Useful Delusions

-If you think that lying to yourself is bad, you're delusional. We are all phenomenally skilled at lying to ourselves because it is necessary. We need useful delusions.

- If you take one thing away from this today, please let it be that you must make yourself aware of your delusions. Our identities are merely stories that we tell ourselves, and we make up nonsense narratives to justify our actions, no matter how bad they are. You do it, I do it, everyone does it. We have to lie to ourselves in order to get out of bed each morning. If I didn't believe I could connect with someone and make some kind of difference, I wouldn't bother with this video. If we didn't lie to ourselves, the knowledge of death and the futility of existence would crush us and we wouldn't do anything at all, or we'd choose to make a permanent exit. 

Delusion is necessary to maintain an identity. 

- I refer to my own useful delusions as "Playing mind games with myself," and that's the trick. We have to be aware of our own nonsense. We manifest some wacky, unpredictable, and sometimes horrific behavior. Not everyone is capable of this awareness because some people's psyches can't survive the pain of who they truly are, despite the fact that their delusions harm them, and everyone else.

- I'm sure you've met a cluster B type with a house of cards identity who believes they deserve special treatment all the time. The type that falls to pieces every time someone tells them no. Cluster B's can never recall the horrific things they've done because it breaks the delusion that they're decent people. But harmful delusions and cluster B's are subjects for another video or two.

-Why do we need these delusions? Because truth seeking is not advantageous toward surviving and passing on our genes. Overthinker types focused on objective truths get out competed by those who run on base impulses, every time. Internal debates about big ideas do not keep people alive and do not help them pass their genes on. 

-I have no children and have never been married. Go figure. 

-Our brains are designed to keep us alive, not to help us find objective truths. They're designed to be efficient, not accurate. Has your brain ever automatically corrected a typo, and you didn't see it until someone pointed it out? Have you ever went days, weeks, or months without noticing a change in your surroundings, or in someone close to you? There's an old gas lamp on the corner by my house that I just noticed after several years of walking past it. We have all done this because we do not perceive reality accurately at all. Our brains give us bad info all the time. Brains fill in the blanks with the familiar to save bandwidth. Our view of the world is more like a map than a photograph. Just an outline. This is necessary because, if we were conscious of every single piece of information thrown our way each day, we wouldn't be able to function. It's too much. We must filter it and get things wrong in order to survive. 

-I'm delusional enough to believe that we're all capable of change, but we're not. Why do I tell myself this lie? Because when I believe everyone can change, then I am, in fact, capable of change, and this useful delusion has proven to be true for me. However, I know that not everyone is capable of changing. I've met countless people who believe their identities are made of stone, and because that's their delusion, it's also a fact. A self fulfilling prophecy. ---Acknowledging who we really are is painful enough, and changing an identity is even more painful, but it's possible, with some useful delusions.

-Another beneficial delusion I have is that people are decent. I believe this despite the fact that I've been victimized and people do horrific things to one another everyday for no good reason. If I didn't hold this delusion, I'd drive myself insane with paranoia and I'd create self fulfilling prophecies with that paranoia because distrustful people cannot be trusted. However, when we have faith that we can depend on people to do the right thing, that's mostly what we get from people, but not all of the time. 

-I still choose to believe that people are decent despite the fact that someone I love was killed in a 100% totally random act of violence. Some kid just happened to lose his mind on the same block as her. Wrong place at the wrong time. I know that, statistically, random violence is extremely rare, and mentally ill people are more likely to be victims than perpetrators, but that doesn't change the fact that things like this do, in fact, happen. Despite that fact, I still keep faith in people being decent because people are overwhelmingly decent to one another out in the real world. The internet is a different story.

-Even if society fell apart and people in cities started eating one another in the street, I'd still believe that people are decent. Why? Because I need that delusion in order to continue to be decent to you and everyone else.

- Robert Sapolsky believes that free will is an illusion, and he might be right. He chooses the delusion that we are blessed and doomed to live our lives exactly as they were meant to unfold, and we have no control over this. There's a lot of debate on whether free will is real or not, but I could not care less. We absolutely must believe in free will in order to have the agency to make better decisions, to change ourselves, and to change our environment in meaningful ways. This belief, and these changes, may in fact be predetermined like Sapolsky claims, but who cares?

                  -Empowering ourselves with useful delusions is a much better choice than the alternative. We need the useful delusion that we have some power regardless of truth. And this ties back into evolutionary advantages. Seeking objective truth gets us killed before we can reproduce. Believing that we can affect change in ourselves, affect other people, and affect the world around us empowers us, and makes it more likely that we'll make babies. A useful delusion. If you're looking to pass your genes on, I'm accepting applications. Believing that anyone would have unprotected sex with me is a useful delusion.

-We have to be delusional to be optimistic and to live well and to wield agency over ourselves and the world. Please play mind games with yourself and lie to yourself, but stay aware of it.

Still having fun driving blind with these videos. Hope you're doing the same. Having fun I mean. Don't drive blind unless it's metaphorical, please.