One of the keys points to come out of the book is outlined in Chapter 13. Robert Trivers is very critical of the social sciences such as economics that pleasingly refer to themselves as a science while avoiding any foundation for, or connection to, the natural sciences for their discipline. For example, mathematics gives physics a certain amount of rigor, physics gives chemistry a strong atomic mode, chemistry gives biology a valid molecular model. From here, the author’s point is that the social sciences such as economics, sociology, psychology etc. should be built from the natural sciences. The findings of biology should be the starting point for the social sciences that seek to explain and predict human behavior. Such a foundation for the social sciences would maintain the rigor established in the natural sciences and maintain the coherence of knowledge form the foundations of objective science upon which to build more abstract findings. Instead, the social sciences have willfully avoided their necessary connection to the natural sciences and have struck out on their own path based on untested and un-testable assumptions as well as ad hoc methods which impede progress and produce very dubious if not fallacious and pernicious results. This is especially true in economics where basic assumptions such as the one that unrestrained pursuit of personal utility is beneficial for the larger group or social order – this is already acknowledged as a fallacy in biology, but economics persists in this ideology. Part of the resistance here is to biological determinism, but the severing of the social sciences from their natural starting point in biology produces arbitrary systems of thought that we naively label social science. The author’s thesis is that the greater the social content of a discipline, the greater the amount of deception and thus self-deception on the part of the practitioners.
Misunderstanding Freud:
Chapter 13 is also where I have a disagreement. For example, Freudian psychoanalysis is not an ongoing fraud just because it does not meet the very high bar of experiential science in terms of testing. Freud’s faults and fallacious theories aside, Freud did elevate the awareness of issues we now take for granted but were ground breaking when Freud presented them such as, viz., the need to treat ostensibly physical ailments by addressing the mind, the importance of childhood experiences and relationships, recognition and understanding of mental illness, introduction of the new talking therapy (psychoanalysis), in place of dubious techniques of hypnosis. This proved to be the basis of later group therapy. The author himself advocates the sharing of trauma (talking therapy) with a counselor for obtaining positive immune and related mood benefits. It is hard to square this with his unrelenting attack on Freudian psychoanalysis as an outright fraud. Freud was also the first to break important barriers and recognize the importance of sex, dreams images, the psychopathology of daily life, psychological understanding of art, literature and religion, interpreting the unconscious as well as the mechanisms of repression and projection. Following from Goethe and Nietzsche, Freud saw the importance of development over being, he taught us to be honest and face ourselves without the repressive guilt imposed of religion and social consensus.
The Author's Twin Pillars of Deception:
Natural – that which is instinctive and simply embedded in the natural order such as the deceptions practiced by predator and prey, parasite and host, and even by bacteria and viruses to gain entry into cells by mimicking certain proteins. Certain medications are designed in the same manner, to use disguises to overcome or fool the immune system of the human body in order to become efficacious such as the new synthetic enzyme, Palynziq®.
Human made – this is the realm of self-deception. But this can instead be thought of as fallacies in thinking and logic, rather than as unconscious self-deceptions as the author sees it. The philosophical objection to unconscious self-deception is that the self cannot deceive the self without also first knowing the truth; being conscious. For self-deception in the way author presents it to be real, the self must not know what it does in fact know and must in fact know to practice the self-deception. The author tells us that the way around this objection is to bifurcate human awareness, the self, into the conscious and the unconscious. For this to work, we must accept that the unconscious state can act upon the conscious state to bias the conscious state about the self. For the author, the benefit gained with self-deception seeping into consciousness is that it allows us to hide our true selves from others, providing a mask under which to hide, and with which to manipulate others. I still find it difficult to see how the unconscious can exert influence over the conscious if the conscious is not aware of it. That is, the unconsciousness is by definition outside of consciousness awareness making it difficult to see how it can have influence on awareness without there being awareness of it by definition of being conscious. The author's theory seems to beg for some mysterious and unexplained process by which the unconscious causes the conscious to fool itself without being aware that it is fooling itself. I believe the philosophical objection to un-willful self-deception still stands, the author’s best attempt to get around it notwithstanding.
