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Until recently, I lived with a certain false assumption: that people would want to know the truth. Furthermore, I used to think that once people discovered the truth (even accidentally) they would never be able to reject it. How can you hold an unjustified false belief, right? But recently, I realized that I was wrong. There are indeed people (who knows, maybe they are a majority) that prefer self-deception over truth.

In other words, such people prefer the beautiful lie instead of an ugly truth. Or, rather, they prefer to beautify the lie so that they don’t have to ponder on the possible qualitative attributes of the truth. Furthermore, I’ve discovered something incredible, which shouldn’t even be possible, according to philosophy and epistemology. Unlike what I mentioned above, there seem to be many people who can hold an unjustified false belief.

In plain English, they are capable of believing something that isn’t supported by evidence and is false (and, the implication is, they know it to be false). In other words, not only are they performing self-deception, but they do so knowingly and willingly.

Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon – I’ll also throw in a story connecting Jesus and Donald Duck 😛

Thin Ice: Telling Someone They’re Wrong

Some time ago, a Facebook friend posted an article describing the story of a brave grandma who fought off three would-be robbers. The source didn’t seem reliable, and the entire article reeked of sensationalism. It took me a couple of Google searches and 5 minutes to find out the truth. Yep, you guessed it. Fake news.

And just as I explained in my article on fake news, the reaction was quite predictable. “Well, it doesn’t matter”, was the reply I received when I tried to enlighten that Facebook friend, “it’s still an inspiring story”. I was dumbfounded. What story?

Self-Deception: From Jesus to Donald Duck

I think I truly understood the psychology and motivation behind self-deception after the story you’re about to read. I was talking with an aunt of mine about religion and philosophy. Now, you should know that this aunt has always had a rather odd relationship with religion. The best way to describe it would be to say she believed in God but not in the Church. In other words, she wasn’t really religious, but she believed in a higher power.

Discussing on such matters, I brought up what I saw as an acute problem in her epistemic approach to God; that is, a problem in the way she obtained knowledge in relation to her spiritual stance. I told her that all the knowledge she held about Jesus originated from the source she herself rejected as fallacious, namely the Church. I told her that, since she rejected as fabrications everything the Church communicated, she had no grounds to place the divinity of Jesus (among other things).

Her reply? “But it comforts me to think of such a character in my life”. My own retort? “And what is the difference, then, between thinking of Jesus and thinking of Donald Duck? They’re both imaginary, by your own definition”.

In the end, we couldn’t reach a proper agreement. I left the discussion feeling defeated in some way. This level of self-deception was a slap in the face of philosophical truth, of logic and reason. But it also helped me understand the psychology and motivation behind it.

By Deceiving Yourself, You Postpone Action

Let’s face it, knowing the truth is a good theoretical state but a bad practical one. In other words, knowing the truth often entails the necessity to act; to bring about a change, to respond to a certain situation. Not many people face this gracefully.

After the discussion with my aunt, I eventually realized that the reason she forced herself to believe the way she did was a coping mechanism. She embraced self-deception in order to avoid the dirty job of acting on knowledge. Indeed, most religions are predicated on displacing responsibility: you check in your ethics at the door, and you let someone else (the bearded old man on the cloud or his representative on earth) to decide for you.

It’s a bit like politics and governance, too: you let someone else mesmerize you with pretty words, so that your duty as a citizen need not be put into action.