Word count:12854
[Music] you let's wrap up this series on self-deception by completing our list of self-deception mechanisms I promised you a list of over 60 of them we're gonna cover about 30 of them here today picking right back up from where we left off with part 2 so I got a really big one for you to begin with which is ignoring one's own conflicts of interest oh man talk about a self-deception mechanism this one is huge and under it this is such a big one that there are some sub topics which I include double standards as other self deception sub mechanism here self justifications and excuse making backwards rationalization confabulation and wanting or needing a thing to be true so let's talk about all of these but let's begin with this central point about conflict of interest what is a conflict of interest and why is it so deceptive well think about a tobacco company executive who has built his entire career on climbing the corporate ladder for 20 years and now he's the CEO of this tobacco company and let's imagine this was before there was a lot of good scientific evidence which conclusively proved that tobacco caused cancer so back then in his own mind it was iffy you know he might have suspected that cigarettes aren't really the healthiest thing but it wasn't conclusive but then what starts to happen his ass he's CEO all this evidence and all the science starts coming out but of course this presenta huge conflict of interest because his entire career and his entire identity and the way he feeds himself and his family the way he puts his kids through college depends on him being this great executive of this successful tobacco company so is he going to really listen to that scientific evidence when it comes out is he going to be objective very very unlikely and of course we understand how this works in these sorts of situations we understand when politicians act with conflict of interest we even have laws against conflict of interest where judges or attorneys or certain heads of government are supposed to recuse themselves in a situation where they have a conflict of interest because a judge can't judge a situation when his own interests are involved like financially for example but this is a much bigger thing than just politicians and judges and CEOs this goes to all of us and it especially applies very strongly in areas of how we make our living although of course there can be other kinds of conflict of interest but especially where you make your living because it's precisely the place that you get your livelihood from that you are most likely not to question if there's something there which isn't completely true or authentic and so a lot of people build their entire careers on inauthenticity and falsehood and unconsciousness and even though the back of their mind they know this they can't really ever admit it to themselves because hey how am I gonna survive you see the reason it's so closely tied to someone's career is because career isn't just about going to work it's actually your survival it's how you bring home the paycheck and in modern society bringing home the paycheck is equivalent to an animal hunting for food it's sort of like you're taking away the Lions ability to hunt for antelope of course the line is not going to stand for that because it's very survival is on the line so this becomes a very potent self-deception mechanism and of course I don't exclude myself from this and in fact actualised org is a significant conflict of interest for me as I pursue the truth and as I do spirituality because hey you know when you start to get successful you sort of develop a reputation you you start to release courses and you start to earn money for what you're doing the way that I do then sure yeah there's a pressure there's a pressure like you you need and you want things to come out a certain way because that helps your business for example what if the truth happens to not help your business what if it actually starts to erode your business what are you gonna do are you gonna side with the truth or with your business with your success with your career so that's tricky that's something I've had to navigate for a few years now and I still have to navigate that I have to I have to walk that path very carefully and that's that's always been a challenge for mixing spirituality with money that's why a lot of people don't like to do that a lot of teachers will say oh you shouldn't charge money for teaching at all because if it's a true teaching then I should be free and generally I'm on board that's why most of my videos are free just a little bit ads but of course there's also the reality that you need money and you need energy in order to fuel something so if someone's doing this full-time putting a lot of their time and energy into it then it also it also becomes a way of making a living so it's tricky it's tricky to navigate that there's no like clear and cut answers for how to do it so the next sub point is double standards and this one I find really interesting to observe in politics for example where it's very crystal clear and the hypocrisy there is incredible it's just stunning how much double standards exist within politics for example we're seeing it nowadays with Republicans and with Democrats and there's a double standard on both sides so one of the double standards with Republicans and conservatives is that when one of their politicians gets accused of lying or immorality or some sexual scandal or something like that which traditionally no they like to they like to be the party of morality then of course they ignore it and they don't really take it seriously because they have a double standard they expect morality from everybody else but really from themselves but then of course you got the same sort of problem happening with liberals with the Democrats because nowadays with all the sexual scandals coming out Democrats want to take a firm stance on sexual abuse but then of course the Democrats have a lot of instances of sexual abuse in the in their in their past with their politicians especially Bill Clinton for example and so you know where were where were the Democrats and where where was their outrage about sexual scandals and sexual abuse back in the Clinton era so see of course they turn a blind eye to it because it's all about how your mind is able to push through itself agenda so really the thing if you're a part of a political party that you care about is that your political party is winning that's the same thing as your ego winning so of course you're gonna use and manipulate whatever evidence or facts come your way for your own benefit and you're gonna ignore and cherry-pick all the stuff that doesn't serve your agenda and that's why you see so much hypocrisy within politics and a lot of people are disillusioned by that of course but that doesn't just happen in politics that happens within yourself as well you should start to notice double standards that you hold in many areas within your life scientists hold a lot of double standards you might think scientists are supposed to be the objective ones but of course that's not quite quite true right because you might take a hard-nosed scientist like a physicist or something and you might start talking to about some religious topic or some spiritual topic and he'll say oh but there's no objective proof for God or for any of this religious stuff so I can't take any of it seriously right so that's one standard but is he applying that same standard to himself and to science is there objective proof for example that there exists an external world of course not there never was and there never will be because the objective were the external world this is a conceptual construction and there can be no proof for it and if horse science has never proved it but do most scientists accept this do most scientists really question the existence of the external world no not at all because that just comes to them as part of the dogma of the scientific paradigm so of course how do they get away with it by having the double standard so people who are very rational and skeptically minded they often have a very strong harsh standard that they apply to spiritually minded people and New Age people and they like to criticize and dismiss the New Age people because oh the New Age people they have such lacks standards of evidence and criteria they're not really hard-nosed enough well what about the scientists what about the rationalist what about the materialists do you actually have conclusive proof that the universe is rational that is material see do you have conclusive proof that there exists a self why do you believe in a self have scientists seven prove ever proven the existence of a self no of course not all this stuff is just taken for granted and then a double standard is applied to a bunch of