Helpful Lies: Can You Strategically Use Self-Deception to Advance Your Life?
with Shankar Vendantam & Bill Mesler, Authors of Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving BrainUpdated: July 25th, 2024
"If you want to truly understand how reliant you are on lies to help you navigate your social world, just try to go a few days without lying."
Is Self-Deception Dangerous?
If a lie helps us get out of bed in the morning, work to be our best selves, and create a legacy of purposeful and intentional relationships to uplift our community, is it inherently harmful?
Today, I want to explore the potentially beneficial side of deception, the type of deception that opens the door to an experience that logic, reason, and data could never provide.
This blog will include quotes from the text,
Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain,
which explores the psychology of the ubiquity of lies, from the malicious to the benevolent.
TLDR:
This blog will uncover
how/when humans are prone to be more reliant on illusions and which scenarios implicitly rely on deception to create a positive change,
the outcomes of lies on an evolutionary and nation-building scale,
and uncover humans' more complex and complicated relationships to the truth that is not always black and white.
What is Self -Deception or the
Self-Deceiving Brain?
"Our minds are not designed to see the truth, but to show us selective slices of reality and to prompt us toward predetermined goals. Even worse, they are designed to do all this while giving us the illusion that we are seeing reality."
Just as advertisers spend millions of dollars to convince our lives would be that much better with a product or service with a goal of purchase, the human brain readily can fall into the comfort of self-deception to align with our own pre-determined goals.
The brain does this by filtering the perception of your reality based on previous images, experiences, and desires.
Self-deceptions arise stronger when our relationships and mating become involved because the predetermined evolutionary goal is to pass those genes along.
Humans have long figured out that banning together causes strength in numbers, and if lies cause division from an evolutionary perspective, then a lie may very well be the price to pay.
Types of Useful Delusions
"The lies we abhor are those where someone says or does something to get ahead at the expense of others, but the lies we admire are those told to help people grow into their best selves, to achieve their fullest potential. Our problem isn't really with deceit—just with who is doing it, why they are doing it, and when."
Which situations do the authors of Useful Delusions illuminate as likely to rely on positive illusions to enable positive change in your life and others?
The selected quotes below may offer insight into where self-deception tipped the balance in favor of life instead of death, winning instead of losing and overcoming instead of giving up.
Scenario A: To Encourage Others to Be Their Best Self
"The kind, the liars who work to protect the feelings of others, to help them achieve their best and to get back up after they've been knocked down—most of us think highly of those "player's coaches.
Scenario B: To Heal Disease: The Placebo Affect
"The placebo effect can be harnessed even when a patient is explicitly told that they are being given placebos. Again, this underlines something easily overlooked—when you get a prescription for pills, it isn't just the pills that do the curing. It's everything else, too—your visit to the doctor, the effort it took to make an appointment, the drama of the doctor's waiting room, the ability of the doctor to listen attentively to you, the medical center's efforts to put you at ease."
Scenario C: To Persevere in Entrepreneurship
"Delusional self-confidence in the face of entrepreneurial failure can be a source of resilience. False beliefs about how you are going to do better than others when facing down a disease can be adaptive."
Scenario D: To Mate and Survive
"The goal is not to waste precious mental resources on the unimportant task of seeing reality accurately, but instead to focus on the far more important tasks of survival and reproduction—what evolutionary biologists call fitness."
The positive illusions about the personalities and traits of those we love the most lead us to be, in a very literal sense, blind to their flaws. Psychologists call this the "love-is-blind bias."
Can You Trick Yourself Into Serving Yourself a Better Reality Using Useful Delusions?
The answer is a resounding yes.
"If the stories have resonance and power, does it really matter if they are true? Why put the emphasis on the truth or falsity of the stories rather than on what the stories do for us?"
Our preoccupation with stories and their meaning allows life's alternate realities to emerge much more vividly than the sobering truth.
The authors of this book state that the best con artists do not necessarily trick their marks but set up the conditions in which the marks trick themselves.
Which useful delusions have created a positive impact in your life or the lives of others?
I would love to hear in the comments below!
With critical thinking and integrity,
-dd
Works CitedVedantam, Shankar, and Bill Mesler. Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.