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

by Robert Trivers

  Another example of noticing a pattern of behavior and acting consciously against it concerns displacement activities. It is a fact of human (and monkey) psychology that aggression is easily displaced onto others. Angry with your spouse, you may be harder on your children or kick the dog, often to their surprise. It is as if your anger is incited and, looking around for targets, is blocked from the logical one, so it looks for nearby victims, preferably those smaller and less able to retaliate. This is such a common occurrence that everyone sees it coming, including me, and yet often, as before, the initial impulse is to indulge the anger, even if shortly following it with contrition and apology.

  WHY ARE WE SO COMPULSIVE?

  Why do we repeat ourselves so often? Why do we have compulsions that reappear despite our every effort to suppress them? Why do we have lifelong arguments inside ourselves that hardly change and are never resolved? Why no learning? The details differ from case to case, but I believe that genetics is almost always involved.

  As much as 60 percent of all our genes are active in the human brain, the most genetically diverse tissue in our body (see Chapter 6). Thus we expect enormous genetic variation affecting behavior, including deceit and self-deception. This means we may often differ one from one another psychologically on genetic grounds alone, with no environmental or social rhyme or reason accessible to us. Only by studying genealogies in our immediate environment—especially in our own extended family—could we glimpse the genes in action, and this is very difficult. Thus, for all we know, much of the variation in social complexity around us is beyond our ability to understand, at least in causal terms.

  Our genes do not change, although their expression patterns may. If they continue to act in the same way, we may experience this as a compulsion we are unable to change. Likewise, genes may have laid down an early structure to our desires and impulses, a structure that is difficult to modify. This may well mean that we have repetitive features to our behavior that we wish we could do without but that are entrained in us by our particular genotype.

  As for our internal conflicts, remember that the interests of our maternal and paternal genes are in conflict throughout our lives, so that internal conflict resulting from such genes may be hard to resolve (see Chapter 4). On the other hand, as we have noted, the older we get, the more symmetrically we are related to others on our maternal and paternal genes (more to children and grandchildren, less to siblings and parents), so we are expected to become more internally peaceful as we head into our sixties and experience (separately) the “positivity effect” of old age (see Chapter 6).

  Regarding fighting our compulsion, few are as strong or regular (in a man, at least) as the compulsion to seek out sexual companionship late in the evening, with whomever and on whatever terms. One lesson I have learned in more recent years—a good forty years after it actually would have been useful—is that it is better to go to bed lonely than to wake up guilty. Formulating this as a simple rule has helped me to enforce it, not always but more often than not. And when not, I am more conscious that I am waking up guilty and that I’d better pray myself back into my own good graces and become more conscious. I also believe that there is strength in the new approach. No guilt morning after morning starts to build up a feeling of genuine confidence and relaxed strength. You can set yourself on a better path, and now you see the reinforcing benefits. How long this effect will last, of course, is another matter, but on the assumption that repetitive behavior leading to repetitive guilt is suboptimal, the goal seems worthy and obvious.

  THE VALUE OF BEING CONSCIOUS

  There are two great axes in human mental life: intelligence and consciousness. You can be very bright but unconscious, or slow but conscious, or any of the combinations in between. Of course, consciousness comes in many forms and degrees. We can deny reality and then deny the denial. We can be aware that someone in a group means us harm but not know who. We can know who, but not why, why but not when, and so on.

  Regarding deceit and self-deception, lack of consciousness of such tendencies in others may victimize us. We may be too likely to believe them, especially when they are in positions of authority. We may believe what is printed in newspapers. We may believe con artists. And we may easily embrace false historical narratives. To be conscious is to be aware of possibilities, including those arising in a world saturated with deceit and self-deception.

  Consciousness and ability to change are two different variables. I am prone to be moralistic, overconfident, and dismissive of alternative views, more or less as expected for an organism of my type, but I am also conscious that I am biased in this way. I can cite chapter and verse. Do I wish it were otherwise? Yes. Can I change it? No. This to me is the real paradox or tragedy of self-deception—we wish we could do better but we can’t.

  On the other hand, consciousness of deceit and self-deception allows us to enjoy it more, to understand it more deeply, to guard against it better (as it is directed against us), and, finally, to fight such tendencies in ourselves should we wish to. Mostly it gives us much greater insight into the social world surrounding us, everything from the lies of the government and the media to the deeper self-deceptions we tell ourselves and our loved ones.