other religious stuff which of course is a gross hypocrisy but the mind doesn't see it precisely because it sets up these standards and it doesn't know that it's setting up these standards to the mind it seems like no this is just reality is just truth and we see a lot of double standards very interestingly within spiritual traditions and communities so for example you might go to the Buddhists as one community or you might go to the Neo invitin stew as another community and you ask them ok so if I use your spiritual techniques or your meditation technique or your self inquiry technique so is this gonna like produce all the results for me is this gonna make me enlightened Interlaken me or whatever and grow me and of course the Buddhists will say yes of course our techniques are the best and then you ask the Neo advance what about your techniques are they the best and they say yeah of course our techniques are the best the boot techniques they're not so good see and every group you noticed does this and then if I ask the Buddhist group okay so how good are your techniques really objectively like what if we compare them with the Neo invitin techniques and one of the Buddhists gonna say the boots are gonna say oh those new inviting techniques they don't really enlightened people they they produce half-baked indictments and they're not really as good and strong as our techniques but when you actually take a look at any school and you objectively evaluate how good their techniques are in truth what you discover is that 98% of all spiritual techniques are utter failures and all the students who go to all the workshops and all the seminars and all the bypass and retreats and all the Sat songs and all of that do they ever become awakened do they ever radically transform their consciousness no of course not because that's true across the board across all spiritual traditions across all spiritual techniques so the trick though of belonging to one school is to turn a blind eye to all the people who fail using your own techniques so what the Buddhists will do is though say Ollie oh but look at all these people who have become enlightened through Buddhist teachings and techniques yes of course but you're ignoring the even greater number who never did and never will and so the Buddhists will point to the new invite ins they'll say oh look at all the people who fail at neo-advaita yes of course but look at all the people who also fail at Buddhism just as many if not more and of course that's true of neo-advaita and have a very other tradition basically it's really quite amazing at the double standards that these that these schools have and why is that because the loyalty of the person who belongs to one of these traditions or schools is of course the school comes first that's like the new ego that's being defended and so there's no objective analysis that's actually happening or objective comparison of which techniques are actually the best objectively speaking that's never actually done these people don't go out and they don't try 20 different techniques they try a couple of techniques within their tradition and then they become staunch defenders of that self justification and excuse making of course serves to enforce these double standards so these double standards are never acknowledged to be double standards they're always excused away the mind always comes up with a good excuse for why there should be an exception for Buddhism or for neo advisor or for something else so of course it'll cherry-pick evidence to make its case and also it'll employ the tools of backwards rationalization and confabulation and this is a really powerful phenomenon psychologists have called it confabulation it's when actually they've pinpointed it to the left hemisphere in the human brain there are modules in the left hemisphere which are extremely good at backwards rationalizing or confabulating a story which explains a situation after the fact to fit a particular narrative or agenda that the person has and there are some remarkable cases with with people who have brain disorders which very clearly illustrate just how strong confabulation can be and I'll actually shoot an episode that I plan in the future about brain disorders and all the interesting stuff that goes on with those and there I will talk about some amazing cases of confabulation which will utterly blow your mind people who backwards rationalize the most incredibly false things and trick themselves into believing that it's actually true because they they fail to take into account that when the mind is rationalizing it can rationalize almost anything it wants in the same way that an attorney a really good attorney can argue for almost any case and a good attorney can stand there in a courtroom with a big smile on his face and legitimately defend rapist or a murderer or some politician how does he do that precisely because he's using his left hemisphere to do this sort of confabulating building a strong case through cherry-picking of evidence and having these double standards and the last sub component here is wanting or needing a thing to be true for whatever reason maybe you need a thing to be true because your relationship hinges on it or are you having sex hinges on it or you not upsetting your child hinges on it so what you're gonna do in that case is because you don't want to upset your child or because you want to have sex or because you want to maintain your relationship or because you want to keep your career you are going to say to hell with the truth of course dissolve done subconsciously so you don't consciously say to hell with the truth but subconsciously you say to hell with the truth I'm gonna go with what's gonna serve me the most and so you do and so then that's how these self-deceptions get enforced the next self deception mechanism is unwillingness to do personal investigation into matters not being willing to actually put in the time and energy to do research this is a big trap that I see people falling into because I might present some technique or some abstract philosophical idea for example through my content and then some skeptic will post to me and say all leo but where's the proof for that well the proof is you going and actually doing the research but then of course they say ABBA Leo why should I do the research give me the proof for why the research will be useful for me to do but you see that's of course sort of a catch-22 if you're looking for proof for why the researcher is going to be valuable then you're not really serious about doing the research to be a really good researcher what you need to understand is that research could lead to a dead end and that not every single path that you pursue within a research project is necessarily going to lead to gold and in fact most companies who do research like pharmaceutical companies or technology companies military research all the sort of stuff what happens with their research projects most of them end up going nowhere most technologies never come to market most new drugs that are being tested will fail the approval process and you might say oh that's a huge waste of money yes but the whole value of research is that you take multiple paths you pursue multiple avenues and then you have a shot at discovering something big striking gold but you can't do that so long as from the very beginning you need to be guaranteed of the result you see and it's the same way with with personal development research I research a lot of stuff and not all of it pans out I try and dabble with different techniques and not all those techniques work for me or produce the kind of results that I want but then once in a while I strike on a technique that's really amazing and really powerful and I would never have been able to stumble upon it had I not had this mindset of being a researcher and being willing to try stuff and having it fail but see to be a good researcher that requires that you don't judge things too harshly from the outset you need to be open to the fact that your mind can be changed that's why you're doing research you would be a very bad researcher if you assumed the result the end result of your research before you actually did the research if that was the case you wouldn't need to do research to begin with because you'd already know what's true and what's the best but the whole point is that you don't know what's the best and what's true therefore you need to keep your mind open it would be sort of like imagine that you're fat and you've never been to the gym and then I tell you hey you know you can get really buff you can get like one of the one of those little weightlifter bodies by going to the gym and doing squats and doing the treadmill and all this sort of stuff but you're very skeptically minded so you say aha leo but where's the proof show me