I01 · Self-Deception and the Shadow
Self-deception and rationalisation
Lying to oneself, constructing excuses and hiding behind neurotic pride or false narratives.
Cues
Showing 12 of 12 cues
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes - but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”
“But whether easy or difficult, Alcibiades, still there is no other way; knowing what we are, we shall know how to take care of ourselves, and if we are ignorant we shall not know.”
“With all that which a person allows to appear, one may ask: what is it meant to hide? What should it divert the eyes from? ... How far does he deceive himself in this action?”
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?”
“If a person does not become what he understands, then he does not understand it either.”
“Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.”
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
The wind-up toy dog and mystic energy
A first-grade science book asks what makes a wind-up toy dog move and answers "energy makes it move"; a mystic formula no better than saying "movability makes it move." The real answer is that the wound-up spring tries to unwind and pushes the gears; taking the toy apart teaches science.
Anti-dogmatic perspectivism
Treat even your own best theories and philosophies as perspectives and interpretations rather than absolute dogmas, remaining sceptical towards your own conclusions.