Dangerous is the lie we tell ourselves
“O Sancta Simplicitas! How strangely simplified and falsified does man live! One does not cease to wonder, once one has eyes to see this wonder”- Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
We all agree that we are always deceiving others, and as T.S.Eliot said, we ‘prepare to meet the faces that we meet’. Even Shakespeare has compared life to a stage and people as merely actors continuously acting roles. But the story of deception doesn’t end here. Some of the greater deceptions we practice are subjected against our own selves.
We are constantly telling ourselves lies that suit us; lies that make life convenient for us and lies that help us feel nice and happy. A chain smoker I know seems to need cigarettes like we need oxygen to breathe. He refuses to believe that every cigarette is cutting his life short and protests that he would die if he didn’t smoke. He is lying to himself.
Obesity works much in the same way. When some obese people take recourse to suggestions that it is hereditary, they are lying to themselves..
When we want to feel good about ourselves, we tell lies like, ‘ we are putting in our best, but aren’t getting the results’ or ‘there is no time, I am so busy’. We are unable to blame our complacency, our inhibitions or ourselves. Each blame is justified like this. When we subscribe to a particular ideology, we convince ourselves of its infallibility and refuse to accept flaws in its premises. George Orwell brilliantly exploits this psychological possibility in his brilliant novel ‘1984’. Truth in his society of 1984 is the picture the government has cleverly presented and there is no evidence of any fact that makes it uncomfortable and so no one knows what is actual truth. People can only verify truth through government owned documents and every piece of information is cleverly and efficiently doctored to suit convenience and protocol. So, here, the people in power decide what you should think and this is called ‘double-think’. There is ‘ thought-police’ that monitors people’s thoughts 24x7 and any person thinking divergently is effectively eliminated in order to create the ‘perfect’ government and the ‘perfect’ governed.
Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger condemn self-deception as bad faith, an inauthentic response to the anxiety produced by contemplation of human freedom. When we deceive ourselves, we are abandoning ourselves to chance and to others. The cocoon of lies we weave around us may make us feel very secure, but we become incapable of intimacy and we lose our integrity.
Shakespeare says in Hamlet Act I Scene iii
‘To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not be false to any man.’