the proof and I say well the proof is in the doing go to the gym do it and get your results but you're so skeptical that of course what do you say you say ah Leo but okay fine fine fine you convinced me you've convinced me I'm open-minded I'm gonna go for one week and I'm gonna try it and then I'll prove you either right or wrong so you go for a week you try it and then you say aha Leo look I went for a week I tried it and look I proved you wrong I'm still fat I'm still not the weightlifter that you know I don't have that weightlifter body that you promised me yes of course because you're still fundamentally closed-minded see what's required for this case to succeed is you have to be much more open-minded than you are you have to try it for a whole year maybe for two years and you have to be serious about it you can't half-ass it it's the same thing with personal development techniques and with spiritual techniques you can't just go meditate for a week half-assing it and then say okay if I don't get my results that I'm quitting well if that's your attitude you might as well not go do it at all you're just wasting your week there it's not enough to be 5% open-minded as in these failed cases you need to be a hundred percent open-minded so that the situation could actually work on you and transform you but see the self-deception that a lot of people get themselves into is is with this sort of false sense of of open-mindedness they're unwilling to actually do personal investigation into existential matters or into personal development into spirituality or any this kind of stuff and then they complain that all there's not enough evidence there's not enough evidence Leo about self-help only because you haven't bothered to get off your ass and do the personal investigation and of course not because you're lazy and because your mind wants to stay stuck in its all tools paradigms and all its old habits to actually do real research real personal investigation into things that is emotionally challenging and it's actually gonna transform you and it's gonna kill you in various ways to various degrees and that's of course something the mine doesn't want the next self-deception mechanism is assuming rigid dualistic categories or distinctions and this is something that's plagued Western thought for over 2,000 years ever since Aristotle who came up with all these categories for reality and what do I mean by these dualistic categories or distinctions well the mind loves to think of reality as having these fixed categories like science versus religion as though these two things are totally separate and either you're scientific or you're religious or how about the category of good and bad either something is good or something is bad or is evil or subjective versus objective either something is objective or subjective or mind versus body or physical versus immaterial or life versus death and there's hundreds of others of these dualistic sorta categories a really good example might be natural versus artificial this is one that trips a lot of people up a lot of people will use this argument of like Oh Ally oh this thing here is good because it's natural and that thing there is bad because it's artificial but what they don't understand is that they're assuming this this category somehow fundamentals or reality but it's really not this is just a conceptual category and science has been plagued by this for for a very long time and it still is to this day many scientists just assume that these sorts of categories are true of reality that they are objective when in fact the notion of objective is itself one of these categories the truth is that all such categories ultimately collapse when you explore them broadly and deeply enough only when you have a very narrow perspective can one of these categories hold up you know in many situations in life such a category does hold up like you can say that an item or a food is artificial or natural and loosely speaking that can be true and that that can be a useful distinction to make but you always have to keep in mind that there's nothing fundamental about it and that ultimately if you explore this question of which foods are natural artificial you should understand and you should expect that that's gonna collapse and break down and it's never gonna be so simple as just categorizing this piece of fruit or that vegetable or that piece of meat as being artificial or or natural because there are no sharp boundaries within reality there's always just these fuzzy edges and that's what we find with science you know a science investigates things deeper and deeper and deeper they see that all of these sorts of simplistic categories that we used to have for example the Aristotle came up with 2,000 years ago that all of them ultimately collapse including for example the category of matters versus energy which is something that was discovered by Einstein and by quantum physicists over a hundred years ago now is that there is no such category even though simplistically speaking yes we assume that there is a difference between matter and energy but also now we know that you can convert one into the other that's what nuclear reactions are about or how about with light being a particle or a wave see early scientists thought that it must be one or the other because they assume that it's just this is a just a rigid categorization scheme and that nature must fit into one box or another box but then they discovered it's not so simple as just light being a particle or a wave it's got properties of both another self-deception mechanism is being overly logical and rational I've talked about this in the past hopefully you can see how this becomes a self-deception mechanism because logic and rationality is not something you can assume is going to deliver truth to you not necessarily there are a lot of rational logical people in the world who are deluded so you got to wonder what's the difference what's really running the show is logic and rationality may be a tool of the mind to actually maintain its power why is it that law that lawyers can use logic and reason to argue for all sorts of silly things and philosophers have used logic and reason to argue for all sorts of silly things as well so how can you rely on logic and reason is it rational and logical to just take on faith that reality can be fully understood through logic and through reason or is that just a dogma is that just a personal pet theory of yours that you're clinging to another closely associated self-deception mechanism with this one is thinking bias something I call thinking bias it's when a person thinks that thinking is the only way that one can understand reality and that thinking is the best way and if there is nothing beyond thinking and that if I can't think it then it can't be true or it can't be real and that anything that is true or Israel must be thinkable but what if there are other ways of interacting and understanding reality other than thought such as for example intuition or such as for example direct consciousness see people who are very logical and rational don't take these other modalities very seriously because they're just stuck on thinking all the time and the mind of course loves to think so of course that's a conflict of interest that it has since it loves to think it loves to think that thinking is the best and that thinking is all that there is but how do you know that you can trust all the thinking that your mind does that's the very thing that we're questioning here so we have to be careful not to use our thinking to justify our thinking you see because that just creates a vicious circle another related self-deception bias is what I called analysis bias or self-deception mechanism rather is analysis bias what is this this is the tendency of rational and scientifically minded people to want to analyze the world to death thinking that the best way to understand the world and to arrive at truth is through analysis or a sort of a reductionist philosophy where we take everything we just split it apart slice and dice it and by doing so thinking that we're gonna get to the most fundamental elements and of course this is something we see for example within science within the physical sciences it's like if you take a cell and you break it apart into its little molecules and stuff then you get chemicals and if you break those chemicals apart then you get atoms and if you break those apart you get quarks and so we say okay so we just uh D quarks then we're gonna understand everything about reality but of course it doesn't work this way this is another bias that the mind has which is fragmentation the mind just assumes that if it can just break everything apart into little pieces that it will understand because see the mind can't deal with big stuff it needs to simplify things