Robert Trivers tells us that an elementary form of self-deception is to make sure that one is not exposed to facts and information that conflicts with one’s assumptions or fantasies. But this takes hubris, an overt avoidance that must be a willful act for it to be effective. We cannot infer self-deception by simply observing behavior. Simply put, we know when we are deceiving ourselves, we just do not like to think about it and thus admit it to ourselves. We engage in fallacies, not self-deceptions. We navigate our experience of existence with the use of fantasies about ourselves and others. It just takes a bit of self-reflection to realize this. In any case, I believe that there is gradation, or spectrum of awareness between being fully conscious and being fully unconscious. Thus, there are gradations of deception with full truth and full deception not being likely.
The above critique notwithstanding, the book comes into its own in chapter 10 (False Historical Narratives), chapter 11 (Self-Deception and War) and chapter 12 (Religion and Self-Deception).
Chapter 10 puts the lie to such simple-minded notions as American exceptionalism, Japanese mildness, Turkish authenticity and Israeli aspirations, just to name a few. The chapter, though a bit of a contradiction from main theme of the book provides a riveting history of the actual events and motivations of the exceptional brutality, holy horrors, and unspeakable tortures conveniently glossed over with false feel good national historical narrative lies fit for fools. I say it is a contraction from the thesis of the book in that the self-deceptions described here, and the following wider social deceptions embedded in false historical narratives, are a willful function of consciousness awareness. There are no mysterious or hidden influences of the unconscious by some unexplained mechanism working upon consciousness awareness to create self-deceptions. The theme of this chapter is how historical narratives are created with willful self-deception to destroy the past and invert reality. At the bottom of most false historical narrative is the mythology of religion.
Chapter 11 is where we see the classic symptom of over estimation of one’s abilities and the underestimation of an opponent’s abilities. There is a drive to overestimate the validity and value of good reports and underestimate the same in bad reports. What is called self-deception can also be seen as overconfidence, a sense of righteous moral superiority and tenacious beliefs. When both sides in a conflict feel that they are morally superior, the fighting is most violent and prolonged. The paradigm example here of course is the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. Not because it was unique, but because it is recent and well documented. However, in all of the fiction, falsehoods, deceit, denials, bravado, conceit and arrogance leading from colossal military blunder to staggering human catastrophe, I see willful ignorance and arrogance, not feeble unconscious self-deception. Delusion about such absurd feel good clichés such as ‘Iraqi freedom’ (the phrase even sounds cartoonish) but not the result of an unconscious process at work acting upon conscious awareness, just garden variety conceit and nationalism combined with ideology and confirmation bias to create a false reality, forming the basis for a false narrative as discussed in chapter 10. Also, discussed in this chapter is the must reading on Israel’s junkyard dog brutal bullying behavior in Gaza with the backing and cheerleading of their leash holding overmaster, the Christian U.S.
Chapter 12 is where the best case for genuine self-deception can be made but perhaps this is also my own bias against religion. The key to religion is denying reality then denying the denial itself. The strong ego-maniacal characteristics of religion seem to lend themselves to self-deception. In just one example, this is where we find the toxin of Christianity mixed with the poison of an aggressor state (Israel) to produce a new virulent religious strain resistant to reason, compassion, empathy and sympathy called Christian Zionism. Religion is the most powerful force for war. The author tells that religion has an external social aspect and an internal, contemplative one; that the social aspect leads to violence and the contemplative aspect mitigates against violence, p. 300. I can state it as: “There is nothing more consequential than religion when tied to the state, nothing is more inconsequential than religion in its natural state” (‘Pretend Poetry’, p. 97). Worse than self-deception, religion is itself the deception, a vast and massive deception created by removing the restraints of reason from the fantasy called faith and the delusion called true belief. I am not sure if religion is the handmaiden of deception or if deception is the handmaiden of religion. The fundamentalist religious believers are the most self-righteous and thus the most self-deceived. However, what I have noticed in religion is self-deception based on willful ignorance, with an emphasis on the word willful which leads me to think there are least some examples, even in religion as with any other self-deceptions, where the self-deceiver is at some level consciously aware, but not willing to admit the self-deception. I do appreciate Robert Trivers making the case that there is more and better evidence to support a feminine rather than masculine notion of God, this was refreshing.
From personal experience, I have found prayer to be the most disgusting and delusional aspects of religion. While I was caring for a cancer patient, I witnessed many who offered their prayers and actually believed that they were doing something beneficial for the patient and their family. I wondered what role they thought chemotherapy played in the patient's treatment. In any case, the offering of useless prayer absolves the prayer from the guilt of not offering to do something really useful or helpful but requiring real effort such as bringing meals to the family, watching children, covering household or yard chores, help with shopping or even financial assistance. Ugh!
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