Lies and Self-Deception
Everybody lies.
In fact I think that lying has become such a normal part of life that many of us do it reflexively and have literally no awareness of our own dishonesty and deception most of the time. We know to some degree that it’s morally questionable, but we lie anyway. It’s gotten to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if most conversations that people have on a daily basis are contaminated in some way, shape or form by untruths. But why shouldn’t we lie if we can get away with it? We’ve already been able to do it since we were two, so why not keep going? Why not lie to get what we want in life or lie to avoid things like disappointment, confrontation and shame? It all just seems harmlessly self-beneficial, right?
But it’s not. If we dare to peer beyond the surface of our dishonesty, we would realize that the consequences of lying should scare us far more than any potential consequence of telling the truth.
“If you deceive, if you lie, then you begin to warp the mechanisms guiding the instinct that orients you.”
— Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
The problem with lying is that you’re not just misleading other people for your own benefit — you’re simultaneously learning how to deceive yourself, whether you’re aware of it or not. According to a scientific article written by William von Hippel and Robert Trivers, we lie to ourselves at least partly because this helps facilitate the deception of others, and it’s actually quite a genius plan. Let me explain.
See, you’ve probably noticed that there’s something just downright uncomfortable about lying while consciously knowing the truth — something about it doesn’t feel right. You get all jittery, you trip over your words, your brain has to work hard to make sure that your lies are coherent, etc. In other words, the discomfort that you feel causes several subtle changes in your speech and behaviour which may alert other people to your dishonesty. This experience is likely related in some way to the amygdala, a part of the brain’s emotional system which flares up and causes us to feel negative emotion when we lie, essentially warning us to stop doing it. But if we ignore these warnings and lie anyway, the brain starts to adapt; it quickly becomes desensitized to the high activity of the amygdala and as a result we begin to feel more comfortable about our deception. But here’s the kicker — as lying becomes more of an instinct or habit, the brain learns to hide bits and pieces of the truth from your awareness. Little by little you begin to know less and less about your own reality. So the more successful you are at deceiving yourself, the less conscious you are about your own dishonesty and the more natural it becomes to deceive others.
But then this begs the question: just how in the world can a single person be both the deceiver and the deceived at once? If you already know what the truth is, then wouldn’t it be impossible to “convince” yourself of a lie? Well, the thing is that this question underestimates the power and complexity of the mind. At first glance it’s easy to believe that you have complete awareness and control of the things that happen in your own head, but this is clearly untrue. After all, if dissociative identity disorder is a thing, then it shouldn’t really be so shocking to consider that people can lie to themselves unknowingly. It’s important to remember that we only have direct access to the information found in our conscious mind, while everything that is found in our unconscious mind is beyond awareness. And because we have no awareness of the unconscious mind, it functions partly as the rug under which we are able to sweep unwanted information, so to speak. It’s the place where repressed memories, thoughts and feelings can be found; it’s the habitat of the Jungian shadow. And most terrifyingly, it’s the place that allows us to lie to ourselves.
So here’s what happens: when you choose to deceive people and tell lies, you are implicitly indicating to your own brain that you want to hide the most authentic version of your thoughts. And let’s just say that once your brain receives this initial signal, it does the rest of the work for you. According to Hippel and Trivers, our brain has the ability to manipulate the way it analyzes information by dissociating or disconnecting certain mental processes from others. This dissociative process is somehow triggered when we lie, allowing the mind to split itself into two parts: the deceiver and the deceived. And yes, that works exactly how it sounds — it means that some processes of the brain become responsible for deceiving the self, while other mental processes are targeted by that self-deception and therefore lose access to important pieces of information. As a result, the “unwelcome truth” can be successfully suppressed and hidden from your conscious mind in a way that makes it easier for you to tell lies. It’s incredibly sophisticated and yet terrifyingly dangerous at the same time. Here’s one instance of self-deception provided by the scientific article:
“For example, a student whose parents want her to be a physician but who wants to be an artist herself might follow her conscious goal to major in biology and attend medical school, but her unconscious goal might lead her not to study sufficiently. As a consequence, she could find herself unable to attend medical school and left with no choice but to fall back on her artistic talents to find gainful employment. By deceiving herself (and consequently others) about the unconscious motives underlying her failure, the student can gain her parents’ sympathy rather than their disapproval.”
— William Von Hippel and Robert Trivers, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 34, Issue 1
Some people might still say that they have no problem with self-deception if it gets them what they want. But ask yourself this: if you can’t be honest with yourself then can you really be so sure that your thoughts and motivations are genuine? How do you know that what you think you want is what you actually want or need if you’ve been spending so much time deceiving yourself and others? The student in the previous example could have saved a lot of time if she chose to be honest with her parents about what she truly desired. But instead she deceived herself into thinking that she actually wanted to pursue medicine, only to end it all by sabotaging her ability to do so anyway! Sure, her parents might have disapproved of her decision had she decided to study art instead of biology at university, but disapproval still sounds a lot better than dedicating years of university to the pursuit of a career that she would never do.
So here’s what all of this means: when you deceive other people, you also learn to deceive yourself in ways that you’re probably not even aware about, and as a result you corrupt the unconscious psychological systems that are supposed to help you to navigate life effectively. You’re therefore more likely to make bad judgements about where you are and where you should be headed in life because you see the world through the biased lenses of your self-deception. How could you rely on your decisions to guide you in the right direction if you’re so blinded by the lies that you’ve unknowingly told yourself? How would you be able to weather the storms of life if you can’t even see clearly? Everybody suffers in some way or the other, but there is only one solution for overcoming that suffering— you have to acknowledge its existence and face it head on. But you will never be brave enough to do such a thing unless you learn to be brutally honest with yourself, and you’re not likely to be honest with yourself in any profound sense unless you choose to be honest with other people. Implicit in your decision to lie to others is the decision to lie to yourself, and lying to yourself makes life a living hell.
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I’ll end off with the two rules I’ve learned from Jordan Peterson that changed my life forever:
- Tell the truth — or at least don’t lie
- Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act
Once I applied these rules to my life, I began paying close attention to everything that I did, said and thought — I started watching myself — and what I realized is that I was lying quite a bit more than I originally thought. I didn’t tell direct untruths as often (although still much more than I should have been) but I lied a lot by rationalizing, or by saying and doing things simply for the purpose of creating a particular image of myself around others. But once I resolved to tell nothing but the truth, I slowly began to eliminate my dishonest habits one by one, and I started acting in ways that gave me no reason to lie at all. I was finally free from the mask that I had been putting on for other people, and I was free from the lies that I had been telling myself. This is the foundation on which I would say I was able to dramatically improve the quality of my life. It was the necessary prerequisite for improving my relationships with other people and improving myself as a person, because relationships suck without honesty, especially the one that you have with yourself.
They say that the truth will set you free — they weren’t lying.
So go ahead and free yourself.
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