down break it down into little pieces because it can't hold the whole but what's interesting about reality is that just taking some pieces and arranging them together doesn't produce the whole the most interesting phenomenon in life are emergent phenomena phenomenon that is greater than some of its individual parts see you take a bunch of little bouncing around plutonium atoms and if you have a small number of them they just bounce around they vibrate but you have enough of them and you trigger them and then you get a chain reaction now you get all sudden a nuclear weapon that's very different that's a that's a huge qualitative shift there when you get past that critical mass and a lot of other things in life work that way so fragmentation is a is a poor way of generally speaking understanding reality especially if you care about the big picture and this analysis bias you see a very prevalent throughout our universities and in academia because their people become hyper specialized within a sub-domain of some science and they become technical masters of that sub domain and they learn about some very niche esoteric topic like molecular biology or some subfield within algebra or calculus and then they think that because they have that they now they they've they've understood the world but of course they haven't what they've gotten sucked into is small picture thinking really if you want to have a true understanding of the world what you're looking for is looking for wisdom and you're looking for big picture thinking and you're looking for holism which is actually the opposite of analysis and fragmentation you're looking for synthesis you're looking for getting a like a Gestalt of the entire thing which is difficult for the mind to do it's difficult for the logical mind to do this actually it can't this sort of holistic understanding requires more intuitive capacities which many people are out of touch with and so this sort of analysis and reductionism ultimately can lead to a lot of self-deception because it might seem like when you're analyzing everything to death that you're understanding it all but actually you are just investing a lot of your time and energy understanding of the minutiae of life but missing the most important parts which is why you can have a scientist who's a brilliant mathematician or a physicist or something like that but he's not gonna have wisdom he's not gonna have an understanding of what reality is or what emotions are or how to be in a relationship and you might say oh Willy oh but that's not his job yeah exactly that's the whole problem is see when you define your job as a very narrow thing then that's what you become you become this technical technician this little technical robot and then you're not happy with your life you're depressed your life doesn't go well because for your life to go well you need to be more of a generalist with life rather than a technician and this is especially a problem in universities because universities put a lot of pressure on intellectuals to become hyper technicians and you would think that well in a university we should have our smartest people in society would be the professors and academics and the doctors and the PhDs but actually turns out to be oftentimes quite the opposite don't go to a university to find wisdom that's the irony of it the next self-deception mechanism is what I call impossibility bias it's assuming that your intuition of what's possible and impossible is correct how many times have we seen throughout the history of science or humanity where people have made bold predictions about things that aren't impossible powered man flight is impossible uh-uh nuclear explosions are impossible ex is impossible why is impossible this thing is impossible that thing is impossible and then what happens is that usually within a hundred years and oftentimes much quicker these people are proven to be wrong why is this how could they have deceived themselves so for example there's a famous example of Lord Kelvin who is over one of the top respected scientists in the late 1800s and he made a famous pronouncement that powered man flight will never be possible to scientific impossibility and that was just five years before the Wright brothers created and flew the first plane that was rather a huge embarrassment for him he all he also famously said that x-rays are a hoax and that they are also impossible and then he was very quickly proven wrong so how could this be the case well because the mind gets arrogant and it takes the limits of its imagination for the limits of reality and we see this time and time again it's not just with Lord Kelvin you see this with very many intelligent people throughout Western intellectual tradition it's quite remarkable how easily they trick themselves one thing that we have discovered throughout human history is that the future always surprises us in radical ways and new things end up being possible which we could have never have conceived of you know just go back 500 years and tell them that you're gonna have a smartphone which has streaming video on it that you can use all over the country without any interruptions and service and you can talk to your mom across the world and it all works seamlessly and they would have they would have called you out as a heretic and as as a sorcerer if you said that even scientists would say you're deluded because what you're is completely unscientific that's completely impossible you're talking about some kind of magical wireless technologies non-physical immaterial technologies delivering radio waves and all this stuff this is hocus pocus that's what they would have told you because we mistake our own limited imaginations for the limitations of the world that's a powerful lesson you can learn from history another self-deception mechanism is mistaking truth with proved ability again many intelligent and rational and scientific people mistake these two things the notion of truth improve ability these are two different things and the domain of things which are true is much larger than domain of things that are provable whereas many rationally minded people think that these I do Menor I dent achill they think that if a thing is is true it must be provable and if it's not provable that means it must not be true that's actually false and it's actually been proven for example curt girdle actually proved that within mathematics the domain of truth must always be much larger than the domain of proof ability and that was within a hard feel like mathematics not to mention ordinary everyday situations so a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that Ollie oh well if you're saying something and it's very profound its true that means you should be able to easily prove it to me no not at all in fact the most profound things are often completely unprovable because the truth doesn't care about prove ability prove ability is something that you do in a sort of formal way like a self-help technique might be very helpful for you it might calm your emotions certain meditation techniques can get you to all sorts of interesting mystical states and like that stuff like that but proving it is much harder because proving it is like you have to pay a lot of money to set up a double-blind clinical study in a laboratory those usually cost tens of millions of dollars they usually take up a lot of time making take many years to do they require large sample sizes a lot of you know careful controlling of all the variables who's gonna pay for that do you think science just goes around and proves everything that's true no science cherry-picks what it goes after these experiments are very expensive so science has to be very selective as to what its gonna fund and what it's going to research and of course it mostly does the research on stuff that's gonna earn money which is how science is biased by business and by marketing another related self-deception mechanism is expecting the truth to be thrust upon you and proven to you overwhelmingly against your own resistance so some skeptics will take this position of like Oh leo well if what you're talking about is true then you should be able to prove it beyond a doubt such that I am convinced no matter how much of a devil's advocate and a skeptic that I play no of course not in fact the truth is such a delicate thing that if you are not willing to surrender yourself to it completely then you're never gonna see it this is a big mistake that people make people assume that the truth is just so overwhelming that it'll it'll convince and persuade anybody no it's just the opposite of that it will only convince the person who is willing to surrender to it which means that you have to be willing to to meet the truth halfway you can't sit in your little corner with your ears and eyes shut and expecting