How We Lie to Ourselves - Jordan Peterson

Your knowledge is in fact limited. So you're limited by your ignorance. And so you can never necessarily say that what you're saying is true. Especially if you think of truth as a complete description of reality. It's like, well then never anything you say is true because it's incomplete. But I don't think that that's in accordance with people's actual experience of their reality. I think that you know perfectly well when you're lying, at least some of the time. And I think that manifests itself physiologically as much as any other way. You know, I've asked my classes, for example, many years in a row. Because I think it's an interesting phenomenon. It's like, how many of you have had the experience of a little voice in your head? Talking to you, essentially, when you're about to do something that you know to be wrong. And everyone puts up their hand. Now, it isn't a voice for everyone. Sometimes it's a feeling. But people have that capacity, right? We think about that as conscience, whatever that is. It's a form of moral orientation, partly as a consequence of socialization. I think it's biologically instantiated because it seems so incredibly... Well, people have been talking about it since the beginning of time. We better have a sense of when we're in alliance with the truth. Or when we're spouting falsehoods. Because when you act out a falsehood, then something terrible happens. That's the definition of a falsehood, fundamentally. It's based on a slightly different notion of what constitutes truth than one that's purely based on the idea of objective reality. It's based more on pragmatic reality. So, if you accept a set of propositions, and you receive a psychophysiological signal that that's unreliable. That's an indication that if you act it out in the world, you're going to walk over a cliff. And then you'll die. And that'll be the end of that. And so, to think that we have no instinct, so to speak, to help us identify when that's the case. Is to say that thought is of no utility in relationship to survival. We're hardwired to be tempted to lie to ourselves. And the lies are very interesting. You know, I've studied that for a very long time, trying to figure out exactly that. Now, so imagine that your belief systems are essentially maps of the world. So, they're maps that you use to orient yourself with. Because we move from point to point, right? We're active creatures. And then, those maps are very complexly structured. They're sort of hierarchically structured. And so, for example, you have some assumptions that are predicates of more of your actions than others. So, for example, here's a good way of thinking about it. Imagine that you're teaching your child to set the table. And they put the fork and the knife on the reverse sides of the plate. And you say, you're a stupid kid. You've always been a stupid kid. And you're always going to be a stupid kid. And there's nothing that you can do to change that. Well, you might say, well, is the fact that the child made that small mistake an indication that he or she is that kind of stupid kid? And the answer to that is, well, it's some evidence. Now, a sensible person would say, well, look, you got the knife and fork to the table. And you put it near the plate. So, good for you. But you made this local mistake, this tiny local mistake. You just flipped these and you got it exactly right. Now, I think everybody who had any sense would realize that the second response is much more reasonable than the first. Now, the first response is one that knocks out the child's whole axiomatic system. You say, well, you're stupid, so you're bad. You've always been that way, so that covers your entire history. You can't learn, so you're destined for that in the future. It's like you've torn apart the orienting map that the child uses in the world. And it's a very important illustration, because if you have an argument with someone that you love, one of the appropriate tactics is to make the argument about the least that it has to be about and to specify what you want as precisely as possible, because then you don't take the person apart. Now, there are times when we encounter pieces of information that threaten the integrity of our entire belief system. So, another example would be you have a relationship with someone, an intimate relationship, and it's predicated on the idea of fidelity. And so, all of your memories of the relationship have that as an axiom for the representations. The way that you construe the present has that as an axiom, and the way that you construe the future has that as an axiom. And then you find out that the person has betrayed you, and perhaps multiple times. Well, your world falls apart, and the reason it falls apart is because that presupposition of fidelity is an axiom for every representation of that relationship you've made, and maybe of every representation of yourself you've made, and maybe of every representation of other people that you've made. And so, it's a crucial card in the card house, right? You pull it out and everything falls. Okay, well, when people encounter information that is like that, they're likely to turn a blind eye to it. Well, that often happens in the case of betrayal, because it's very rare. It happens sometimes. It's very rare that if someone in an intimate relationship betrays you, that you can't go back over the past and think, you know, there was a hint two years ago. There was another hint 18 months ago. We weren't holding hands as often, you know. He or she was always distracted. I knew, but I didn't ask any questions. It's willful blindness. Now, the ancient Egyptians, they represented the state as Osiris, and Osiris was willfully blind. That was one of the characteristics of the state, and it was because of that that his evil brother Set, who was like a precursor to the idea of Satan, chopped him up and destroyed him. And so, the lies that you're talking about are often sins of omission rather than sins of commission. It's like something threatens our axiomatic system at a very fundamental level. We get a physiological signal of threat. The physiological signal says, you should watch this and pay attention and unfold it and unpack it. And we think, no, we're not going there. And no wonder, because, like, you want your whole house of cards to collapse and you fall into chaos. It's a terrible thing. So, that's why we're motivated to lie to ourselves, but it's not helpful. And the more you do it, the more likely a precipitous collapse is to occur because you're not updating your world models. It's very useful to know that our axiomatic systems orient us in the world and regulate our emotions. And so, if you destabilize someone's fundamental axioms, you dysregulate their negative emotion. That's also why people fight so hard to protect not only their belief systems but their social systems. So, there's plenty of motivation to falsify, but it's a bad idea. You live out the falsifications and the world hits you. How do you stop deceiving yourself, assuming that you want to stop doing so? Well, I don't believe that you can tell unerringly when