The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  Thus, on the subject of Israel, a vast wave of biased argumentation washes over people who have not had (or taken) the chance to study the matter carefully. The key is a fundamental inversion of reality: The Palestinians are not displaced people, driven from their homes and their land and persecuted ever since. They (and Arabs more generally) are terrorists—virulent anti-Semites—against whom all is permitted. What looks like Israeli terrorism and relentless theft of land and water is really just a proactive campaign to prevent another holocaust (apparently by inciting the very feelings that would invite one).

  The truth about Israel’s theft of Arab land and water since 1967 via “settlements” was well put by a pair of Israeli historians:Deception, shame, concealment, denial, and repression have characterized the state’s behavior with respect to the flow of funds to the settlements. It can be said that this has been an act of duplicity in which all of the Israeli governments since 1967 have been partner. This massive self-deception still awaits the research that will reveal its full magnitude.

  As is so often true, what can be said in Israel is usually more honest and detailed about Israel than what can be said on the same subject in the United States.

  WHY FALSE HISTORICAL NARRATIVES?

  False historical narratives are important because every country has one, they are often fiercely defended (and regularly upgraded), and they provide a strong underlying system of logic (easily biased) for interpreting social and historical trends and truth. In short, they are available to justify all action—contemplated, under way, or accomplished. Deception is often involved in their construction. That is, people consciously lie to create them, but once created, false historical narratives act as self-deceptions at the group level. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they take to be true.

  A true historical narrative might force us to make reparations for past crimes and to confront more directly their continuing effects. A false one permits us to continue a policy of denial, counterattack, and expansion at the expense of others. Why do we continue to attack our Arab neighbors? Well, because they have long harbored racist animosity toward our Bible-ordained project. Why are we attacking Iraq? Because it is part of our divine mission, our “American exceptionalism” that requires us to interfere and sacrifice for the good of the world.

  Inevitably, false historical narratives will have their deepest connection with religion: Where did we come from and with what aim? To that subject we shall return, but first we consider self-deception and war, to which false historical narratives make their own contribution.

  CHAPTER 11

  Self-Deception and War

  It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war. Actually, truth is often dead long before war begins. Processes of self-deception make an unusually large contribution to warfare—especially in the decision to launch aggressive ones. This is as depressing as it is important: one of our most critical behaviors, often with huge, widespread costs, appears to be strongly ruled by forces of self-deception. There is, indeed, a subdiscipline of military studies devoted to the study of military incompetence, and this does not usually refer to computational error. It refers to biased and self-deluded mental processes. Think Custer’s Last Stand.

  Faulty decisions are said to arise from four main causes: being overconfident, underestimating the other side, ignoring one’s own intelligence reports, and wasting manpower. All are connected to self-deception. Overconfidence and underestimation of others go hand in hand, and once self-deception is entrained, the conscious mind does not wish to hear contrary evidence—even when provided by its own agents, whose express purpose is to provide such information. Indeed, the old rule was to shoot the messenger. Likewise, self-deception will make it more likely that manpower is underestimated (vide US invasion of Iraq in 2003) or employed along illusory lines of attack. In the military it is said that “amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” False logistics easily feeds overconfidence and vice versa.

  For faulty logistics (and other acts of self-deception), Napoleon’s invasion of Russia provides the classic example. In an extreme act of overconfidence, he grossly underestimated the enemy, the harsh conditions of the Russian winter, and, most critically, the problem of supply. When he reached Moscow, he was more than a thousand miles from home and his men and horses required 850 carts a day for their care alone, never mind the additional carts needed to transfer weapons, medicine, the injured, and so on. There was no way such a feat could be sustained, so the French were forced to live off the land, but of course the Russians did their best to make this difficult. Stuck without resources far from home, with no ability to seize Moscow (or clear advantage in doing so) and the Russian winter closing in, Napoleon was forced to withdraw. He marched in with 450,000 men and returned with 6,000. Even worse, he lost 175,000 horses. The men could be replaced; the horses could not. After another disastrous foray by Napoleon into Russia a year later, the Russian army stood outside of Paris. It was the problem of supply that broke the back of the overconfident warmonger. Napoleon had been very successful before his disastrous Russian adventure. This is a deep feature of self-deception: success entrains confidence but also overconfidence. How many of us have taken success one step too far? (Bill Clinton and his women?)