me or somebody else deliver the truth to you it just doesn't work that way another self-deception mechanism is assuming that reality is simple intuitive and obvious and because it is so we can use linear Aristotelian logic to understand reality and this linear Aristotelian logic is sort of like a thing is either a or it's B or it's C or D but it can't be a combination of all the above or it can't be that a is part true and part false and B is part true and part part false see linear air-sealing logic says it no it must be either a is true or B is true and most things in the world aren't that simple aren't that black and white which leads me to the self-deception mechanism of black and white thinking this is something that's very tricky and produces a lot of self delusion for example well here's a good example for you with personal development is that people do personal development but only here about enlightenment and then say well Leo what's the point of personal development doesn't enlightenment mean that all persons of ailment is false and then it's all useless and see what that is that's black and white thinking no it's not like that why would it be that way why do you assume that why do you need things to be so black and white why can't it be the case that you can pursue enlightenment and even after you get enlightenment that there's still value to doing personal development that there are personal element techniques that are just independent of enlightenment that can still improve your life and that you probably want to learn for example just because enlightened you're enlightened doesn't mean that you understand nutrition and how to feed yourself properly or just because you're enlightened doesn't mean that now your relationships are gonna be smooth because you haven't learned how to relate to human beings and that's a separate issue but of course see people don't like that sort of complexity and they don't like the complexity like well just because you're enlightened they think it all down all the sudden life purpose is pointless and it's stupid no because after enlightenment you're still gonna have to feed yourself you're still gonna have to have a job unless you're already a millionaire so what's your job gonna be is it gonna be working at McDonald's are you gonna be happy with that or would you rather create the kind of job where you're actually doing something that you find meaningful something that you can be passionate about see these things aren't at odds with each other the way that people like to think sometimes another example of black-and-white thinking is some people here this topic about self-deception and they say Oh leo so that means everything is a self-deception see they become indiscriminate whereas before they heard about self-deception they thought nothing was a self-deception now they hear me talking about all this stuff it's obviously all okay so let's swing the pendulum completely the opposite way now everybody do is deluded every emotion that I have every thought that I have everything that's going on with me is complete self-deception and what does that turn out to be Pope just more self-deception no the whole point is that self-deception is subtle it's not black and white it's not the case that everything is self-deception you do have genuine motivations and desires within you and you have certain values that you shouldn't just throw out because you assume that they're lies you have to actually carefully introspect and look in there and learn how to distinguish between what's true and what's false within you otherwise you're just gonna get yourself stuck because once you start to think that everything is a self-deception including yourself deception to self-deception including everything I'm telling you is a self-deception including all enlightenment teachings are self deceptions so you're so wrapped up in this idea of self-deception that now you've deceived yourself into complete inaction so now what you do is you do nothing and what you get is you get the exact same life that you've always gotten which is largely one based on selfish and that just continues and perpetuates which is the opposite of what we want what will go on here is we want to help you to jailbreak your mind and that requires nuance not black and white thinking about the next self-deception mechanism I call it paradox bias this is a general bias that I noticed that most rational minds have and have had throughout Western intellectual tradition since the very beginning of avoiding paradox and avoiding weirdness they're scared of the paradoxical or weird or strange facets of reality it's like the human mind the rational mind wants reality to also fit it's sort of rational agenda so it tends to only look at phenomena which fit that and it tends to not look at the paradoxical edge cases and actually I find the paradoxical edge cases to be the most interesting aspects of phenomena to study it's in those gaps or in those cracks that you find the paradoxes from which you can learn the most about the ultimate nature of reality sure it's easy to look at reality and to cherry-pick the phenomena such that it fits your rationals paradigm but that's not the whole picture that's a partial picture that's a partial picture that fits your rationalist paradigm and I'll actually shoot an episode in the future well at where I will present evidence for how many great Western intellectuals have actually been scared to death of paradox and have gone to great lengths to eliminate all traces of paradox from feels like logic mathematics and the hard sciences and how that ultimately got them into trouble and into epistemic blunders so that's for our future topic the next self-deception mechanism is taking hard-won knowledge as obvious a good example of this is for example we just assumed these days that it saw Deus that a surgeon should wash his hands before doing surgery especially after he's just finished operating on another patient you think what could be more obvious than that and yet 300 years ago if you proposed the idea that surgeons had to wash their hands in between surgeries they would have laughed at you they would have criticized you for daring to to say that they're unclean doctors and they would have actually kicked you out of the hospital which is actually exactly what happened with the very first doctor who started to propose the idea that washing hands is important for sanitation and actually a lot of deaths were caused by not washing hands do you think that his ideas were accepted by doctors no of course not they were totally rejected because this is not an obvious thing the way that we assume and this is just one example of of a ton of other pieces of knowledge like this which to us these days in the 21st century seems totally obvious but actually many people had to die and overcome a lot of dogma and resistance hundreds of years ago for us now to be able to take this hard-won knowledge as obvious now it appears that it never had to be hard-won no one had to actually fight for it when in fact people died for this knowledge and we are just like standing on the shoulders of giants these days and taking a lot of it for granted and the reason that this produces a self-deception is because this also gets people to think about the wrong way about how our knowledge will progress because if we had to fight so hard to get most of our knowledge nowadays you have to assume that we're gonna also have to fight that hard to keep advancing our knowledge into the future people just have to assume that knowledge just comes easily because the truth just reveals itself and everybody agrees to it no that's not how a knowledge works worshiped you costly have to fight and push and battle against all sorts of self-interest and entrenched interests and dogmas and people's prejudices so that later after all that fighting is over people can say oh of course that's so obviously we knew it already everybody knew that no they didn't they only say that after the victory has been won another sub deception mechanism is what I call mindfuck bias it's the tendency of very intelligent and rational people to look at a trend and expend the expect the trend to just keep going in the same direction they can just extrapolate it out and they assume there's not gonna be a surprise reversal somewhere in that trend and what this does this sets them up for a mindfuck and the reason I call it mindfuck bias is fundamentally these people underestimate the possibility of mind [ __ ] within whatever thing they're studying because they think that uh you know if you think the trend is just going this way it'll just keep going this way like if population is just rising it's just gonna continue rise if computer processing powers is growing every year is just gonna continue to grow no not necessarily you