  THE DANGER OF FANTASY IN PROPAGATING DECEPTION

  There is a kind of self-deception—indulging in fantasy—that makes deception less rational and less likely to succeed. Certainly for serious crimes, it is valuable to think the matter through consciously and carefully in some detail. Neither self-deception nor (especially) fantasy is apt to be of much use. Consider minor crimes. You are trying to sneak a small amount of illicit drugs through customs. The one thing you haven’t thought through is what you are going to do when you get caught, perhaps because it is unpleasant to contemplate. You may also imagine that not thinking about the matter will be to your advantage, sailing through customs based on a pretense of innocence, bolstered by absence of fear. But exactly the opposite is likely to happen. Having failed to think about what you will do when caught, you become more and more nervous as you get closer to that moment. If you were calm in your knowledge of how you would handle this awkward situation, you would project much more nearly the innocence you would like to. The Times Square bomber was required to leave his engine running to set off his bomb properly, but he was not required to have his full set of house keys attached to the ring. Did he figure the ensuing fire would incinerate them or did he simply fail to carefully think through his crime?

  Two absurd examples of the futility of letting fantasy guide deception were provided by the same individual, a distinguished mathematician who was an expert on chaos theory in the 1980s. In each case, he was trying to move small quantities of hashish across international borders, and in each case, he became persona non grata in the country he was visiting, unable to return for five years. In the UK he tried to send the hashish to his girlfriend in Germany, hollowing out a mathematics book, putting it in a university envelope, with her address and his, and marking it fourth class, as indeed it was (a book). But fourth class permits the postmaster to inspect the contents at will. The post office was in the basement of his building, and the package never left, but he did. The point is that his first job was to send off something that could not be traced to him—not to create the perfect pseudo-book for the Germans, complete with a real university stamp and fourth-class postage to show he had nothing to hide.

  He then tried to bring hashish into Italy by train from France. He dressed up as a Catholic priest, on the theory perhaps that a priest could get away with murder in Italy, which may well be true, but first he had to convince the Italians that he was, in fact, a priest. Since he had a large, Karl Marx beard, appearance to match, and spoke no Italian, the customs officers naturally became suspicious. Neither he nor the drugs entered Italy. In each case, he appeared to be caught up in the fantasy of deception, producing elaborate hoaxes, which failed to either defend himself or fool the adversary.

  THE BENEFITS OF PRAYER AND
MEDITATION

  Mindful meditation can produce long-term benefits in both mood and immune function. Prayer may have similar effects. Meditation and prayer may also be used against self-deception directly, but this may depend very much on the kind of prayer we use.

  Although I had studied the gospels deeply by the time I was thirteen and had given myself over completely to this system of thought insofar as I understood it, I never knew that I never knew how to say the Lord’s Prayer until I was on an airplane years later seated next to a “religious,” that is, a person who had given himself over to the understanding and love of God. Beyond a priest or a monk, he was a lone soul, way out there in his religious knowledge. So we got to talking. Did I pray? he asked. Yes, I prayed. How did I pray? I mostly said the Lord’s Prayer. And how did I say it? And here I burst forth with the old Presbyterian marching band version on which I had been raised. Out rolled the prayer as so much martial music and self-assertion:Our father who art in heaven

  Hallowed be thy name.

  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

  On earth as it is in heaven.

  It rolls right along as if you are telling God where and what she is. It even ends with an assertion that, spoken properly, inverts meaning—the way we act on earth, with your blessings, is the way you would have us act (as in heaven). No, no, no, said my new friend. Here is how you pray: the emphasis is on your own humility, on submitting to God’s will—“Thy will be done, Thy kingdom come” with “thy” said very softly, and so on. I never prayed the old way again. Subject yourself to the will of the Lord and then be yourself.

  If we really want to learn from experience in the sense of transforming the possibility that we will make the same mistake again, just looking at the phenomenon and saying “there goes good old self-deception again” does not do the trick. One has an anecdote for future amusement, but no change in the underlying dynamics. For this we need much deeper confrontations with ourselves and our inadequacies, ones often drenched in tears and humility. Even then it must usually be combined with a daily meditation contra the old behavior for it to have any chance of working. Seeing your self-deception in retrospect is one thing, decreasing its frequency in the future a much deeper matter.

  VALUE OF FRIENDS AND COUNSELORS

  As we saw in Chapter 6, disclosure of trauma, even if only to a private journal, produces both immune and related mood benefits, and this is probably at least equally true for sharing the trauma with a friend or a counselor. Sometimes the latter is necessary because we are unwilling to reveal deeply personal issues even to our close friends, but we will do so to a professional sworn to secrecy whom we typically encounter only at counseling sessions.

  Friends are also useful as commentators on our ongoing life. I will talk with a friend about a recent unfortunate interpersonal interaction and tell him I am thinking of calling the person and giving him or her a good dose of personal abuse. He always argues against it and is much freer to do so than am I. He does not suffer the internal feelings I do; he simply asks what the consequence of my act will be. How will I feel afterward and what benefits will I thereby gain and what new pain will I receive in return for my spiteful behavior?

