Self-Deception
Building futures with people who won't see the present
I think most of us who are still careful to avoid Covid have had some version of the following conversation:
Me: Is there a particular reason you stopped taking pandemic precautions?
Them: Well the pandemic isn’t as bad as it used to be.
Me: Right, and is there some piece of evidence that you looked at and felt was in support of that belief?
Them: No… I just shifted when everyone else shifted.
Me: Does that strike you as a good reason?
Them: Not really. But I have a strong sense that I’m not wrong for doing so.
What is striking about conversations like these is that often they take place with people who are otherwise quite committed to holding evidence-based beliefs. Maybe they have a sign in their yard that begins, “In this house… we believe in science.” Or maybe they themselves are scientists. The point is that they are what I would consider reasonable people. And yet, they hold not only unreasonable beliefs but also unsupported beliefs — that is, beliefs that reveal themselves to have no evidentiary foundation. It’s this latter fact that intrigues me the most.
Self-deception is a tricky thing. What sets it apart from merely holding a false belief is that the holding of the false belief is motivated by desire, and desire is not usually thought to be a legitimate influence on one’s beliefs. We don’t, for example, think it legitimate to believe that one is benevolent simply because we want it to be so. Rather, we think that beliefs about our own benevolence should have some tether to the reality of our actions — do we consider others’ best interests? Do we weigh their interests more than our own? If the answers to these questions are “no,” then part of responsible believing, in a sense, is adopting the contrary beliefs despite our desires and indeed disappointments in what those beliefs reveal. The truth is independent of desire, in at least this way.
In philosophical terms, this peculiar feature of self-deception reveals that ethics and epistemology, i.e. the study of knowledge itself, have more intersecting points than we would think. We have responsibilities in the epistemic realm just as we have responsibilities in the ethical. So it matters a great deal actually how we come to form our beliefs; how our beliefs are sensitive or insensitive to the evidence in front of us; how our beliefs are shaped by the demographic facts of the messenger. What we believe matters — not just because we don’t want to be wrong, but also because we don’t want to do wrong.
The flip-side of responsibility is wrongdoing, and philosophers have also explored various ways that failures to live up to our epistemic responsibilities constitute moral injuries to others. Miranda Fricker’s pioneering book, Epistemic Injustice, was a landmark in this field because she showed that the life of the mind is not separate from the moral requirements that govern interpersonal life. Power runs through our belief systems, and we are morally responsible for correcting the outsize influence that power has on the content of our beliefs. This work has since proliferated across thinkers around the world who have developed theories of epistemic responsibility as it intersects with race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and every other demographic that has an axis of power running through it.
Self-deception, then, is not a private affair. It is, instead, a building block of what Charles Mills refers to as a “socially-generated illusion.” These illusions are part and parcel of systems of unjust power — how they originate, how they maintain themselves, how they justify themselves. They are ideology in the strict Marxist sense. So it is crucial that we understand self-deception insofar as it is a part of a pernicious and unjust political phenomenon.
Nobody seems more self-deceived to me than the interlocutor from the dialogue at the beginning of this article. After all, they fulfill all the criteria of self-deception: false beliefs (“the pandemic is over”) that are unduly motivated by desire (“I want the pandemic to be over”). But the traditional accounting of what exactly is going wrong in their belief-formation seems to undersell it.
Consider the following explanation: Alfred Mele chalks self-deception up to various ways we mishandle data. We either consider the data on one side too strongly, discount data on the other side too readily, ignore evidence that might thwart our desired belief-outcome, or misinterpret data in ways that reinforce our desired belief. All of these are classic failures to weigh the evidence correctly.
Surely some people in denial about the pandemic are doing this. We’re all familiar with the person who clings to the now-debunked study showing “masks don’t work,” or the person whose eyes glaze over when confronted with the ongoing death toll. Evidence-based epistemic practices are not in their finest era, to put it lightly.
But these explanations don’t adequately capture what is going wrong in the opening conversation — it’s not that our interlocutor has failed to treat evidence in the proper manner, crumpled scientific studies filling their trashcan after a half-hearted review. It’s that they have seemingly abandoned their commitment to evidence altogether. After all, they admit to not being able to point to a single moment where they changed their pandemic behavior on the basis of evidence. This is a kind of epistemic lacuna that is not explained by a simple mishandling of data. Rather, we are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of a method of knowing, i.e. the scientific method, that our interlocutor otherwise endorses and adopts in their regular life. The lawn sign actually states, “In this house…we believe in science (except when we don’t).”
So this is who we find ourselves trying to forge moral and political life with: people whose self-deception touches not only their beliefs but also the methodologies by which they acquire those beliefs when it comes to the pandemic. They have rejected an epistemic methodology that they otherwise self-reflectively endorse as reliable (remember the original lawn sign). And when confronted with this abandonment, they don’t know what to say, but they retain a sense of being justified nonetheless (after the surprise wears off). What is revealed and then quickly covered up is a kind of epistemic gap in which the ordinary machinations of the mind have gone quiet. In its place is desire.
I don’t know how to forge moral and political life with people who only see the world as they want to see it. Imagination and fantasy surely have a place in political life — it is in fact the only way we can plan for something better, something beyond the terrible conditions that have been handed to us. But it comes too early if it impairs our ability to assess the current conditions, if fantasy distorts reality instead of assisting us in moving beyond it.
Our capacity for sober reflection on reality, then, and all of the ongoing grief that this reflection churns up, is a necessary precondition for both being right and doing right. James Baldwin, perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th century, got it right when he wrote: “One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man.” (source) Sobriety is one of our greatest assets in the face of what the pandemic has wrought, what it continues to wreak.
Baldwin goes on to remind us, though, that “most of mankind is not all of mankind.” Not all of us are in the business of destruction and death, though it can feel like that when we lose yet another friend or family member to the allure of self-deception, that tempting belief that we already live in the world we desire. We don’t, and it’s imperative that we acknowledge this terrible fact. But I am at least heartened by another fact: namely, that this insistence on living in the reality of ongoing injustice paves the way, indeed is the only way, towards building a world in which our beliefs and our desires merge not through an epistemic sleight of hand but through the hard, communal work of making it come true.