Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [115]
How we are able to perpetrate a deception against ourselves is a longstanding mystery of psychology and philosophy. To understand what’s so tricky about it, imagine that a couple of your acquaintance, Roger and Anna, are experiencing relationship difficulties: Anna is having an affair, Roger is in complete denial about it. Anna routinely comes home at ten or eleven at night (“working late at the office,” she tells Roger) and goes away alone on weekends (“visiting old friends”). She spends inordinate amounts of time on the phone, and, when he accidentally walks in on her, jumps guiltily, changes tone, wraps up the conversation immediately, and reports that she was talking to her mother. When Roger goes to use their computer one day, Anna’s email account is open and he glimpses a line of an email (not to him) that reads, “Darling, when can I see you again?”—a question he dismisses as an affectionate inquiry to a friend. You and other well-meaning friends gently try to put him on his guard. But, despite ample evidence that he should be nervous, Roger is certain that Anna would never cheat on him.
From an outside perspective—yours, say—it’s easy to see that Roger is in denial about Anna. His faith in her fidelity, while touching, is simply wrong. It’s also easy to see how Anna could deceive him (even if she doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it). Her boyfriend doesn’t have any direct access to her inner world, after all, and she is free to keep her real feelings, desires, and actions to herself if she chooses. But it is much harder to understand how Roger could deceive himself. To protect himself from information about Anna’s affair, he must know enough to avoid it—enough to not read the rest of that email, not ask too many questions about her weekend, and not surprise her at the office late one night with takeout food and flowers. But if he knows enough about what’s going on to carefully avoid it, how can he simultaneously not know it? As Sartre wrote, to be self-deceived, “I have to know this truth very precisely in order to hide it from myself the more carefully.” To be in denial, then—to not know things that, given the available evidence, we should know—we must be both the deceiver and the deceived.
How does the human mind manage this? Most observers have suggested that it can do so only by dividing itself. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Freud (among many others) all made sense of denial by proposing separate, semiautonomous, and semi-warring parts of the self: the mind against the will, the mind against the soul, the conscious against the unconscious, the split ego against itself. These descriptions of the self in conflict are fascinating, but in the end, they don’t shed much light on the conundrum of self-deception. As the philosopher Sissela Bok has pointed out, the idea of a partitioned self is only a metaphor. It’s easy to forget this, because it is an unusually good metaphor—so good that, somewhere along the line, it started to seem like a literal description of how we function. But notwithstanding its hold on our imagination, the idea of a divided self remains an analogy, not an explanation. Our brains are not actually duplex apartments occupied by feuding neighbors, and how we bring about the complicated act of deceiving ourselves remains a mystery.
One of the chief reasons this mystery matters is that it bears on the moral status of denial. If our mind is figuratively divided against itself, with one part oblivious to its errors and the other part actively working to keep things that way, who bears the responsibility for being wrong? Just one part of ourselves—and if so, which one? Or is our whole self somehow to blame, despite being deeply and genuinely in the dark? Or can we not be held responsible for our errors at all when we are in denial? Are we, in those moments, simply victims twice over—once of some hidden part of ourselves,