UBIQUITY OF ILLUSION
1 We love illusion
We don’t start with truth and deviate from it. Illusion is our homeland, and truth makes a few brief incursions within its boundaries, which we repulse with ease. There never was such a thing as the real world for us.
We lie as we breathe, instinctively, habitually and unawares. ‘No man,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘speaks the truth or lives a true life two minutes together.’ The heart and head lie as the lungs take in air. People notice that they are lying not when they lie best but when they strain to do it, as they don’t notice that they are breathing except when they gasp. They suck the exhilarating air of illusion, and they feel hearty and expansive just by inhaling it. As Butler observed, ‘It is the unconscious liar that is the greatest liar.’
Don’t we prize a book, denomination, party or church not for the one big lie that it means to tell but for the swarms of small ones that it takes for granted?
People are so prone to be imposed on by creeds and systems of belief, not because they give so much thought to things of the mind, but because they don’t care for them at all.
2 The ceaseless birth of illusion
We can’t do without illusion, but we don’t much care what shapes it takes. From age to age there is such an unquenchable thirst for illusion, that we have to keep fitting it to new conditions and furnishing it with new forms. But the love of truth burns so low, that it can feed forever on the same fuel.
Illusion always falls into good ground, and brings forth fruit. But truth falls upon stony places.
Lies may have shorter lives than truth, but they procreate more rapidly. A lie mutates so fast, that it can adapt to all environments. Truth stays stubbornly unadaptable.
A lie may have a vogue for a time, but a truth can count on being neglected through the ages.
Truth may have time on its side, but error has numbers. ‘Truth is the cry of all,’ as Berkeley wrote, ‘but the game of the few.’
Error is hydra-headed, truth is cyclops-eyed.
Though resistant to ideas, we are susceptible to infectious opinions.
Truth is as easy to eradicate as lies are quick to infest us. Lies spread by contagion. But some you are immune to, whereas others you need to be vaccinated against by assenting to them for a while.
We use truth is a figurehead or a fig leaf, depending on which of our desires we want to hide.
You don’t decrease the demand for illusion by cutting off the supply. Faith is one of the forking tributaries of the broad river of delusion. Dam up this runnel, and the flood will surge with more force elsewhere. ‘Dream delivers us to dream,’ Emerson wrote, ‘and there is no end of illusion.’
3 Steeped in illusion
We all wear motley, though the patches of truth and falseness differ for each of us. All of us are either fools or frauds, and many of us prove to be both. We should try to stint our folly, use no more fraud than we need to get by, and know what we are. We can’t free ourselves from our hypocrisy so long as we pretend that we can be anything but hypocrites.
People live by lies, till they die for real. They lurch from one splendid untruth to the next, till they at last go out in squalid darkness.
We grow honest not by impulse but only after routing hard resistance.
People are such creatures of illusion, that they can’t even stay true to the pristine form of their falsehoods. So they must forge new, perverted, more bizarre versions of them, and run after these.
Truth shines like starlight, brilliant but cold and distant. Illusion is the sunlight by which we live.
Most of our ills are all in our mind. And so most of our remedies are in our mind too. And they are therefore all the more tormenting, since we can never get free of them.
People must have some affinity for fraud, since they are glad to lie for such low pay.
I tell as many kind lies as cunning ones. So I square my reckoning, and can lay claim to a love of the truth.
How little effort it costs us to keep our eyes shut to the most glaring truths.
4 Advancing in illusion
I trust that I’m advancing in truth, when I swap a coarser fallacy for a more subtle one.
From year to year we get farther from real life but no nearer to our dreams.
It’s easier to get a lie into a head than to dislodge it. But you hardly insert a truth before it starts trickling out. Our fancies snag faster in our brains than the real thing, since we have tailored them to suit our wants. As Napoleon said, ‘it’s easier to deceive than to undeceive.’
LIFE-LIES
5 The ugliness of truth
Truth is either so dowdy, or, like the goddess Diana, so refulgently lovely, that she seldom appears nude. But if truth is, as Nietzsche said, a woman, why does she act like such a prude, and not deign to undress even for her most respectful wooers?
Telling the ugly truth is one piece of bad taste that few of us are so gauche as to indulge in.
All of us tell the truth if we have no choice. But why be gratuitously honest?
Polite people look away from truth as if it were an indecency, and practical people look down on it as a useless nuisance. The love of truth is one of the strangest aberrations. And truth lives on in the world only because there are a few who are aroused by its obscenity.
Truth steals in haggard and unwelcome as death in the midst of the raucous masque of our desires. How frightening to look in the hollow eyes of one who has looked on the truth. Thinkers need to put on a bright visor, to spare the world the sight of the grisly cripples that truth has made of them.