  Here we will gain an overview of the evolution of warfare in humans and the growing role self-deception plays. Besides such classics as World War I, we will concentrate especially on recent wars where the facts are well known: the US war on Iraq in 2003 and the US-supported Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008. These are not to suggest that the war in the Congo is not more hideous than all other ongoing wars put together, and probably more deserving of analysis in terms of deceit and self-deception, but the relevant information for this is far more meager than for the recent US and Israeli wars.

  CHIMPANZEE RAIDING → HUMAN WARFARE

  Chimpanzees reveal a likely route to human warfare. Chimps raid other groups, or, more precisely, usually three or more chimpanzee males working together will watch a neighboring group until they spot a chance to make a lightning strike on an isolated male (or occasionally more), who is attacked and killed. The marauders quickly return to the relative safety of their own territory. If over a period of time enough males are killed, the killers may take over their neighbors’ territory, along with some of the surviving females, but with even a single rival dead, the killers can expect to gain a little more territory and, thereby, food. At the Gombe Preserve in Tanzania in the 1970s, one group of chimps appeared to pick off and kill isolated males in a neighboring group until, after four years, all seven were gone. In another area of Tanzania, five adult males in their prime disappeared under similar circumstances, and after ten years the entire group was gone, with most of the females (and territory) absorbed by the larger (murderous) group. Attacks appear to be carefully planned, that is, launched when there is a clear likelihood of success—an isolated male is quickly overwhelmed by a superior force acting in silence.

  In both chimpanzees and our own lineage, primitive warfare—or raiding—was a male territorial strategy based on the coordinated murder of neighboring males. The benefits were increased access to resources, including, in some cases, adult females—in either case, a net increase in reproductive rate. Deception by attackers was based primarily on hiding and surprise, with traps on the other side unlikely. Recently, remarkable evidence has surfaced of ten to twenty males engaging in regular warfare against a neighboring group. About every two weeks, males are drawn by some unknown signal to walk very quietly, single-file, into a neighboring territory to attack a vulnerable male. Infants are often killed, as in animal infanticides more generally, the better to bring the mothers into reproductive readiness. Likewise, an adult female is sometimes killed, but the overwhelming targets are other males.

  This pattern of intergroup male raids leading to murder and later territorial expansion probably lasted in our lineage for severa
l million years, undoubtedly increasing steadily in subtlety and design. Detailed studies of surviving hunter-gatherers suggest that intergroup war was widespread and dangerous. The best data from both archaeological sites and current hunter-gatherers suggest an astonishing 14 percent of human mortality every generation due to war (a percentage that thankfully has declined steadily since then). Killers were almost always men, as usually were the victims. Circumstances varied from massacres of vulnerable strangers encountered by chance to deliberate forays in search of victims in distant groups. The key was usually overwhelming advantage in surprise, numbers, or technology. Sometimes surprise consisted of inviting people to a peace banquet and then slaughtering them. Evidence from slash-and-burn agriculturalists (such as the Yanomamo of South America or the Dugun Dani of New Guinea) suggests that raiding often resulted in killing but that battles were rare, largely ceremonial, and ended badly only when one displaying group discovered to its dismay that it was greatly outnumbered, after which it might well be massacred. Participation in warfare was voluntary, but since attackers were rarely killed, it was, for them, not very dangerous.

  The emergence of battles—conflict between massed warriors on each side—is much more recent, almost certainly connected to the large increases in the size of human societies about ten thousand years ago associated with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry. With these battles involving large numbers of soldiers, several new elements came into play. Relevant information was apt to be much more scarce, the outcome harder to predict, the opportunities for fooling the opponent greater, all of which are more congenial to self-deception. Overconfidence emerges as a key variable, a factor that by itself can create wholesale slaughter, especially when practiced on all sides (witness World War I).

  Perhaps worst of all—from an evolutionary perspective—there is now lower negative biological feedback on those making bad decisions. You decide, hundreds die—but do you also die or even suffer? If you choose to attack an apparently isolated male chimp in a neighboring group and you miscalculate, you may lose your life. That is, natural selection acts directly back on any self-deception that helped produce the mistake. The same was probably often true of primitive warfare. Of course, it is sometimes true of those initiating large-scale wars: not only may your own country be invaded and your relatives slaughtered or suppressed, but you too may be killed—vide Adolf Hitler, whose thousand-year Reich ended with his own pathetic death by suicide in a concrete bunker only six years after he launched his disastrous wars. Still, in terms of natural selection, this was one, or a few men, who launched wars with aggregate costs of probably more than sixty million people killed.

