For most of my adult life, my job has been to listen to people. As a journalist, as a pastor, as a chaplain, I’ve asked people questions and listened to what they’ve said.
I’ve heard a lot of great stories from people that have enriched my life. But I’ve heard a lot of self-deceiving lies as well. I say self-deceiving lies, because the primary person being lied to in these conversations isn’t me. It’s themselves.
We intentionally lie to ourselves on a regular basis.
Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, “It is the easiest thing in the world for a person to deceive himself.”
I’ve listened to a painfully convoluted theological argument from a man explaining why he should divorce his wife. And it made me remember times when I’ve twisted the Scriptures to fit my own poor choices.
I’ve listened to a woman claim her need for a divorce from an immaculate man because he didn’t keep the garage clean. And I was glad she hadn’t seen all of the junk in my garage I’d been lying to myself about, telling myself I’d need it some day.
I’ve listened to people sketch out financial plans based on the most dubious of information. And it’s made me think about my own head-in-the-sand approach to finances.
I’ve listened to people claim to be victims of the hospital they were trying to defraud. I’ve heard people claim to be victims of the family members they were manipulating.
In each case, I thought: This person is lying! It’s so obvious! But why are they lying to me? And then as I listened further, I realized they were lying to themselves and they were doing so in order to justify some specific behavior they knew was wrong. And if they could convince themselves, then they could silence their nagging consciences and even (ironically) have a sense of moral superiority. They were using me, wanting me to question their lies so they could defend them and convince themselves even more about them.
In the book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, Daniel Goleman write, “The mind can protect itself against anxiety by diminishing awareness. This mechanism produces a blind spot: a zone of blocked attention and self-deception. Such blind spots occur at each major level of behaviour from the psychological to the social.” (Moment of honesty: I pulled this quote from this excellent article on self-deception.)
Several decades ago, M. Scott Peck wrote a book called People of the Lie. In it, he wrote about people who had practiced self-deception long enough and deep enough that they become participants in the dark power of Lie.This bothers me, because I catch myself lying to myself on a regular basis:
“I don’t have time for …” is a sure sign I’m about to lie to myself.
“It doesn’t matter if I [cut this corner] because …” usually precedes a rationale based on a perceived unfairness.
“I know it’s just an assumption, but it’s probably right that …” usually precedes a made-up fact.
“I don’t know why that person treats me this way; I didn’t do anything to them” is the ultimate in self-deception.
I could go on. I prove the truth of Jer. 17:9 —
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
But not only does my tendency toward self-deception bother me, I’m deeply bothered by our culture of niceness and its unwillingness to call people on their self-deception.
I watched in shock as our culture changed almost overnight when Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner. We went from compassion toward a sadly confused man to applauding the courage of Caitlyn to cast off the shackles of a male gender identity.
Where not many years ago our culture would have told people with gender identity issues that they were deceiving themselves and should seek help, now we applaud their self-deception and call them courageous. (My saying such is bound to anger plenty of people. But the truth is our genes don’t lie to us; our hearts do.)
When we tell people their are heroes because of their self-deception, we participate in the Lie. We ally ourselves to that dark power.
Not long ago, I was visiting with a patient and we talked about self-deception and spiritual pain. So, when she started telling stories about what others had done to her, I asked if she was telling the whole story, if there might be things she had done as well. And since we’d just been talking about self-deception, she came clean on the missing elements of the stories that made her not look so good.
Amazingly, simply telling the truth for a change made her feel much better. So much so that she marveled at it. She guessed, and I think rightly so, that her physical ailments were made worse by her self-lying which enabled her to hold on to resentments longer than a truthful self would have.
Here are some common areas of self-deception that I’m all too familiar with:
Health and diet.
Finances and the use of money.
Ascribing fault in relational tension.
The use of time. Any other areas you’re aware of?