1. Attention management
Attention management has two sides. On the one hand, we manage to deceive ourselves by systematically avoiding attention to evidence against those beliefs upon which our felt well-being depends. On the other hand, we direct inordinate critical attention to evidence that opposes our cherished belief if that evidence can’t be avoided or if we think we’ll have to answer for it in public. We give it our attention, it seems, not so much to learn from it as to creatively discount it. Either way, through careful management of attention, we enable ourselves to be deceived over the long haul. Attention management, then, is the first of our self-deceptive strategies.
2. Procrastination
Many have agreed to take on the heart of Jesus, but they’re planning to do it later . . . much later. They’ll have the character of Jesus — just not now. For now, they’ll be, as the bumper sticker says, “not perfect . . . just forgiven.” Having received forgiveness because of the work of Jesus on the cross, they’ll live with the expectation that perfection will come to them all at once in the blink of an eye at the moment of passing from this life to the next. As a result, they procrastinate acting upon the clear biblical imperative to put on perfection. And the longer they procrastinate, the less clear it is to them that this is really what they ought to be doing anyway.
At this point, procrastination joins forces with attention management. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile with the witness of Scripture the belief that noticeable progress toward Christ-likeness awaits my bodily death. So I’ll need to direct my attention to those passages that emphasize themes like grace, forgiveness, and passivity. I’ll need either to avoid attention to, or explain away, those passages suggesting that I’m expected to work hard now to make progress toward Christ-likeness in this life.
3. Perspective Switching
Most of us monitor with some care the perspective others have of us. Often a decision to see the world from their perspective gives us relief from painful truths that haunt us. But we’re not happy to settle permanently into the perspective of the other. Our own perspective gives us special insight into our own circumstances and often yields the more attractive picture. So, as Sartre suggested, we switch back and forth depending on the demands of the moment.
4. Rationalization
Perspective switching is but one variation on what is perhaps the most recognizable of our strategies for self-deception: rationalization. To rationalize is to construct a rational justification for a behavior, decision, or belief arrived at in some other way. When we rationalize a behavior, for example, we locate reasons that would justify the behavior were they operational. We then present these reasons to ourselves and others as explaining our actual behavior. But the reasons are mere fictions. They play no causal role in the production of the behavior. One strategy for rationalizing, as we have seen, is to capitalize on the perspective of another. We find or create in those around us a perspective from which our actions and decisions are reasonable and right and we adopt that perspective.
Sometimes, though, there is nobody with the perspective our rationalizing requires. In this case, we are left to the devices of our imagination. We must construct — out of thin air, as it were — a story that satisfies the constraints of rationality and justifies our behavior or decision.
Instead, the mind is taken hostage by the will, and a more palatable explanation is invented.
5. Ressentiment
Crying sour grapes is one form of what Friedrich Nietzsche (and later Max Scheler) called “Ressentiment” — a re-ordering of the sentiments. We adjust our affections, sentiments, and value judgments in order to avoid severe disappointment or self-censure. When we cry sour grapes, we avoid the severe disappointment of not having what we want by convincing ourselves that we don’t really want it after all. Often the ploy for discrediting the desired object is to place inordinate value on something else instead…… Nietzsche famously attributes the Christian praise of humility and prizing of suffering to the ressentiment of the persecuted church. Since they could expect no better than humiliation and suffering, he said, the Christians re-ordered their sentiments in such a way as to praise humility and prize afflictio
Three forms of ressentiment:
(a) First, a generally recognized good is made an object of outright scorn for its unavailability.
(b) Second, a seemingly unavailable good is pushed to the edges of consciousness by super-valuing something else. We see both kinds of ressentiment in the various forms of Christian anti-intellectualism.
(c) In this final form, it’s not so much that there is an unavailable good creating a demand for the re-ordering of sentiments. It is rather that particular sentiments are deemed unacceptable, inappropriate, inconvenient, or otherwise undesirable. They are then recast as something other than what they are. They go undercover. They continue to operate, but they are renamed in such a way as to make them acceptable to the person who has them.