  Even minimal evolutionary feedback to leaders is not necessarily the case. The war on Vietnam was a disastrous miscalculation, violating a fundamental US Army doctrine: no land war in Asia. It cost more than fifty thousand US lives and well over a million in Vietnam, and another million in Cambodia and Laos, while bringing on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia with an additional million or so slaughtered. It also left behind an ecological disaster that to this day is producing, among other effects, horribly mutated and deformed children. It produced no known “strategic” benefit. But those who designed and propagated the war in the United States suffered no such adverse effects. Neither JFK’s advisers—“the best and the brightest”—nor LBJ and his, nor Nixon and Kissinger suffered, so far as we know, any adverse consequences to their inclusive fitness. In other words, there may well have been stronger selection against warlike stupidity and self-deception in chimpanzees than in ourselves where the decision-makers are far removed from the biological consequences of their decisions. Herbert Spencer summarized the general effect: “The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.”

  The switch to large-scale battles and warfare that may stretch for weeks and even years has several important consequences for self-deception. Predicting the future is far more difficult than in a single cross-border chimpanzee raid, and there is opportunity for bluff on a large scale. One may bargain in bad faith. It may also be necessary to convince the home population or onlookers that the war is worth fighting or supporting—in any case, not opposing. These generate a whole host of new opportunities for deceit and self-deception. Recent wars, such as the 2003 US war on Iraq, for example, are more of this kind: not fooling your opponent but your own citizens and, if possible, the larger world.

  SELF-DECEPTION ENCOURAGES WARFARE

  Evolutionary logic suggests that self-deception is expected to be especially likely (as well as costly) in interactions with members of other groups. In interactions with group members, self-deception is inhibited by two forces. Partial overlap in self-interest gives greater weight to others’ opinions, and within-group feedback provides a partial corrective to personal self-deception. In interactions between groups, everyday processes of self-enhancement are uninhibited by negative feedback from others or by concern for their welfare, while derogation of the outsider’s moral worth, physical strength, and bravery is likewise unchecked by direct feedback or shared self-interest. These factors result in systematic faulty mechanisms of assessment, in turn making aggression more likely and contests more costly (without any average gain). Processes of group self-deception only make matters worse. Within each group, individuals are often mis-oriented in the same direction, easily reinforcing one another, while absence of contrary views is taken as confirming evidence (even silence being misinterpreted as support).

  When you and an opponent who are fairly equally matched face off in an escalating fight, each has to decide how long to persist—given that if one is going to lose anyway, it is better to lose early and thereby lower the costs. There seem to be several reasons why in an even match, a positive illusion that exaggerates your own competitive abilities and chance of prevailing may reduce your chance of losing (along with the cost of battle). The positive illusion increases self-confidence and, therefore, apparent competitive ability and motivation. It decreases signals indicating fear and other emotions that would undermine the effectiveness of any threats. It therefore increases the chance that the opponent will view you as unbeatable and will give in outright (or be so scared that he fights poorly). The positive illusion may actually make you more effective mentally, because it reduces cognitive load by making you focus on positive strategies that may work instead of the full range (although there is, of course, a risk in inattention to the downside). In short, positive illusions may be important in a fight, because we partly commit more resources to it. On the other hand, we will suffer less ability to read our opponent and fail to respond appropriately to negative information.

  Sports would provide a useful parallel, but there has been precious little useful study of self-deception in sports. It would be interesting to have data from sports. Are more fearful individuals worse at sports, since to be good at competition it helps to think you are going to win, which is easier the less fearful you are about losing? The only evidence I know of comes from swimming. Individuals who are more likely in a choice situation to concentrate on negative rather than neutral stimuli do worse, while those who concentrate on positive over neutral do not do any better.

  It is a striking fact that almost every category of self-deception we have described in this book is conducive to aggressive wars. Modern war is conducted against an out-group by powerful people who have an exaggerated opinion of themselves and their degree of morality, are overconfident, often have an illusion of control, enjoy taking risks, and are almost always male. Let us briefly review these biases.

  The general bias to consider oneself superior to others is obviously congenial to waging war, where these positive traits include strength, endurance, fighting ability, and so on. Both sexes display this bias. Derogating others is especially dangerous if it both incites your aggression and prevents you from seeing the power and tenacity of the resistance your aggression is likely to engender. Overestimating your own morality is a
critical bias since it naturally leads you to overemphasize the strength of your own position and to underemphasize that of your opponents. After all, when you invade your neighbor’s country, there is already a prima facie case in favor of the neighbor and an expectation of a “home field” advantage (see page 255).