  Friends have another advantage: they see the interaction from the outside, as if others were actors in a play. I am embedded in the play but they are not. They can see what I cannot. How often we look at a political leader and say, “But it is perfectly obvious what you should be doing,” and yet often it is probably not obvious to the person caught up in the action. A tree among trees, they have a harder time seeing the forest. I have often thought the popularity of plays partly came from the fact that the audience could see all, while the actors were constrained by their position on the stage.

  AN INVITATION TO SELF-DECEPTION AND PERSONAL DISASTER

  Try to avoid overconfidence and unconsciousness. Each is dangerous; together they can be deadly, as we saw so vividly in several airplane crashes. Showing off is a special kind of behavior in which we tend to both be overconfident and deliberately exaggerate our behavior to impress others. This can create a very bad mismatch between behavior and reality. The closest I myself came to experiencing the potentially dreadful survival costs of showing off occurred on a lizard-collecting expedition high (above one thousand meters) in the Blue Mountains north of Kingston, Jamaica. My muscular young nephew-in-law was driving the car, itself a “muscle car” in having too small a steering wheel, requiring the quick application of real muscle to turn it properly. Among the team was a young woman, allegedly with me but she seemed to be admiring my nephew’s muscular mastery of the road all too much for my comfort, so I took over the driving. We were soon rounding a corner too fast, one I was not sufficiently strong to handle, and the car drifted slowly toward the precipice, until it was caught by a small sand embankment, three wheels in the air, tilting downward, a tree six meters below that might have caught us, otherwise a clear one hundred–meter drop to a rocky death. The man behind me and I were the first ones out, and we had to reach down into the tilting car to pull out the other two, including my by then thoroughly terrified “girlfriend.” Someone had white rum and we poured some on the ground, threw some ganja seeds on top, and thanked the Almighty for our survival. I do not remember seeing the young lady again.

  For this and many other reasons, I regard showing off as one of the most dangerous things you can do. I believe your attention has shifted entirely to persuading others and away from current reality. While I am focused on the young woman next to me and on impressing her—wanting to divert her attention from my more muscular nephew—I am paying little attention to driving, careless and overconfident and completely unconscious that I am doing so, not at ground level but on some narrow road high in the mountains.

  A NEVER-ENDING EXTRAVAGANZA

  There is no doubt that deceit and self-deception—if it does nothing else—provides us with an unending extravaganza of nonsense, comedic and tragic, large and small. No human group has a monopoly on the disease, nor is anyone immune. How else can one explain that about 20 percent of US citizens in 2011 claim to believe that their president is a Muslim and 40 percent say he was not born in the United States. Or that the argument can be seriously advanced (and believed) that the same president has a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” when his mother was white and he was raised entirely by her and her family. It has famously been said about the United States that no one ever lost a dollar underestimating the intelligence of its people. It could be said likewise that no one has lost a political position in the United States by underestimating the political intelligence of the US voter. In any case, the level of ignorance regarding fundamental facts is astonishing.

  Consider other regular occurrences. Absent self-deception, how do we explain that Ponzi scheme after Ponzi scheme after Ponzi scheme marches across the pages of our newspapers despite a one hundred–year record of financial disaster (at least for all those rushing to join the scheme once it is under way). Or how—without self-deception—should we explain that every year in the United States another anti-homosexual politician or preacher is shown to have a hidden homosexual life?

  Or to turn to real tragedy, without deceit and self-deception, how can we explain people across the world of various faiths murdering their daughters and sisters for often trivial infractions of local sexual mores in so-called honor killings? It is hard to believe that the feeble Y chromosome, with only a few dozen protein-coding genes, could do the job. But patriarchy—benefiting all or most of a male’s genes even at the expense of his wife and female relatives—could, with proper mental adjustments, bring about this horror. Men (largely) who murder their daughters or sisters, or horribly disfigure them or drive them to suicide, do not appear to do so with a guilty conscience. Quite the contrary, they profess moral indignation and are outraged at the sins causing them to take such extreme measures. This appears to be a case of innocent women caught in the crosshairs of conflict between local patrilines, not quite out
-groups or unrelated neighbors, but sets of related genes in paternally related people. As we have seen when discussing war and religion, these kinds of conflicts are especially likely to induce self-deception, along with heartless and cruel behavior.

  The newspapers disgorge fresh material daily. It turns out that the safety culture at Japanese nuclear reactors was so bad, even NASA could admire it. All effort was put into a public relations campaign to convince the country that the reactors were safe, while no effort was spent on what to do in case of crisis. Although it’s the world’s leader in robotics—Japanese robots can run on two feet, sing, dance, and play the violin—none were designed to work in a crippled, radioactive plant, because “introducing them would inspire fear.” Japan had to import them from a Massachusetts company better known for making vacuum cleaners. Nor did they have a way of introducing cooling water; they had to import a 203-foot-long water pump from China. But as we have seen so often in this book, when a company or government is in full-sale mode, mundane goals such as safety are cast aside.