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Self deception is a fascinating phenomenon and has been used by philosophers aplenty to examine the consistency of selfhood and the nature of consciousness. Sartre used the phrase 'bad faith' to describe a mental state humans often compel themselves towards. Existential reasoning lead him into the seeming infinite loops which arise in our consciousness. Consciousness denies freedom which denies itself, blind selfhood rolls off into infinity. From Wikipedia:
We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least. So why do we do it?
It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.
"It's tied in with self-esteem," says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. "We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."
Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others, researchers say. People are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds, Feldman's research shows.
[...]
"People almost lie reflexively," Feldman says. "They don't think about it as part of their normal social discourse." But it is, the research showed.
"We're trying not so much to impress other people but to maintain a view of ourselves that is consistent with the way they would like us to be," Feldman said. We want to be agreeable, to make the social situation smoother or easier, and to avoid insulting others through disagreement or discord.
Men lie no more than women, but they tend to lie to make themselves look better, while women are more likely to lie to make the other person feel better.
Extroverts tend to lie more than introverts, Feldman found in similar research involving a job-interview situation.
- Link to 'Why We lie'Bad faith
Is this evidence that the lie is where we find reality? Without it, it seems, a consistent self could not be maintained. Animals appear to deceive, but in the ability of humans to deceive their own self perhaps we see glimpses of our inate power. In denying our objective world the human is naturally thrust into a state of inner reality, a solipsism reliant on the depth of lie one envelopes oneself in. Where do the human, the lie and the real interlink? Is all a lie?
A critical claim in existentialist thought is that we are always radically free to make choices and guide our lives towards our own chosen goal (or 'project'). We cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even a armed mugger's victim possesses choices: to hand over his wallet; to negotiate; to beg; to run; to counter-attack; or to die.
Although we are limited by our circumstances (our facticity), these cannot force us, as radically free beings, to follow one course over another. For this reason, we choose in anguish: we know that we must make a choice, that it will have consequences, and that some choices are better than others. But for Sartre, to claim that one amongst our many conscious possiblities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, 'I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family') is to assume the role of an object in the world, merely at the mercy of circumstance - a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity.
Intentional Consciousness and Freedom
For Sartre this attitude is manifestly self-decieving. As human consciousness, we are always aware that we are not whatever we are aware of - we cannot, in this sense, be defined as our 'intentional objects' of consciousness, including our facticity of personal history, character, bodies, or objective responsibility. Thus, as Sartre often repeated, 'human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is': it can only define itself negatively, as 'what it is not'; but this negation is simultaneously the only positive definition it can make of 'what it is'.
From this we are aware of a host of alternative reactions to our objective situation - i.e., of freedom - since no situation can dictate a single response. Only in assuming social roles and value systems external to this nature as conscious beings can we pretend that these possiblities are denied to us; but this is itself a decision made possible by our freedom and our separation from these things. It is this paradoxical free decision to deny to ourselves this inescapable freedom which is 'bad faith'.
- Link to Sartre and Bad Faith -
Faith, fidelity, confidence...The real may be inaccessable, forever outside our formulation ( thanks Godel), so we must make the best of all possible lies. Faith is always blind, I know I dont know what the fuck is going on. Except that it is perhaps a lie to say that the human in any aspect, is unreal. I hope to become a hedonist.
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Does one need a self to be able to lie? Perhaps one needs a lie to be capable of self.
This chicken egg world is surely the 'best of all possible lies' -
I recall that learning to lie is a very important stage in childhood development...a technique by which we identify the other as a separate mind and evaluate its vulnerability. So say youre right, we need the lie to develope a self....the origin of storytelling, fiction etc?
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From last week's New Scientist:
...self-deception evolves in the service of deceit. I think that self-deception not only hides your deceit better from others but also allows you to practise deception in a less cognitively expensive way. If you're aware of the truth and the untruth simultaneously, and you're trying to project the untruth, that's cognitively expensive. But if you make at least part of deception unconscious, then it's less demanding. I want to organise the whole field of self-deception coherently. When we pray, are we practising self-deception? When we have positive illusions that are partly self-fulfilling, is that the same kind of thing as when we suppress information the better to fool others? What kind of deceit and self-deception do you expect in your relations with your parents? What kind do you expect in relations between the sexes? What differences do you expect between males and females?
Interesting too was your comment on the origin of storytelling. I like John Gray's (author of Straw Dogs) idea that writing acts as a false memory which reflect the mutually constructed lies of human culture into a coherent, but plainly illusionary, version of our history. Fiction is all their ever can be, yet we still deceive ourselves that some things are more fictional than others.
I like the idea too, as briefly outed in the extract above, that religious faith is built in service of self deception. To compound one's fragmentary existence into a causal homogeny, whether deceptive or not, is the true power religion has over the masses. The chaotic universe only offers us a glimmer of objective reality, our brains self-deceive this reality into an internal lie which binds our sense of self, our sanity together. Religion is a self deception one can believe one shares with others.
Maybe in the pop-mythology of Star Wars or Da Vinci Code we can glimpse this illusionary matrix casting its spell on its followers. If virtual realities come to better represent people's inner lies perhaps historically extended religion will become extinct, replaced, as if from the rubble, by an ever mutating mass of simulated truth.
Knowing where the boundaries of one lie intersect another may be helpful in traversing these new virtual, mass appealing lies. Escape from them is impossible, as we've already been living in them just as long as language has been altering our perceptions. -
- CommentAuthorjennyology
- CommentTimeMay 18th 2006 edited
Quite a fascinating topic, I must say. I've been thinking a lot about this recently.