Truth does not dwell on the heights. It skulks in the sewers with the rest of the waste matter which we keep out of sight in decent life.
6 Truth disgusts us
The reception of truth requires a willing suspension of disgust.
Truth disgusts us when it’s naked, and it bores us when it’s dressed.
Though people don’t believe in the truth, they are still irked to see it rudely bared in front of them. They care just enough about it to be repulsed by the sight of it. And though they pay it no mind, they still loathe those who are nasty enough to tell it.
Truth gives us nothing to desire, but plenty to disgust us.
We don’t believe in the truth, but we still fear it. It’s a gun which might go off in any direction. The people least to be trusted are those who dare to tell the truth. If they would tell you that, they would tell you anything.
The truth is a stumbling-block on a road that no one would want to travel.
Most of the deepest truths are either too scandalous or too obvious to be spoken. But few of us care so much for the truth to see how scandalous it is. And we are too anxious to conceal it to admit how obvious it is. How could we be horrified by what it shows us? We are too heedless of it for that.
We know enough of the truth to see that it must be kept hidden.
7 Human kind cannot bear very much reality
We try to heal our hearts with lies, not because we desire falsehood itself, but because truth would do us no good.
Most of us know enough of the truth to make us content with our plausible coinages. We know our hearts too well to wish to know them better. We would rather be consistently and decently deceived than scandalously and painfully disabused. Better a reputable dupe than a ridiculous clear-eyed eccentric. We strain like puppies at the leash of error, but we lack the will to snap it.
Truth is savagely abstract. But illusion is so beguiling because it is safely conventional yet complacently personal.
Life robs us of all the struts that hold up our make-believe, and so leaves us too weak to let go of it.
‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality,’ as T. S. Eliot wrote. But neither can it bear very much illusion. People can’t bring themselves to front the truth. Yet they don’t quite believe the faith that they take up to protect themselves from it. They can’t even rest in the lies which they need in order to live.
People rarely fix in words the false creeds that they live by, and they may not even be quite aware of them. And the false creeds that they do fix in words are not the ones that they live by.
8 Illusion is a fortress
Truth may make the windows of your house, but strong illusions make the walls that hold it up. Yet these too will tumble down, if the lies of others don’t shore them up. And from whatever building blocks you seek to make your happiness, it will soon cave in, if you don’t ground it on the unshakable dream of your own importance.
Illusion is a stronghold which truth would pull down on our heads to crush us.
That truth will shield us from sorrow is one of the illusions that we use to shield ourselves from the truth.
How do we go on, but by forgetting what the years have gouged from us and the dismal lessons they have taught us? Our brains would split, if we believed each day and hour the things that we know to be true.
In this world of deceit and discouragement, the best you can hope for is that the years will be kind to your illusions.
9 Truth through lies
Most of us would go mad, if we freed ourselves from our mad aberrations. You can’t even be wise, if you’re not sheltered by a thatch of dry self-deception.
How could all the tender shoots of truth live on, if they weren’t shaded by the broad overspreading tree of falsehood?
You have to submit to be duped by faith, so that you can go on seeking a despairing wisdom.
Truth would make you a castaway, but illusion is the lifejacket that bears you up.
Thinkers are torn two ways. They must dwell in illusion while searching for the truth. And if they find the truth, they still can’t live in it. And it’s touch and go which will sink them, the lies which they must live in, or the truths which they choose to seek.
Our inane lies may be the truest summation of our inane and false lives.
10 The lie gives life
Our lives are saved by lies, and would be wrecked by the truth. Lies struggle with truth, as life struggles with death.
We can live through the rest of our lacks, so long as we lack self-observation too. If we gave up our hypocrisy, the world would wither to a wilderness. And if we gave up self-deception, solitude would contract to a torture chamber. ‘The art of living,’ as Pavese wrote, ‘is the art of knowing how to believe lies.’
It does not much matter what desolating truths I find out about myself, since I no more than half believe them, and I get rid of them in such quick time.
Some of us suffer from our illusions like a plague, but most profit from them like a fund of capital.
We thrive best in the rank air of teeming illusion.
The more errors you hold on to, the fitter you are to survive.
We need uplifting illusions, to reconcile us to the poor trash that we have won, or else to rouse us to attempt the high exploits of which we might be capable.
Since our species can know the truth, it is driven to live most of its life in fictions.
It took humans hundreds of thousands of years to dismiss ghosts and phantoms, and see what was there in front of their noses. And now all they want to do is look at the ghostly phantoms that pass before them on their screens.
11 Truth’s a poison
Nothing human can survive in truth’s lifeless lunar atmosphere. You can breathe no air but that of your vital half-lies. Even the most lucid of us are kept on our feet by our flimsy evasions. Life is not compatible with the clear consciousness of what it is. Life is not worth much thought. And if you give it much, you find that it is scarcely worth living.
