is a choice, then it is not simply part of our nature. It is a strategy we use to achieve things, and we will use different means to achieve those same things if we anticipate them working better.
Humans are monsters, but humans are not demons, not even the part that chooses to self-deceive. The demons are the collective hallucinations that compel humans to harm themselves and each other.