The perversely self-destructive nature of the avoidance of truth

Posted Sunday afternoon, November 15, 2020.

Detail from “The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura” by Marie Sparteli Spillman. 1889. Via Wikipedia.

The American philosopher Sissela Bok wrote this in 1983; the Italian poet Petrarch walked the earth in the 14th Century. The issue is human nature. Politics has an implicit relation to the matter at hand, only because politics is the result of humans being human trying to live together. The words liberal and conservative are beside the point. But it speaks to certain political questions of the moment, doesn’t it?

Before and after Petrarch, a great many thinkers have...warned of the corrosive and perversely self-destructive nature of such avoidance of truth, of the lies we tell ourselves, and of the secrets we keep from ourselves. But they have seen far different truths---equally obvious in their own minds---at the ones we so obstinately reject through self-deception. In our time, Marx and Freud have signaled, as false consciousness and defense mechanisms, the clinging to illusion that stands in the way of becoming free. Only through unmasking, demystification above all interpretation, can we break through the web of illusion and become aware of our role in perpetuating it.

Some have claimed that we would not become more free through the dispelling of self-deceit, but also more capable of acting morally and leading nobler lives. Echoing Plato, they have argued that if only we could discern what is right and what is true, we would surely choose it. Others have held, more pessimistically, that self-deception may be our only shield against knowledge that would otherwise cripple us---that without what Ibsen call our “life-lies” we could not survive.

Whatever role they assign to self-deception, most have taken its presence for granted. To see the self as deceiving itself has seemed the only way to explain what otherwise might be incomprehensible: a person’s failure to acknowledge what is too obvious to miss. How, if not through such intentional misleading of self, can someone fail to notice that his work leads nowhere, that he lives beyond his means, that his marriage is a farce? How else can so many patients listen to a doctor’s explanation of their life-threatening disease, respond as if they understand, yet know nothing about it a few hours later?

Postulating such self-inflicted ignorance helps point to the biases and weaknesses besetting perception and testifies to the perennial effort to understand human failures that would otherwise seem inexplicable: and it is secrecy that lies at the center of such self-deception: the secrecy that is part of all self-deception. According to such a view, we keep secret from ourselves the truth we cannot face.

---Sissela Bok, “Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation”.

Comments

[john sundman]

Of the many great people & wise people I met during my years in high tech, one of the first, and one of the wisest, was named Linda Birch. I met her on my first job in the industry, at Data General in 1980. She was a senior technical writer with a very strong computer science background when I was a total neophyte with a basically nonexistent technical background, and she became a real mentor to me.

Anyway I remember Linda using the phrase "not just stupid, but militantly stupid" to describe some people (who would certainly be Trumpists today). "It's not that they're stupid; anybody can be stupid. It's that they actively choose to be stupid."

Linda went from Data General to Symbolics or Lisp Machines, one of those mid-1980's MIT startups in Kendall Square. But she got cancer and died when she was 40 or so. A great loss.

Life's a mystery, ain't it. Petrarch said as much, I believe.

[Pete Johnson]

I shall have to study Petrarch a bit more deeply now. I have been deeply puzzled and dismayed by the self deception and self defeating ignorance in this country. The fact that is is much more pronounced in the US and Britian and far less pronounced in Asian nations leads me to believe there is hope.
However, on this I may be be deluded too.

[EWM]

No need to be honest with yourself when there is a safety net to save you from the ramifications of bad decision making.