you're telling the truth. I think that some of the time, when you lie outright, you know. And so, what I would recommend and have recommended in my writings, in my books, especially in Twelve Rules for Life, the first of my last two books, said, tell the truth or at least don't lie. And I added that codicil to the phrase, tell the truth, because it became evident to me when I was writing that, you know, I don't know the truth, certainly not in its fullness. And so, I can't say to someone, tell the truth. But I can say, if you believe that the truth is valuable, and if you believe that living your life according to the dictates of the truth is for the best for you and everyone else, let's say, then you could at least stop lying. And then, I would say that as you pay attention to what you say, so that you're attending to your deceptive statements and trying to stop making them. Some of them, maybe, you know outright they're not true. Some of them make you feel uneasy and weak. That would be a less evident criteria of falsehood, but still a reasonable one. You stop doing that. And then, your eye for such things, or your ear for such things, or your embodied capacity to evaluate such things develops, just as everything develops with practice. And your intent, which is to maintain truth in your speech, becomes sharper and more focused across time. And perhaps you get, as you eliminate the obvious untruths, you get better and better at detecting the more subtle untruths, and better and better at avoiding being entangled with those as well. So the first issue, I guess, is the decision that it's best to live in truth. And then you have to decide how far you're willing to take that, if that becomes an absolute, for example, or if it's an important guideline, but perhaps to be superseded by other things. You have to sort that out for yourself. Once having established that, then I believe that you decide, in practice, not lying. And then, possibly, if you're fortunate, if the world smiles on you, you'll engage in less self-deception. I guess the last thing I would add to that is that there's another form of self-deception that I wrote about in the second of my last two books, the last one, Beyond Order. There's a chapter in there called Don't Hide Things in the Fog. And that really deals with self-deception too. So you might say, well, there's one form of self-deception that occurs when you say something that you know not to be true, and pretend even to yourself that it's true, or even act as if it's true, or base other statements or actions on it as if it's true. But there's a more subtle form of self-deception, which I think is more pervasive, which is the unwillingness to look at, or the willingness to turn away from evidence that you know would undermine something that you want to believe, or make things inconvenient for you. I think a cliched example is maybe someone runs a company, and they have a chief financial officer, and they know that person's not exactly straight, but it's convenient not to look at the books. So maybe when they're around that person, they feel guilty and uncomfortable, and that's a sign that something's rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. But then the self-deceptive act is to not look where you know you should look. And that's the sort of thing that people refer to when they talk about the elephant under the carpet, or the skeleton in the closet. And sometimes, to mix metaphors terribly, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie, but often, if you have the sense that there's something more to the story, it's painful and difficult to delve into it. But to not do so, which is the easy route, is a form of self-deception, a very common self-deception. And I don't think my experience as a clinician, and my personal experience as well, is that when you have a sense that something's up, and you fail to act, you almost inevitably pay a much higher price for it at some point deferred into the future. So you have to think that through for yourself, and ask yourself if you believe that's true. And if it is true, unless you want more trouble in the future, then perhaps you investigate when your moral unease, let's say, alerts you to the fact that there's something to investigate. The problem of self-deception is extremely thorny, and it's tangled up with the issue of ignorance as well, right? How do you know when you just don't know something? And how do you know when you're being willfully blind? And how do you know when you're outright lying? All of those things are, especially to yourself, all of those things are very complicated. So, to some degree, the answer is, well, you have to develop a philosophy of life that's detailed, that contains within it an assessment of your thoughts about the relationship between truth and deceit. So, for example, do you believe that it's okay to lie? Is it okay to deceive other people to get what you want? Are there occasions when it's okay to deceive other people if that helps them get what they want? So, that would be an instance, for example, of what people perhaps call white lies, right? Lies that are designed to be of benefit. Are they appropriate? Do you feel that it's okay to deceive yourself or other people in the pursuit of things that you believe are valuable? And none of those are trivial questions, and they can't be answered with trivial answers. So, to some degree, you need a moral philosophy that privileges the truth above all else if you wish to cease engaging in self-deception. And then you might ask, well, how would you develop such a philosophy? And some of that might be, well, reading about moral philosophy, reading literature, because it often deals with questions of good and evil and deception, thinking about it, writing about it, reading about it. Well, I said that. And also contemplating how central an issue this is for your life. How important is this? There are times in your life where you know that the thing that you're saying is not true. It's a deception. It's a lie of some sort. And you're using it to manipulate yourself or another person or the world. And you're also possessed, fully possessed, of the idea that you can get away with it. And there's a satanic arrogance about that. In fact, that is the archetypal arrogance that's portrayed in the mythological character Satan, because Satan is precisely the archetype of the element of the mind that believes that it can twist and bend the structure of reality without paying the price for that. And you can't imagine anything that's more arrogant than that, because really, do you really think that you can twist the structure of a reality and that that's going to work out for you without it snapping back? It's so obvious that that can't work, that everyone knows it. But anyways, back to the initial point, is that you know, by the rules of the game that you yourself are playing, that some of the times you're violating the rules of the game that you're playing. And the first issue with regards to, say, stating the truth or behaving in a responsible manner would be merely stop cheating at whatever game it is that you've chosen to play.