Our illusions fill us up. The truth would empty us out.
Truth is as alien to our nature as illusion is necessary to our being.
Truth is a venom, lies are a cure. And you would have to be a fool or a suicide to dare to meddle with the truth.
Truth is a poison, but most of us ingest it in such small doses that it does us no harm. But a thinker’s stomach can absorb so much of truth’s toxin that it ends up killing them.
Truth is an opiate that makes life more unendurable than it was before.
12 Cruel truth, kind lies
A seeker woos truth like an unrequited lover. It’s the hapless ones who find their way to win her. The fortunate get fantasy, her more kind-hearted sister.
Truth must be wooed long and long. And by the time she yields to you, she is dried up, withered and bitter, and you will be too fashed to get much good of her.
Truth leaves you naked and exposed in a gale of affliction, when hospitable illusion would shelter you. Your errors nerve you, where the truth would weaken and discourage you. What deludes me makes me stronger. In the shipwreck of our hopes we have to cling to our buoyant delusions to stay afloat.
Illusion is a deep ocean which bears up those who yield to it. The lost souls who yearn for the truth thrash about in it and drown.
Truth is no help in time of trouble, but our humbug is an ever-present guide and consolation.
The truth would kill us. But even if lies killed us and truth kept us alive, we would rather die by our lies than live with the truth.
13 Dying for illusion
A few people may give up their peace of mind in order to seek out the truth, but far more give it up to keep hold of their illusions. They’re willing to die for their prejudices, but they won’t live for their principles. Why are they so keen to kill or be killed for tenets which they were too lazy to examine? ‘People,’ Russel remarked, ‘would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.’ Defoe said that there were a hundred thousand englishmen clamouring to make war on popery, who were not sure if it was a man or a horse.
Those who lay down their lives for a cause don’t prove a thing, not even that they believe in it or grasp what it means. And yet a creed may not be untrue even if millions die for it. But its adherents assume that they prove it true if they can make more of its adversaries die.
There are many ways to avoid examining whether your beliefs are true. To let yourself be martyred for them is one of the more drastic.
People have never cared to live for the truth. But they stand ready to kill for their false creeds.
14 The illusion of disillusion
We grow disillusioned with the world when it refuses to indulge the illusions that pander to our own importance.
We don’t fear lies but the motives for which people tell them. And we don’t fear truth but the effects that it might have on us. I’m disillusioned by those subterfuges that profit someone else more than me. And I’m disgusted by the deceptions that have ceased to serve my own ends. Those who assent to a lie from which they had hoped to gain are the first to squeal when they learn that they too might lose by it.
How disillusioned I may be by those things about which I was sure I had no more illusions. And what enchanting illusions I keep up as to objects by which I have been heartily disenchanted. Our lies are so durable because they are so elastic. And if they do snap, there is always a new one near at hand to take their place.
15 Disillusion and desire
People may fancy that they are gravely disillusioned by the world. But they are just disheartened that they have gained such a low place in it. A small promotion is enough to buy off their deep disillusion.
You may get rid of most of your illusions, but you can never get rid of your desires. And your desires bring with them their own illusions.
I try to dignify my frustration by titling it despair, and my disappointment by titling it disillusionment.
Life is a series of dizzying adventures in disgust and disillusion. And yet most of us end up adroitly poised in our steady self-satisfaction.
16 The economy of prejudice
If we tried to use our reason, most of us would aggravate our initial slips into catastrophic conclusions. By some happy chance we are more judicious, or at least more harmlessly muddled, than our principles or our prejudices should make us. ‘The average man’s opinions,’ Russel wrote, ‘are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.’
Reasoning would isolate us, and cut us off from our unreflecting herd, and leave us shivering in the dark. But we want to huddle close in a bright warm fug of shared prejudice.
We may be too remiss to track down the truth, but how perseveringly we work to keep up our indolent bunkum. Why do we tax our miraculous gifts to dream up ways of evading the truth, when we could have used them to find it out with far less labour?
UNITED BY ILLUSION
17 Lies keep the peace
In social life truth is the first casualty of peace. How could we get on so harmoniously, if we didn’t find it politic to act as if we were fooled by one another’s lies? ‘If people knew what others say of them,’ Pascal wrote, ‘there would not be four friends in the world.’ Truth is the nuclear deterrent which keeps the truce between friends, since we know that no one will dare use it.
Malevolent people cause such mayhem, because they light the fuse of the ill will that lurks beneath all comradeship.
A tactless mouth may cause more hurt than a malicious one.
