The Lies People Tell Themselves

I ran across a recent Scientific American article on how people deceive themselves.

We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague.

The idea has been around for decades going back at least to Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene.

I first heard about this concept in Stephen Pinker's How The Mind Works, which is one of the more memorably books I have read. The concept is that basically there is an evolutionary war that has been going on regarding truth ever since humans became humans. Here is how it works: It can be advantageous for an individual to lie. Which leads to it being advantageous to be able to detect when someone is lying. Which leads to self-deception in order to thwart people from knowing you are lying. After all, the best way to fool someone into believing what you say is to believe it yourself. You, unknowingly, really believe what you say even though it isn't true.

But we are not mindless robots. We can think about our actions abstractly. One of the major differences between moral and immoral people is how introspective they are when it comes to their beliefs and actions. Moral people are always asking themselves if their actions are in alignment with their values. If you teach your kids not to lie but lie to them, you are not acting in alignment with your moral values.

If you are a lawyer who is sworn to act in accordance the lawyers rules of professional responsibility and within the law but do not, you are not acting morally.

If you tasked with ensuring that lawyers act in accordance the lawyers rules of professional responsibility and within the law but do not, you are not acting morally.

Most evil in the world is the result of people not acting in accordance with their professed values.