Quotes from the Book
Knaves, Fools, Villains, and Hypocrites:
How do they live with themselves?
"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue,
and then, when we are finally proved wrong, imprudently twisting the facts...
so as to show we were right."
George Orwell 1946
"Mistakes were quite possible made in the administration in which I served."
Henry Kissinger
"If, in hindsight, we also discover that mistakes may have been made...
I am deeply sorry."
Cardinal Edward Egan... of New York Parish
Self justification is not the same as lying or making excuses.
"Cognitive Dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions that are psychologically inconsistent."
People become more certain they are right about something they just did...
...if they can't undo it.
Don't rely on testimonials.
"He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another
...than he whom yourself have obliged."
Benjamin Franklin
Dissonance reduction operates like a thermostat,
keeping our self esteem bubbling on high.
That is why we are usually oblivious to the self-justifications,
...the little lies to ourselves that prevent us from even acknowledging
that we have made mistakes or foolish decisions.
All of us, to preserve our belief that we are smart, will occasionally do dumb things.
We can't help it. We are wired that way.
The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological.
Blind spots can enhance our pride and activate our prejudices.
Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves,...
...so we can see prejudices in everyone but ourselves.
"Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of the eye --it contracts."
Oliver Wendell Homes Jr.
Abraham Lincoln was one of those rare Presidents
who understood the importance of surrounding himself
with people willing to disagree with him.
What we...refer to as memory... is really a form of story telling
that goes on continually in the mind...
...and often change with the telling.
William Maxwell
When two people produce entirely different memories of the same event,
observers usually assume that one of them is lying.
But most of us, most of the time,
...are neither telling the whole truth nor intentionally deceiving.
We aren't lying; we are self-justifying.
Confabulation, distortion, and plain forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory.
...and they are summoned when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us
from the pain and embarrassment of actions we took
that are dissonant with our core self images.
Eventually memory yields.
Because memory is so reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation
--confusing and event that happened to someone else
with one that happened to you,
...or coming to believe something that never happened at all.
If your memories of the same people change, becoming positive or negative
depending on what is happening in your life now, then it's all about You, not them.
Remarkably, the (men's) ability to guess what they had said about themselves...
in adolescence , was no better than chance.
It doesn't matter how beautiful the guess is...
...if the experiment disagrees with the guess,
then the guess is wrong.
That's all there is to it.
Richard Feynman
For example, cognitive and behavioral methods are the psychological treatments of choice for panic attacks, depression, eating disorders, insomnia, chronic anger and other emotional disorders. These methods are often as effective or more effective than medication.
The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them....
--but that they cannot forget them
Recovered Memory is: "the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field...
--since the lobotomy era."
Richard McNally
Once that door closes... --so does the mind.
Many states do absolutely nothing for people who have been exonerated.
They provide no compensation for the many years of life and earnings lost.
They do not even offer an official apology.
Cruelly, they often do not expunge the exonerated person's record.
"Keep your eyes wide open before the marriage, and half shut afterward."
Benjamin Franklin
Before the couple realizes it, they have taken up polarized positions,
...each feeling right and righteous.
Self justification will then cause their hearts...
--to harden against the entreaties of empathy.
...misunderstandings, conflicts, personality difference,
and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love;
Self-justification is.
...self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves:
We give ourselves credit for our good actions...
...but let 'the situation' excuse the bad ones.
Successful partners extend to each other the same self forgiving ways....
of the thinking we extend to ourselves...
The forgive each others missteps...
as being due to the situation,
...but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.
While happy partners are giving one another the benefit of the doubt,
...unhappy partners are doing just the opposite.
Implicit theories have powerful consequences.
Because each partner is expert in self-justification...
...they each blame the other's unwillingness to change one's personality flaws,
--but excuse their own unwillingness to change on the basis of their personality virtues.
...shaming and blaming each other, the very purpose of the quarrel has shifted.
It is no longer an effort to solve a problem...;
it's just to wound, to insult, to score.
That is why shaming leads to fierce renewed efforts at self-justification,
a refusal to compromise,
...and the most destructive emotion a relationship can evoke: contempt.
..it is one of the strongest signs the relationship is in free fall.
Anger reflects the hope that problem can be corrected.
When it burns out, it leaves the ashes of resentment and contempt.
And contempt is the handmaiden of hopelessness.
...self-justification is the prime suspect in the murder of marriage.
" I have found that nothing foretells a marriage's future
as accurately as how a couple retells their past." John Gottman
Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can't remember why they married."
...dissonance, and the way people choose to resolve it, is one of the major reasons for post divorce vindictiveness."
Self-justification is the route by which ambivalence morphs into certainty, guilt into rage.
The love story has become the hate book.
...the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification.
Like all couples, they have small differences that could easily flare into irritation, but they have come to accept them as facts of life, not worth sulking about. Charlie says: "I like to eat at five, my wife like to eat at eight; we compromise --we eat at five to eight."
"The reality was that I was not alone not because of my politics but because I did not know how to live in a decent way with another human being. In the name of equality I tormented every man who ever loved me until he left me; I called them on everything, never let any thing go, held them up to accountability in ways that wearied us both. There was, of course, more than a grain of truth in everything I said, but in those grains, no matter how numerous, need not have become the sandpile that crushed the life out of love."
Vivian Gornick, Feminist Writer and Activist
"In a rift, no one is going to admit they lied or stole or cheated without provocation; only a bad person would do that, ...
Therefore, each side justifies its own position by claiming the other side is to blame...
The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to another and back again in the blink of an eye without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. It's as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.
Victims have long memories.
History is written by the victors, but it's the victims who write the memoirs.
"Every successful revolution, puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed."
Barbara Tuchman, Historian
The mind wants to protect itself from the pain of dissonance with the balm of self-justification;
but the soul wants to confess.
An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
The ultimate correction for the tunnel vision that effects all of us mortals is more light.
"When a friend makes a mistake, the friend remains a friend, and the mistake remains a mistake."
Shimon Peres commenting on Ronald Reagan
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it he corrects it.
He considers those who point out our faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu (Old Master)
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Excellent read... clear, concise & eye opening. One of the best explanations of cognitive dissonance that I've ever read.... it will spark introspection.
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John Fletcher
Interesting, disturbing but too facile
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 16, 2013