Peace and harmony are founded far more securely on contempt than on respect, on ignorance than on empathy, on insincerity than on frankness, on indifference than on affection, on shallow convenience than on deep affinity, and on habit than on spontaneity.
Anyone who dares to get off the gaudy merry-go-round of mutual flattery is not fit to live in society.
If we weren’t content to tell such generous lies, how could we feel such sincere affection for the people we need? Fake sincerity rivets society together. True sincerity would rip it apart.
18 The community of illusion
Society is held together by the lies we tell one another. And each of us is held together by the lies we tell ourselves. Baseless illusion is the sole solid fundament on which a state can be based.
Our lies keep us shackled to the world. They are what we share most intimately, since they frame the rules of the game which we all hope to win. And we try to foist them on as many people as we can, since we add to our own sum by imposing them on others.
In suffering for an illusion, you can at least be sure that you are not alone, as you would be if you were suffering for the truth.
How tenderly the brute world treats our delusions. Yet how unforgivingly it treats those who woo the truth. It indulges the deceitful more than kind people hope, or than stern moralists fear.
19 Hooped together by illusion
A culture is bound by hoops of illusion, and would be blown apart if it got hold of the truth. Our lies unite us. Stable states are ballasted by one vast underlying fallacy. Unstable states are bound by knots of frayed mismatching ones. More resilient cultures don’t have the strength to bear the truth. They just have stronger and more trenchant errors.
Civilization lives by lies and self-deception, refashioning life as a parade of particoloured masks and facades. Yet it is the one setting in which we can find a way to the truth.
Our society is kept humming by its practical information and by its gratifying illusions, its new contrivances and its old lies.
A society that has evacuated all its errors would soon die of a spiritual dysentery.
People hold to their own personal truths but thrive by their shared lies.
A cause proves its worth partly by the goods that we give up to serve it. And the first thing that all of us are willing to give up is the truth.
It’s lucky that people are as ready to tell hopeful and unifying lies in a good cause as in a bad one.
20 Shared illusion
It is because we have to live in groups that we need our own illusions.
Most of us reckon that a thing comes to be real when it makes its way into the world at large and others take it up. But in fact it turns into a sham as soon as it does so. Does anything seem so crackbrained as a falsehood that no one else accepts? Yet this is just one more common prejudice. What we put most faith in is the errors that a great number of others share.
Truth is the thing that seems least real in this world of cheap charades.
Real things, such as truth or beauty, make unreal ones, such as opinion, wealth or success, appear unreal. But unreal things do the same to real ones, and in the minds of far more people. New truths lay bare the falsity of authorized cant. But authorized cant mocks new truths as if they were mere oddities. A truth is one of those superfluous things that means nothing to us if it doesn’t mean something to others.
Our shared platitudes are the best shield that we have in the face of catastrophe.
Why is it that a thing comes to seem credible or estimable for us because others credit or esteem it? ‘I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves,’ as Hume notes, ‘when unsupported by the approbation of others.’
21 Fake cause, real feeling
False convictions stoke in us real fervours, and the most truthless transport us with the most force.
Ideas that are uncontaminated by fact infect us with pure feeling.
We feel a genuine passion for fake things. But we can muster only a lukewarm respect for real ones.
A sham is always more convincing than what is authentic. It’s the hokiest rigmarole that makes us swoon. And real things end in disappointing us, fake things never do. They are at one with the world and our own minds, and they always have some trick or gimmick with which to impress us.
Most of us are too shrewd to be fobbed off with what is real and precious, yet we are mesmerized by the shallowest fakes.
Tinsel fakes thrill our hearts more than the real thing. They seem to have a buried life which they know they don’t lead. And what is second-hand sounds more plaintive. It echoes all the pasts that it once had and has now lost.
22 Awed by the image
Images and icons rouse in us more intense feelings than the real thing. Even those who love life are more in love with its simulations than they are with life itself. We don’t love images because they remind us of the world. Rather we now love the world because it puts us in mind of the images that have set us on to crave it.
People are more wonderstruck by the images of things than by the things themselves. They are awed not by the stars but by the names they assign to them, not by the cosmos but by the theorems that they use to construe it, not by its subtle laws but by the gargantuan machines that they use to probe it.
23 Revelation and repetition
An idea strikes us as a revelation, not when it first butts on our mind, but when we finally accede to it after it has long been rattling round in our heads. A revelation is not the dawn of the light of knowledge but the noontide of an obsession. It’s not the first spark of an unforeseen illumination. It is not a sudden event but the end of a long process. What we call a revelation is a recognition of what we have long thought. Its flash is the sudden detonation of a long and premeditated fixation.
A thought is like a tune. They don’t take hold of our hearts till we have heard them several times.
We are impressed as if by a revelation when we hear our moral nostrums played on with an anguished gravity.