Today’s Aphorism: “Lying to others is the exception. Mostly we lie to ourselves.” Friedrich Nietzsche

We think we are only lying when we knowingly tell someone something else that isn’t true. In fact, we are often engaged in refusing to see the truth ourselves. Thus, Nietzsche says, “Lying to others is the expection.”

You might start by calling it self-deception. Although I think self-delusion is common too, or just delusional. I’ve even heard “delulu.” Then there’s “rationalization.” Which is where you take actions or make arguments designed to shore up your delusions.

What is this like? At work, perhaps, we pretend that a problem is getting better when it isn’t. We pretend that we can cover up a small mistake and then we actually believe it never happened. Our child really is doing better in school; we probably won’t lose our job even though the company is cutting back …

Or how about this one? People who watch the news and think they know what life is like in another state, or another country. Invariably, their incomplete information justifies their own political stance.

We lie to ourselves when the news is bad, usually, and don’t want to admit that we are not the beautiful/brilliant/kind/generous person that we think we are. We don’t want to even begin to acknolwedge that eventually, time will run out and we will be no more.

It’s morning again in America, remember?

My younger brother, asked about mortality back when he was a young man, said, “Oh, no, I don’t ever think about that. I think of it this way. My life is like one of those TV shows and I’m the hero of my life, so, I can’t die.” I still feel speechless when I remember this conversation. Of course, it’s still working for him almost 40 years later, and, when it finally isn’t, he’ll probably have other things, or nothing, to worry about ….still. Delulu.

I hope it doesn’t run in the family. Although, I also think, it runs in every family.

“The wife is always the last to know” is an old phrase meaning that when there’s infidelity, the person closest is the one who can’t see it. And it’s not just adultery that’s this way.

To figure out, you have to observe their actions, dispassionately, and that’s tiring and confusing. And it’s hard to be dispassionate when you’re emotionally involved, right?

And, remember, lying to other people is the exception, so maybe they’re lying to themself too when they say they love you! They don’t want to admit that they don’t because the relationship has benefits for them. If they actually didn’t love you, then they are stealing the benefits. That would make them a bad person, and they don’t believe they’re a bad person (more self decepton). So they engage in this deception of themself and you at the same time. Who will ever find out?

That depends on on smart you are. And how honest. And how willing to see stuff that just isn’t pretty about both of you.

Let me take an example from a book I am reading. George Michael, a Life, is by James Gavin. It is the unembellished story of Michael’s life from the beginning to the end, dealing with issues such as the quest for fame, the family relationships, the love life. In the part I just finished, Michael is mourning the death of his Brazilian lover and friend Anselmo, who died of AIDS. It is 1993. “He died because he went back to Brazil,” Michael was heard to claim. “If he’d stayed in L.A., the better medical care would have saved him.”

That’s confused enough. But when you add in that Michael put off visiting Anselmo in Brazil, so that Anselmo died while Michael was still pretending Anselmo would recover, you begin to see that Michael wasn’t very clear headed. He failed to go, predominantly, because he refused to acknowledge his relationship with the man he privately called his “partner.” He thought if he came out of the closet as gay, his fans would desert him.

This is self deception. He and Anselmo were “partners” but when Anselmo really needed Michael, he was worrying about his reputation.

When Michael later did come out of the closet, the fans did not abandon him, even though the press was ugly and his best music was behind him. But by then, he had missed the chance to be at his lover’s bedside as he died. Also the funeral. So strange it is, thinking about it, Michael wanted to maintain the lie that he was a straight man so much … that he let his true love down.

You see how it is. We lie to others, yes. But mostly, we lie to ourselves. If Michael hadn’t believed that Anselmo was getting better, or even that fans would reject him for being gay (and why did he believe they would, when Elton John did just fine as a gay pop star) things could have been different.

This brings me back to the 12 Step view of life, and the Tenth Step, which states: “when we were wrong we promptly admitted it.” That is hard. And since you tend to conspire to keep your deception of yourself a secret from yourself, you never call yourself on your own lies. So how will you ever be reminded to admit that you were wrong to yourself?

It’s kind of an interior conspiracy.

Sometimes hindsight will deliver you a pictore of the damage self-deception has wrought. However, I know a lot of people who went to their graves without ever showing awareness of various family outrages. It seemed that to the very end, they protected themselves from understanding what they had done.

As for me, what might I have lied to myself about? Do I know? I do know a couple of things. But you’ll have to forgive me for not writing them down. They have had to do with love, and family, and prestige, and even intelligence. These are issues around which I struggle. And they are areas in which I must admit, I have not always told myself the truth.

I’m trying to do better.

How about you? Have you mastered the art of telling yourself the truth? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. Because lying to yourself is just so easy.

“Lying to others is the exception. Mostly we lie to ourselves.” Friedrich Nietzsche. What can I say, I don’t really like Nietzsche’s writing, I think he’s been guilty of some outrageously dangerous aphorisms, the one about God being dead coming to mind immediately, but no one can be wrong all the time. And Nietzsche is right about this.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. 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. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamozof . This is a simple precis of the type I’ve come to expect from Dostoyevsky, the great philosophical novelist, in whose work, if you studied long enough, you could find deeply Christian answers to every human question.

“Mental health is an ongoing dedication to reality at all costs.” — M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie. The famous 70’s psychologist suggests that to the degree that we refuse to see the truth, we are mentally ill. Or perhaps, putting it another way, being able to look at the truth and acknowledge it is a critical component of having integrity and being mentally sound.

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who … are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates.” The Big Book of AA by Bill W. states that inability to be honest with yourself is the core reason for failure at obtianing a spiritual recovery from alcoholism. Further, Bill states that “They seem to have been born this way.” I have thought about this so many times. But it seems that even for a normal person, telling yourself the truth can be difficult.

• Leadership and Self-Deception: The Secret to Transforming Relationships and Unleashing Results by The Arbinger Institute
• The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers
• Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception by Daniel Goleman
• Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception by Joseph T. Hallinan
• Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
• Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception by Neel Burton
• Self-Deception Unmasked by Alfred R. Mele