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Primacy of Evasion and Lies of Omission By Diana Hsieh @ 1:44 PM   
On March 19th, I posted my blog entry about the relationship between self-deception and evasion to OWL. Michelle Cohen responded with an excellent analysis of the relationship between self-deception and evasion. She seems to agree with my basic understanding of evasion as "faking reality by refusing to accept what you know or suspect to be true" and self-deception as "faking reality by persuading yourself of what you know or suspect to be false." However, Michelle disputes my notion that evasion and self-deception are "two sides of the same coin." She writes: I think they are rather two degrees on the same continuum of dishonesty. Evasion is an earlier stage in the shift away from reality, while self deception is a more advanced stage. The dishonest person begins by refusing to accept what he knows to be true and continues by convincing himself that what was negated by the facts he evaded was possible. Then the person has to keep evading the facts that negate his faked reality in order to perpetuate his fantasy... Self deception depends completely on evasion. Michelle's post prompted an immediate exclamation of "Ah ha! That's it!" from me. I think her analysis really captures the nature of the relationship between evasion and self-deception. Evasion is the primary phenomena. In order to deceive ourselves into believing something, we must always first blind ourselves to what we know or suspect to be true. (Thanks Michelle!) My confusion on the relationship between self-deception and evasion resulted, I think, from the fact that self-deception is so often coupled with evasion. As Robert Campbell noted to me in a March 21st e-mail, "human beings are (understandably) uncomfortable living in an explanatory vacuum, so alternative explanations of dubious soundness are the more likely outcome." Evasion is often insufficient protection from unpleasant truths; self-deception provides an additional buffer. Over time, these two forms of dishonesty become intertwined, with self-deceptions supporting evasions and evasions supporting self-deceptions. Imagine a dishonest mother whose teenage son has just been brought home by the police for vandalizing a neighbor's fence. First, the mother must deny that her son did anything wrong. "Not my boy!" she says to herself. Then she starts seeking alternative explanations, telling herself, "Oh, he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time" or "His rowdy friend John must have put him up to it." In order to support these self-deceptions, she must evade some more, perhaps by ignoring what the officer tells her or by refusing to think about the previous times her son has been brought home by the police. These evasions might then be supported by further self-deceptions, perhaps that this officer just has it in for her boy for no good reason. Although, the evasions and self-deceptions become entangled and mutually supporting over time, the avoidance of truth is primary. Without the evasions, the self-deceptions would never be plausible. In fact, the intertwining of self-deception and evasion indicates just how dangerous such dishonesty with ourselves often is, because it is usually not an isolated, containable phenomena. Each evasion risks more self-deceptions and evasions. And each self-deception risks more evasions and self-deceptions. We cannot limit such internal dishonesty to only certain areas because, as I argued in my paper Excuses Excuses: Undermining Moral Growth in the Concealment of Wrongdoing, any such effort would bring the very facts that a person wishes to avoid into the harsh light of conscious awareness. I suspect that the primacy of avoiding truth over constructing falsehoods also applies to lies to other people. In The Truth about Lying, Stan Walters uses the term "evasion" to refer to lies of omission, while "deception" seems to refer to lies of commission. This conceptual scheme correlates very easily with the distinctions and terminology that I have been using in talking about dishonesty with oneself. In fact, it fits nicely into a four-square grid:
I suspect that lies by omission are more fundamental than lies by commission in dishonesty with others, just as evasion is more fundamental than self-deception is dishonesty with ourselves. The first task of the deceiver of others must be to avoid revealing the truth, for without such concealment, outright falsehoods will be immediately recognized for what they are. The "explanatory vacuum" created by the avoidance and denial of truth is what then necessitates outright falsehood. So if a man wants to deceive his wife about an affair, he must first avoid telling her anything about his activities that would raise suspicion, like that he had lunch this other woman. His next task is to construct alternate explanations for his behavior, such as a big project at work that regularly keeps him late. Only by avoiding suspicious truths do the man's falsehoods have a chance of being believed. This is not to say that dishonesty with others first requires lies by omission, then a switch to lies of commission only when those evasions become inadequate. Rather, in both dishonesty with ourselves and with others, unless the truth is deliberately and consistently avoided, the contradiction between the truth and the lie will be too clear. Evasion/omission is required for self-deception/commission. So there seem to be some interesting parallels between the workings of dishonesty with ourselves and dishonesty with others. How dishonesty with others encourages dishonesty with oneself and vice versa is, however, an issue for another day. | |||||||||
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