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1/15/2012 - by Chuck Monan, Preaching Minister
Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
— Ephesians 4:25
The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; Lying to others is relatively an exception.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In recent years there has been an explosion in the numbers of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and others who view humanity through the lens of evolutionary theory. They have offered up Darwinian explanations for lust, love, infidelity, status-seeking, mental illness, violence, patriotism, politics, economics and religion.
With Robert Trivers’ The Folly of Fools, we can add lying and self-deception to the list.
Trivers, an evolutionary biologist, has influenced a host of intellectuals from Edward O. Wilson to Richard Dawkins to Steven Pinker who calls Trivers “an underappreciated genius, and one of history’s greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion.” In this book Trivers tackles the question of why lying plays such a prominent role in so many lives, including his own.
Calling deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, Trivers cites examples from childhood forward to state that we use our large brains and communication skills to become master dissemblers. We play and manipulate others. We engage in “confirmation bias” which leads us to seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data.
We wittingly and unwittingly exaggerate our own strengths, while denigrating those outside our group as well as sexual and economic rivals. Reviewer John Horgan asks,
Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we’re smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are — or than others consider us to be — can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, we can lie to others. “We hide reality from our conscious minds the better to hide it from onlookers,” Trivers explains. But our illusions can have devastating consequences, from the dissolution of a marriage to stock-market collapses and world wars.
Throughout the book Trivers recalls instances in which he has lied to girlfriends (many), wives (two), children (five), and colleagues. He recalls walking down the street with a young woman when he spots “an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly…” Trivers suddenly realizes he is seeing his own reflection: “Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.”
Consider all the wallop packed by that sentence. On all kinds of levels.
The Bible doesn’t support the idea that we are simply purposeless, accidental beings controlled by selfish genes. But too often our behavior doesn’t offer much of an argument to the contrary. We can offer up all kinds of excuses for our behavior, but in the end they are only excuses. We alone are responsible for what we do.
Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). When we refuse to make excuses for our dishonesty, we are ready to begin this exciting quest.
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