always have to be open for a mindfuck for a surprise reversal because reality is nonlinear another self-deception mechanism is what I call pragmatic bias that's the tendency of people to only care about things which they see as obviously useful to them and then what they say is they say well leo if it's not useful then who cares why should I care about it and this becomes a great source of self-deception because of course the stuff that's useful to you is the stuff that directly serves your your ego serves your survival but what if there are things out there that aren't immediately useful or aren't useful at all but nevertheless are true you would miss out on those things because you're always so pragmatic that you're only looking for the stuff that's gonna immediately help you to advance yourself you see but what if life is more than just about advancing yourself what if life is more than just success or technology a lot of people these days confuse success and technology with truth but these are actually poor indicators of truth just because something is successful doesn't make it true in fact often it's just the opposite some of the most successful people are complete frauds and just because the technology works doesn't mean that it's based on knowledge which is necessarily true for example we have a lot of technology that we've built based on Newtonian mechanics but we know that mccanna Newtonian mechanics is technically false but it's still very useful it's a useful approximation it's not the truth a lot of rationally minded people place their faith into technology and I think that all technology will deliver us from all the problems of society and if we can just get more success that will Leo that will obviate the need for truth who cares about truth and we could just become so rich if our economy can just keep growing and our technology can just keep it increasing then truth doesn't matter anymore but what they're doing there is there they're overlooking the subtle value of pure truth of truth for truth sake and it is it's tough it's really difficult to take a person who's pragmatic and to convince him that hey you know why don't you lay your pragmatism aside and maybe you can just pursue truth for truth sake for a while and see what that does for you and see how that might surprise you because the pragmatical person will say what but Leo what's in it for me is it gonna make me richer is it gonna make my ability to make new technology better No maybe it won't but maybe what it will do is it'll get you to see a bigger picture maybe they'll get you to see that life is more than just about pursuing value and just being a pragmatic robot which is the whole problem with pragmatism is that you just become a robot always just chasing success that's the problem with value scanning everything all the time you're putting a value on everything but then you don't appreciate really anything because you look at a beautiful sunset and I tell you hey look at this beautiful sunset look at this beautiful painting and you say oh but what's the value of it how much does that sunset really worth what's the dollar sign on it what's that painting really worth oh it's worth a hundred million dollars because it's a van Gogh oh yeah that's interesting I can appreciate that but of course there you're not really appreciating the the painting itself you're appreciating the dollar sign behind it because you treat everything as a tool for advancing your personal agenda but then that backfires on you because when you're living your life pragmatically all the time you're actually missing out on the most fundamental aspect of life which is the appreciation of the inherent beauty of everything of being you're missing out on the beauty of being when you're being pragmatic because you're just using the being as a tool towards something else and something else and something else is so it just becomes a never-ending rat race and you're never fulfilled by that and then you don't know why because you're too pragmatic that's why other self deception mechanism is under estimating the influence of business marketing and culture in influencing your worldviews and your beliefs and your desires this is huge I've talked about it before I'll just mention it briefly here but people just don't understand that modern business and marketing literally manufactures our culture the kind of music that you like the kind of movies you like the kind of jokes you like all of this has been completely influenced by business and by marketing and this leads to great self-deception because you're just buying into the culture which has been shaped by these companies but then this culture is designed by these companies so that you do what so that you buy and do business with them and so then your life becomes about doing business with them and you don't even know that that's what your life has become about because a lot of this stuff happens on sort of a subconscious level and people don't realize it people are playing video games and watching movies and all this and they think oh it's just good fun yeah it's just good fun on one level but on another level it's just them milking you for money and then what kind of information and what kind of values are these movies and these video games and so forth instilling in you are they instilling values that are actually make you appreciate life more or values are gonna make you addicted and coming back for more to buy more from those companies skewing your entire worldview see it's not just like oh yeah they're selling me a movie no they're skewing your entire worldview in a very subtle but also significant way such that you're addicted to it and that you actually come to it for all your satisfaction in life but fundamentally it's hollow it's sort like they're selling you sugar you consume the sugar but then you're ultimately unsatisfied on the inside and your whole picture of reality is wrong as well that's the the sort of the hidden cost that they don't tell you about the next self-deception mechanism is Authority and credentials this one is big a lot of people just trust in authority and they just leave questions about reality up to the experts they leave it to the academics or the doctors to the scientists to the gurus as though they have the answers and they will figure it out for us and we'll just listen to them and we'll just take on whatever they tell us this happens both real with religious people it's a problem because religious people believe in all sorts of gurus and authorities from the Bible or from some other group it also happens with science just as much you think science isn't built upon Authority and credentials it totally is it's all about what kind of position the scientist has in the university how many peer-reviewed research papers does he have how many citations does he have how many books has he written have those books been on the New York Times bestseller list has he got a Nobel Prize has he gotten a PhD how many PhDs has got published in in certain journals and if he hasn't then we're not gonna take this scientist seriously but if he has we're gonna take it everything he says and we're just basically gonna accept it unquestioningly that produces huge self-deception there's also a mechanism that I call a morality bias which is an interesting one it's people who are very attached there to their moral judgments and convictions and so whenever for example somebody presents a truth to them something new that they should learn or become conscious of what they do is they compare that truth against their system of morality and they say well does this truth conflict with my ability to judge and Mura lies about people and if it does that means this truth has to be false which is completely backwards because the way it should go is that you should consider the truth or the the wisdom being presented to you on its own merit and then you have to think about the consequences of that and then you have to apply it to your existing system of morality you have to say oh well does that mean that now maybe I shouldn't judge rapists and I shouldn't judge Nazis and I shouldn't judge those people because I used to judge them and I thought they were evil but now this truth that I'm being presented tells me that I can't judge them anymore Oh No what do I do do I stick with my morality or they give it up and see these people they stick with their because they think their morality is first and everything else comes second which is completely backwards and a similar sort of phenomenon involves this next self-deception mechanism which is called I call it political ramifications bias same thing you have a political ideology and then some truth or some wisdom is granted to you which you have to consider on its own merit but people don't the way they do it is first is