Experience teaches us that human beings have an infinite capacity for self-deception. This leads us to put our trust in the most untrustworthy ideas, both great and small.
I first came to this realization when I was quite a small boy—not, I hasten to add, that I was then, or am now, entirely immune to the tendency, myself.
The first time I remembering encountering it was while talking to an elderly gentleman in our village. He was an old sailor, who constantly chewed tobacco, and I was utterly fascinated by his ability to spit over vast distances with remarkable accuracy.
I had secretly practiced spitting myself, but was nowhere near as accomplished as the old sailor, so I asked him to what he attributed his great skill. “Chewing tobacco” was his reply and he commended the habit to me both to improve my spitting and on health grounds.
“Chewing tobacco is really good for the teeth,” he explained, earnestly, “I don’t need to brush my teeth because chewing tobacco keeps them healthy. I’m 82 years old and I’ve chewed ‘baccy all my life and I’ve never had a tooth pulled. Just look at them.”
With that he opened his mouth to demonstrate the veracity of his statement. To be sure they were all there—as far as I could tell—but they were just as black as the ace of spades, and his breath would have paralyzed a polecat. The evidence, I decided, simply didn’t support his claims.
I next encountered the phenomenon while chatting with Sam Walker, my grandfather’s gardener. He had been a soldier in the South Africa War and in the First World War, too. He attributed his survival to always having a rabbit’s foot in his pocket.
“Nothing like a rabbit foot for bringing you luck and keeping you safe,” he assured me.
Even at the time it was uttered, it struck me there was something wrong with the logic of this assertion. After all, possession of a rabbit’s foot hadn’t done much for the rabbit’s survival. The prayers Sam said might have had more to do with it, I concluded.
Later, I learned that people deceive themselves about much more important things than chewing tobacco and rabbits’ feet.
In the 1930s, for example, large numbers of people in Europe deluded themselves into thinking Adolf Hitler’s intentions were essentially peaceful, despite the fact that he had openly revealed quite the opposite in his book Mein Kampf.
Similarly, during the same period, a vast majority of people on the political left took Soviet show trials orchestrated by Josef Stalin seriously. They actually believed the poor souls hauled before his kangaroo courts were guilty of the grotesque crimes to which they had been tortured into confessing.
In the wake of the Vietnam War it was a common self-deception to regard the Soviet Union as somehow the moral equivalent of the United States. Now that the Iron Curtain has fallen, it is an equally common self-deception to regard post-Soviet Russia as a natural ally.
Today people are deceiving themselves with delusions that are even more grotesque—not least with the fashionable notions about the sexes.
Certainly, intellectually speaking, women are the equals of men, but, no matter how often some might assert it, women and men are not interchangeable. Biological identity is established in the womb. Sex cannot be “reassigned.” Plastic surgery and hormone injections do not change an individual’s chromosomes.
However, perhaps the most serious self-deception of all has been the belief that the 60-year-long campaign to banish the moral teachings of the faith of our Founding Fathers—the Christian faith—from the public square is without baleful consequences for our nation.
In fact the origins of our present political and social upheavals arise directly from efforts of activist atheists—aided and abetted by politicians, the judiciary, and business leaders—to exclude God and his Commandments from the nation’s public life.
It has among other evils given birth to the notion that competence trumps character—to the destruction of the American family, the coarsening of personal and public behavior, and widespread dishonesty, the spheres of politics, business, and religion. Thus when NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick “takes a knee” during the National Anthem to protest alleged racism he is said to be exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, while a referee who does the same to give thanks to God is deemed to be acting unconstitutionally. Go figure! GPH✠
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