Before I get into what I think lies and reality constructs do for us, I have a few issues with the main article.
1) "We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least."
This seems like sort of a moot point from which to start the discussion of honesty. There are plenty of things which "cause problems," including being honest, deshou? It seems that lying itself appears to be a problem-solving device for most people who utilize it. I would say that for those of us whom are able to control the extend of our lies or at least for those of us whom lying can be pinned down to a social context, lying is rather a tool without which we could be presented with the possibility of losing power in a situation (breakdown of superiority) or creating disconuity (letting someone down, arguments caused through trivialities). These points are important for building social relations in general.
2) "Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others, researchers say."
Someone is talking out of their ass. If research can only show self-inflicted deception in humans, then why wouldn't that exist in other animals that are able to deceive others? One would imagine that same ways in which we deceive others are often the same ways in which we deceive ourselves. It's like those studies that say if you smile enough, you'll be a 'happier' person. Our minds really can't tell the difference a lot of the time, and the better we are at displaying deception in a believable way, the more likely we are able to fool even ourselves. Your act is only as good as your ability to believe in the lie.
Bad Faith is an interesting extension of this discussion on truth. If the constructed reality and negation of truth are the only ways in which we can define ourselves, then the question of "why do we lie?" might be better stated "why do lies matter?" With what learned/biological faculties have we as individuals, cultures, countries, etc. come to regard lies in such different lights? Why is the lie wrong if we are unable to trully define it, and why are we taught that lies are wrong in the first place?
I think most power structures that teach this form of dogma in its strictest forms (religions, governments, businesses) are generally dictating a means to their own superiority. Shared meaning yields power to those able to control enough people who are connected through figments of reality. True deception is rewarded if enough people don't question it. The best liars are those who come closest to full control. They are our Jesuses, our Hitlers, our Ghandis, our Murdocks. They exist so that we don't really have to. -
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CommentAuthorMole of Production
- CommentTimeMay 19th 2006
If the constructed reality and negation of truth are the only ways in which we can define ourselves, then the question of "why do we lie?" might be better stated "why do lies matter?" With what learned/biological faculties have we as individuals, cultures, countries, etc. come to regard lies in such different lights? Why is the lie wrong if we are unable to trully define it, and why are we taught that lies are wrong in the first place?
Amen! And if lies are bad, how can tattling be bad? Malcom Gladwell explores just that question in his review for the New Yorker of Why?, by Charles Tilly.
Little Timmy's dilema:. . .
Gladwell goes on to explain the "four general categories of reasons" put forth in the book.
Timothy has heard that phrase—“Don’t be a tattletale”—countless times, and it always stops him short. He has offered his mother an eyewitness account of a crime. His mother, furthermore, in no way disputes the truth of his story. Yet what does she do? She rejects it in favor of a simplistic social formula: Don’t be a tattletale. It makes no sense.
. . .. . .
This is not a hierarchy of reasons: each, according to Tilly, has its various roles. Conflict arrises when we disagree which form of reason appropriately describes a situation (when we're "talking past each other"). Gladwell uses the abortion debate as an example:
In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations. Tilly would call “Don’t be a tattletale” a convention. The second is stories, and what distinguishes a story (“I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .”) is a very specific account of cause and effect. . . [Stories] circumscribe time and space, limit the number of actors and actions, situate all causes “in the consciousness of the actors,” and elevate the personal over the institutional.
Then there are codes, which are high-level conventions, formulas that invoke sometimes recondite procedural rules and categories. If a loan officer turns you down for a mortgage, the reason he gives has to do with your inability to conform to a prescribed standard of creditworthiness. Finally, there are technical accounts: stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority. An academic history of civil-rights sit-ins wouldn’t leave out the role of institutions, and it probably wouldn’t focus on a few actors and actions; it would aim at giving patient and expert attention to every sort of nuance and detail.
. . .. . . If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious.
It's a great review, and I plan on buying the book.
Mindhacks on Why?:
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That does indeed sound interesting...
It reminds me of a recurring misunderstanding my brother suffered when he was quite young (I am seven years his elder):
I would say something like "You can't use your knife to put food in your mouth!" to which he would reply "You liar!"
It was the confusion between convention and a statement of universal truth (code?) which caused this inner conflict. It would infuriate me because at the time I had no way to see the error in his logic either. Needless to say the matter was further inflated by the lashings of utter bullshit I pasted his brain with at the time. Yet it makes me think...
Steven Pinker talks in his stunning book 'The Blank Slate' about universal truths. Can it ever be maintained that there are a set of moral truths which superscede the mere brains which formed them? His argument rests on the capacity for all life to survive better under certain circumstances, many of which can be stretched to fit what appear to be moral 'choices' in the human realm.
So I suppose the question deepens further still. Does the lie work in survival of only itself?
Altruism has been shown to be an evolutionarily recessive quality. If all humans were truly altruistic then it would only take one immoral entity to outstrip them all in a matter of survival. Daniel Dennet, in his book 'Freedom Evolves', talks somewhat of the consequences of this which, to cut to the chase, allow the qualities of freewill to emerge from deterministic systems. Could it be possible that the lie and the free consciousness are mutually dependant? Perhaps true altruism can not exist precisely because there is freewill. Without the ability to make moral choices based on internally deterministic qualities the concept of the lie, the altruist or the conflict in the "four general categories of reasons" outlined above would have no meaning whatsoever.
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