in rather than send me on its own merit is that they compare it to their political ideology and they see is this truth or piece of information compatible with my political ideology if it is I'll accept it if it's not then it must be false because they're using their political ideology as like the touchstone against which everything else is measured when it has to really be the opposite first discover the truth discover the highest wisdom then ask yourself how should that inform my political ideology and what you'll probably be shocked to learn is that man it completely erodes my political ideology and of course most people don't like learning that another self-deception mechanism is historical meta-narratives we're taught history which gives us a context for how we think about life as a whole here's just one example for you is that generally most rashly scientifically minded people believe the following little story or myth about human civilization they believe that 10,000 years ago humans basically lived like savages like cavemen before the advent of Agriculture and before science came along before rationality came along we just basically live like savages like barbarians we believe in all sorts of silly superstitions but then what happened is that technology came onboard we got agriculture and then we got the rise of Greece and Rome and then we had the rise of reason but then quickly that all collapsed because Christianity came to power and all this religious superstition it sort of squelched reason for for many centuries and then we went to Middle Ages in the Dark Ages and their humanity was floundering and nothing was really happening until the Renaissance when the Middle Ages ended and we had a resurgence of Reason and we had the Scientific Revolution and then we had the European enlightenment and so from that we got all the way to today and today we have science which is taking over and it's it's defeating the last remnants of religion and now science is winning and rationality is winning and so now finally we're free and we're gonna advance ourselves to some new promised future this is what I mean by historical meta-narrative it all sounds good but is it really true or did you cherry-pick that evidence from history actually there's a lot of evidence coming out these days if you study history beyond what they taught you in middle school and in high school and in college is that you actually see that this entire story starts to smell very fishy what if it was actually the case that before the advent of Agriculture humans actually lived very consciously they weren't savages and barbarians they were actually conscious and they weren't just superstitious and mythological they actually had genuine mystical insights into the nature of reality and they had they made some very profound and advanced discoveries just using their direct consciousness yeah they didn't have a lot of fancy science back then but nevertheless they were very knowledge about about plant life animal life how to manipulate stones and do stonework and then they built some amazing monuments like the the ancient Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx and these stone henges and other kinds of ziggurats and pyramids that are found all over the world that date back to sometimes five ten thousand years ago maybe even older I mean that these people actually lived probably quite high-quality lifestyles compared to what happened late when agriculture came about because with the advent of Agriculture we had these cities these cities have started going to war now there's famine there's plague there's war there's infighting there's egos now there's governments that are rising that take over their totalitarian governments and all that still basically persists to this day and really what we've ended up doing is we've ended up domesticating ourselves and contrary to what people think that we're out of the Dark Ages actually maybe we're still in the dark ages it's just that these Dark Ages have become technologized you have your smartphone your internet all this sort of stuff but you basically live in a cube you live in a little prison you go to work you punch the clock you come back home jerk off to some porn and what is all this you think this is a good life what if this is just you being an animal in a zoo you see so these sort of meta narratives are tricky things they can get you to sort of believe that all everything is going peachy but really maybe it's not maybe the world is on the brink of extinction with nuclear holocaust and all these other problems that we have who knows I'm not saying one or the other is necessarily true I'm just saying gotta watch out for these historical meta-narratives because they can really trick you and this is just one example there could be many other kinds of historical metod narratives that you use to sort of ground your understanding of reality and to justify your behaviors or to justify society's behaviors another self-deception mechanism is tribalism you probably know about this one it's big it's very broad I mean tribalism with that comes racism as an example that for example nationalism nationalism is an example of that all sorts of infighting of course part partisanship and political infighting creating various kinds of factions that fight against each other these become huge sources of self-deception this also happens within spiritual communities you get various tribes that form this sort of us versus them mentality another self-deception mechanism is groupthink groupthink is when you surrender your mind to a group of people like in your company or in your spiritual circle or within a university or something and then you just let them think for you without using your own mind because using your own mind is challenging you gotta burn calories you got to sit there and contemplate stuff but but then what most people do is they just they just surrender they outsource that they let other people think for them but then of course the problem with groupthink is that the group has its own agenda so then not only do you have your own layer of self-deception that's got to watch out for cuz it's active and running but now you've got the groupthink and the group's ego is self agenda and it's also rotting its own separate mechanism self-deception so those synergize to make a very bad combination you'll get very diluted there the next mechanism is assuming that everyone has the same brain chemistry and that everyone has the same basic access to reality and that reality is the same for everybody I find this to be a very core assumption that I see almost everybody making almost every teacher almost every book almost every school you learn from what do they do they just basically assume that everyone has the same brain chemistry but we know that's not the case we know that we have strong introverts we have strong extroverts we have left brain people we have right brained people we even have for example sociopaths and Psychopaths we have schizophrenic s-- we have people who are autistic and all of these different people have literally different brain physiology they think about the world differently they feel the world differently and then you wonder why people act weird or why they disagree with your beliefs or why they have access to different mystical states are different consciousnesses well that's because they literally do because they have different machinery you see different capabilities not everyone is able to learn the same things or think about the same things in the same ways think about how many different body types exists across human beings you've got skinny tall people you've got short and stout people muscular people lean people hairy people bald people there's a lot of variety within human physical bodies now imagine that that same kind of variety is also reflected on the inside and then think about what that means for how you think about relating to other human beings you can't relate to them as if they were identical to you you can't expect them all to understand the same stuff you understand you can't expect them all to have the same strengths or the same weaknesses as you have and now all the sudden you can open yourself up to the possibility like oh yeah we need different ideas we need a diversity and techniques we need to be more open-minded we need to be more tolerant of other people but see generally most people just assume that everyone is like me and then they're confused when they see that hey if everyone's like me then why is everybody acting so weird so different than me well maybe it's because they're not like you another self exception mechanism is a preoccupation with the subsection of other people watch out for this one sometimes people like to point out to me my own self deception as if I don't see my own self deceptions