Attention management has two sides. On the one hand, we manage to deceive ourselves by systematically avoiding attention to evidence against those beliefs upon which our felt well-being depends. On the other hand, we direct inordinate critical attention to evidence that opposes our cherished belief if that evidence can’t be avoided or if we think we’ll have to answer for it in public. We give it our attention, it seems, not so much to learn from it as to creatively discount it. Either way, through careful management of attention, we enable ourselves to be deceived over the long haul. Attention management, then, is the first of our self-deceptive strategies.
2. Procrastination
Many have agreed to take on the heart of Jesus, but they’re planning to do it later . . . much later. They’ll have the character of Jesus — just not now. For now, they’ll be, as the bumper sticker says, “not perfect . . . just forgiven.” Having received forgiveness because of the work of Jesus on the cross, they’ll live with the expectation that perfection will come to them all at once in the blink of an eye at the moment of passing from this life to the next. As a result, they procrastinate acting upon the clear biblical imperative to put on perfection. And the longer they procrastinate, the less clear it is to them that this is really what they ought to be doing anyway.
At this point, procrastination joins forces with attention management. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile with the witness of Scripture the belief that noticeable progress toward Christ-likeness awaits my bodily death. So I’ll need to direct my attention to those passages that emphasize themes like grace, forgiveness, and passivity. I’ll need either to avoid attention to, or explain away, those passages suggesting that I’m expected to work hard now to make progress toward Christ-likeness in this life.
3. Perspective Switching
Most of us monitor with some care the perspective others have of us. Often a decision to see the world from their perspective gives us relief from painful truths that haunt us. But we’re not happy to settle permanently into the perspective of the other. Our own perspective gives us special insight into our own circumstances and often yields the more attractive picture. So, as Sartre suggested, we switch back and forth depending on the demands of the moment.
4. Rationalization
Perspective switching is but one variation on what is perhaps the most recognizable of our strategies for self-deception: rationalization. To rationalize is to construct a rational justification for a behavior, decision, or belief arrived at in some other way. When we rationalize a behavior, for example, we locate reasons that would justify the behavior were they operational. We then present these reasons to ourselves and others as explaining our actual behavior. But the reasons are mere fictions. They play no causal role in the production of the behavior. One strategy for rationalizing, as we have seen, is to capitalize on the perspective of another. We find or create in those around us a perspective from which our actions and decisions are reasonable and right and we adopt that perspective.
Sometimes, though, there is nobody with the perspective our rationalizing requires. In this case, we are left to the devices of our imagination. We must construct — out of thin air, as it were — a story that satisfies the constraints of rationality and justifies our behavior or decision.
Instead, the mind is taken hostage by the will, and a more palatable explanation is invented.
5. Ressentiment
Crying sour grapes is one form of what Friedrich Nietzsche (and later Max Scheler) called “Ressentiment” — a re-ordering of the sentiments. We adjust our affections, sentiments, and value judgments in order to avoid severe disappointment or self-censure. When we cry sour grapes, we avoid the severe disappointment of not having what we want by convincing ourselves that we don’t really want it after all. Often the ploy for discrediting the desired object is to place inordinate value on something else instead…… Nietzsche famously attributes the Christian praise of humility and prizing of suffering to the ressentiment of the persecuted church. Since they could expect no better than humiliation and suffering, he said, the Christians re-ordered their sentiments in such a way as to praise humility and prize afflictio
Three forms of ressentiment:
(a) First, a generally recognized good is made an object of outright scorn for its unavailability.
(b) Second, a seemingly unavailable good is pushed to the edges of consciousness by super-valuing something else. We see both kinds of ressentiment in the various forms of Christian anti-intellectualism.
(c) In this final form, it’s not so much that there is an unavailable good creating a demand for the re-ordering of sentiments. It is rather that particular sentiments are deemed unacceptable, inappropriate, inconvenient, or otherwise undesirable. They are then recast as something other than what they are. They go undercover. They continue to operate, but they are renamed in such a way as to make them acceptable to the person who has them.
- Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009
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