Philosopher Amélie Rorty On the Cost of Our Delusions and the Remedy for Those Who Overcome Them – The Marginalian

“Life is a dream. 'Waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our lives,” wrote Virginia Woolf as she looked at how our mistakes keep us alive, shining a light contrary to the fundamental truth of human nature: We tend by touch to distort our models of reality itself, we mistake the power of our certain evidence, we mistake the power of our dream. life. It can be – given how many similar facts comprise any situation, given how data points are combined in any one experience, just as this time you “miss most of what is happening around you,” we cannot process the full range of reality. Our minds deal with it by picking out pieces of it until they are removed, and often extinguished, from something else.

But what we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our intelligence, and how we choose our adaptive illusions over maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life. That's what philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) explores in a remarkable 1994 paper Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophywith a wonderful title User Friendly Deception.

Noting that “many forms of self-deception are intractable and useful,” Rorty writes:

We should not wish to live without the active, self-made illusions that sustain us. And we can't do without second order denial that it's delusional, second order and reverse strategies that we deludedly believe are correcting our various self-deception activities. The question is: how can we support the illusion that is essential to normal life, without being self-destructive idiots? Are there forms of self-deception that are easy to use that do not run the dangers often thought to be caused by lies, irrationality, and deception?

He notes that, self-deception has various “cousins ​​and clones” – among them “dissociation, adaptive denial, repressed conflicts and submerged anger, false consciousness, submissiveness, wishful thinking, suspicious systematic errors in self-reflection” – some of which are rewarded by society for their adaptive goals in helping us achieve our goals:

When we commend the persistent attention and dedication of a single mind that systematically resists the distraction of peripheral things, we call it courage or purposeful resolution.

But just as self-deception may animate our inner lives, with our innate tendency to mistake self-righteousness for behavior, we too easily accuse anyone who has a different model of reality from our own for self-delusion:

Someone who doesn't have our positive reactions is open game for a case of self-delusion, if not the worst kind of mental abnormality.

One necessity of self-deception is the paradox of identity over time: Each of us must answer the question of what makes us and our friends the “same” person despite lifelong and psychological changes, and we can only do it with a certain degree of self-deception, because, of course, in some important sense we are not the same person – our personality is full of misbehavior, the misbehavior of time. As Iris Murdoch reminds us, “man, the environment in which we live, is an illusion”—the basic illusion upon which the structure of human existence is built.

Rorty looks at the psychological roots and methods of self-deception:

Like deception, self-deception is a form of verbal persuasion; and like all forms of persuasion, it involves a complex, dynamic and collaborative process. Successful deceivers are sharp ports, clever deceivers who know how to work with the psychology of their subjects. They begin with minute and subtle interactions designed to establish trust, with approach, specific touch and voice patterns, cues for directed attention and redirection.

Considering the social nature of all deception, he adds:

Delusion and self-delusion are not simply isolated ends of invalid arguments: they are interactive processes with a complex cognitive and affective etiology.

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A canny deceiver puts himself in situations where his misguided attention will be strongly supported by his colleagues.

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It is very difficult to continue to deceive ourselves without a little help from our friends, often given with a conscious but tactful silence.

This very fact points to the best remedy for destructive self-deception:

Since we are at great risk of self-deception caused by society, the wisest course is to be more aware of the company we keep… Unfortunately self-deception is just something that prevents us from seeking your best treatment: you do not know when to expand, and when to limit its epistemological company. Fortunately, we have many other reasons to be smart about the company we keep. Fortunately, some mental and intellectual habits of the deceiver—a penchant for heartbreak and a distrust of hypocrisy, for example—can prevent the uncontrollable imperialist tendency to self-delusion from becoming entrenched and reinforced.

Most self-deception, Rorty notes, is not a matter of outright lying, but rather a special attention to and separation from the truth:

Self-deception need not involve a false belief: just as a deceiver can try to make a belief—as it turns out—true, so a self-deluder can pretend to believe what is true. A canny deceiver can focus on accurate but irrelevant observations as a way of denying the truth most important to his immediate projects.

This is something that stems from the psychological machinery of all illusions, which is possible because “any experience is open to an infinite number of true and even radical interpretations”:

Clever deceivers rarely tell blatant lies. It is very dangerous. The art of deception is closely related to the art of magic: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to divert it away from action. Ingrained patterns of cognition, emotions and attitudes serve as tools of deception. A skilled deceiver is a deceiver who knows how to manipulate the common patterns of what is important to their audience. He places prominent markers – something red, something strange, something desirable – in the field of view, to draw attention to where he wants it. The trick to self-deception is the same: the trick is to put yourself where the intellectual patterns are likely to divert attention away from what we don't want to see.

But for all its pitfalls, and for all the urgency of continuing to ask when it defeats itself, self-deception can be of great help in our efforts to change and grow, providing a reassurance that strengthens our will and an antidote to “the general uncertainty about the importance of our projects.” Rorty writes:

By convincing themselves that the desired change is within reach, self-promoters can use self-deception as an empowering tool.

Self-deception is also necessary to support the pillar of modern life in this century of self-identity:

We establish what we call our identity, placing our self-respect in our involvement in its projects, without any other measure of its worth.

But perhaps the most important function of healthy self-deception is in reducing our ambivalence about projects and life choices that bring us great rewards, but also have great personal costs, accurate assessments that may undermine our willingness to make them:

Without some form of self-delusion, our devotion, our friendships, our work, our causes can crumble. When we decide to have children, we ignore the suffering of the parents, we lose our deep awareness of the normal relationship between parents and children; in devoting ourselves to writing philosophy, we easily forget how little philosophy we are willing to study; in the interest of sanity and happiness, we transcend our deepest disagreements about our kith and kin.

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Concealing and embodying the contradictions inherent in many of our companies brings us not only the energy, verve, style and ease required for successful action; it also helps to ensure social cooperation which is equally important in our individual and collective projects. The pleasant discussion of social life, — the public description of the joy of our social roles and functions (friend, mother, teacher, scholar) — channels and spreads us to play our parts without the chaos, confusion and disorder that would arise if we openly expressed our natural and rational disagreements about these roles. It is almost impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively encourage the self-deception of its members, especially when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are in subtle conflict with the common psychology of its members. Socially induced self-deception is a tool for maintaining social interaction and cohesion.

It goes with Walter Lippmann's century's best nature of deception and self-delusion, and revisits Rorty on what makes a person: the seven layers of identity, in literature and in life.