here's the thing with self-deception the most important person you got to worry about being self deceived as yourself don't get too preoccupied about pointing it out to other people it's everyone's job to take care of their own self-deceptions because you're the only person who can do it if you are spending your time and energy pointing out my self-deceptions to me and then I spend my time and energy pointing out myself exceptions or your self deceptions to you then you see what's going on here neither of us is actually taking responsibility for fixing our own problem we're just pointing fingers at each other wouldn't it be nicer for the person who can actually change it to be the one who was pointing it out to himself such that every human being on earth took their finger and pointed it at themselves and then look the prom is fixed because everyone's gonna fix themselves rather than pointing our fingers at others because if everybody points your finger at somebody else guess what collectively nobody is actually changing it's just gonna be one giant finger pointing contest so don't get too distracted by other people's self-deceptions and it's tempting because you see a lot of deluded people out there in the world I know how that feels it's very tempting but then actually what you should do is you should use that to remind yourself of like oh yeah so that means I'm probably guilty of those very same sins so let me go inside and look for them myself rather than wasting my time arguing about other people trying to convince other people of their deceptions like if you're in a relationship don't spend so much time convincing your your lover that they are self deceived look for your own self deceptions first besides when you point out the sub deceptions of another to them do they accept it and change themselves or do they become defensive and actually they start to confabulate and they start to justify their self deceptions and they get even more entrenched so it kind of has the opposite effect the next self-deception mechanism is talking and knowing versus embodying have you noticed how much easier it is to talk and to know about wisdom and personal development and consciousness versus actually embodying it hopefully you have it's a lot easier to talk it's a lot easier to think about it intellectually it's a lot harder to actually do it yourself so watch out for this trap don't spend so much time talking about with your friends or on online forums or intellectually knowing it and collecting all these pieces of information intellectually in your commonplace book some degree of that is important I'm not saying you should throw out your commonplace book but make sure that you're you're really putting your feet to the fire and you're your number one priority is the embodiment not the talking and knowing another self-deception mechanism is when you think that you have the upper hand on the situation for example when you think that oh I figured the situation out and now I'm not deluded anymore I've got the truth I've reached the end of my journey and just when you think that is precisely usually win there's an additional layer of self-deception that you have yet to discover so what I often find is that when I think I have the upper hand on a situation actually that's usually when the situation has an upper hand on me and that can be a very humbling experience watch out for that trap and the last self deception mechanism I'll mention is just plain old-fashioned arrogance arrogance is something that you just have to feel within yourself as it's happening notice yourself being arrogant in your speeching in your speak speaking in your your behaviors in your manner in your attitude in your opinions and in your ideologies arrogance puts you up on a sort of pedestal from which it's very easy to fall down the truth tends to slap you real hard after you get arrogant and I know how to be into this at all I know that I'm arrogant in certain ways and I see that in myself and that's something that I work to to improve and of course you guys are always there to hold my feet to the fire calling me out for being arrogant or or smug or something like that and all that I know that's in there inside of me and I felt that like since um really since I was a teenager I felt this sort of like intellectual arrogance in me and I know that it's there and I've definitely whittled it away it used to be much worse trust me it used to be much worse and I know there's still a lot more in there but what I find is that as you're going through this process of unraveling the self deceptions of your own mind that you you're you're also noticing your arrogance mourn you're you're letting it go and you're realizing how much this arrogance actually holds you back from from enjoying life so that's it for this list we're done with all the mechanisms as you can see there are a lot of these mechanisms a lot of these traps to fall into this is not merely a discussion about how to attain enlightenment it's much more nuanced and more complex than that self-deception exists in many domains of life in fact in almost every domain of life it exists and I could shoot a video on every single self-deception mechanism so that would be like over 60 videos I could shoot on all just this entire list that I gave you and that would take me over a year to shoot all those videos and there would be a lot to say about every single topic so you might think that I've covered this topic at nauseam and I've covered everything in depth but man there's so much more to actually be said about all this stuff I feel like I've only skimmed the surface of it here so I hope you can appreciate just how deep and rich this field is and it's precisely because the field is so complex so nuanced and so broad that it's so deceptive if it was just one or two sub you have to keep in mind that would be easy the way the self-deception makes itself so powerful is precisely because it's so diverse it's so broad and infects everything it's a total corruption of of of every facet of life and so of course it takes time it takes work to unravel these deceptions and it takes nuance just as awarding as I'm wrapping up here I want to make sure that I emphasize this one final trap which is that just because you know about self-deception just because you heard all these mechanisms don't trick yourself into thinking that now you've escaped them all yeah knowing about them is important you're in much better shape than had you not known about them at all but that doesn't mean you've escaped them now is not the time to get cocky now is the time to actually get serious and say okay now I know them but now I have to actually navigate every single day of my life and be mindful of all this stuff and try to avoid it and that's something I have to keep a constant vigil about and lastly remember that I'm not immune to any of the stuff that I talked about so of course just because I'm aware of some of these mechanisms and I because I talk about them doesn't mean that I am gonna escape them all I know that I'm deluded in certain ways I know that I deceive myself in certain ways I know that it's a process and I know that I can't just drop all my self deceptions in one day doesn't work that way you kind of slowly work through them you slowly gain emotional leverage over them because just because you see a mechanism working within you doesn't mean you can just drop it a lot of times you're not ready to drop it you might need to play it out for a year or two to see all the bad consequences that come from it only then will you become emotionally convinced that okay now I got to let it go see so there's hypocrisy here I know that I'm guilty of many of these sins myself and so actually shooting these episodes makes me more aware of it and shows me how much more work that I got to do and hopefully it does the same for you all right we're finally done so please click the like button for me come check out actualize that org this is my website I got my forum on there sign up to the forum come look at the blog I post new stuff there all the time sometimes some funny memes and stuff like that come check out the life purpose course check out the book list lots of interesting resources for you there that will totally change your life if you start reading those and just stay tuned actually what will be coming in the future probably not immediately next week but in the weeks to come and the months to come I'm gonna shoot some deeper topics about a couple of self-deception mechanisms from this list which are extra important I'm gonna talk about self bias I'm going to talk about self justification and I'm going to talk about the self deceptions that are found specifically within science all of these will be really juicy and profound topics so make sure you stick around for those you