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At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false -- or -- not believing something that is true.
Cortney S. Warren Lies We Tell Ourselves: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false -- or -- not believing something that is true.
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Cortney S. Warren

Lies We Tell Ourselves: The Psychology of Self-Deception

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Mind", can't make differences between real and not..., (OFF NOW THAT..., then that...), you are saying lie after lie..., then believing in false stuff. And thinking in positive sides so to scream not much as the other do, but as always you one moment scream you can't stop it... Now putting against me a knife and saying "Go away... give me my daughter... give me her back"..., don't you see the people laugh at you, don't you see it. Look their faces, with so many smiles, but they aren't people, they are from the army, off, off for god sake they are soldiers which have guns. Have killed few people, have taken your daughter and they are many as a number than you and your whole family... Probably this part as an General I must skip it, because it's logical however look it and from this side, nobody will sacrifice so you to be happy... you will die.. O, o, the poor little girl crying in front of the people, she just saw her mother pointing with a knife against the soldiers and now she is killed by one of the soldiers.

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The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can__ say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was _ but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I__e seen before _ and I__e seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn__ listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. __on__ say I didn__ warn you._ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right _ as it turned out, we couldn__ even help ourselves.

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For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

TL
Thomas Ligotti

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race