Self Deception

David Livingstone Smith, a philosopher and a psychologist, says, “I began to understand how we are built; we're built to be natural-born liars. Nature has fashioned us like nature has fashioned so many organisms.” It looks like for mental health of oneself one has to deceive oneself regularly and without fail. The moment we stop deceiving our self either we go insane or enlightened. Looking at the number of mental asylums, the possibility of going insane is very high.

In the late 1970s, Johns Hopkins University conducted number of experiments with chimpanzees; teaching them sign language and the ability identify things and images. There was a chimpanzee named Arthur. He was fluent in sign language and would refer to other monkeys as ‘black things’. He was extremely comfortable with human beings. One experiment was differentiating photos of human being from the photos of monkeys. Stack of mixed photos of humans and monkeys was given to Arthur and he has to put all human photos on right side and the other on left side. In the stake of photos, Arthur’s picture also was present.

This experiment was conducted two times; both times Arthur could accurately separate human beings from monkeys but made just one mistake. He put his photo on the side of human beings and not in the side of Monkeys.

So we must have inherited this useful quality called self deception from monkeys. Endlessly we bluff others and ourselves. Years ago I used to give training programs along with a colleague of mine. Sometimes it was visible that participants were not happy with the program, but my friend would say that everyone is happy and enjoying. Even when I point out that the body language of participants indicate that they are not interested, he would come up with different explanation and prove to me that they are happy and enjoying. That time itself I was convinced that he will go only higher in life. That is what happened; now he is a leading personality. I will not be surprised if he becomes a successful politician. Nietzsche , a German philosopher, said, “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others”. The art of self deception is a precondition for success in life. NLP does give the techniques of self deception.