Illusions

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization — history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills — history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religions, literature, science, and government — history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future — that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.” Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.

Voltaire rightly preferred the Brahmin’s “unhappy” wisdom to the blissful ignorance of the peasant woman; we wish to experience life keenly and deeply, even at the cost of pain; we wish to venture into its innermost secrets, even at the cost of disillusionment.

It had to improve its sense of history; instead it was told by its critics that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America’s own leaders. The Vietnam debate short-circuited a process of maturing. It represented a flight into nostalgia; it fostered the illusion that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles.

Mood is beautifully described in Hindu mythology as Maya, goddess of illusion.

Groupthink exacerbated the problem by contributing 6 additional symptoms: a shared illusion of invulnerability, an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, stereotyping the enemy as too evil for negotiation (or too weak to be a threat), a collective illusion of unanimity in a majority viewpoint (based on the false assumption that silence means consent), and self-appointed censors to protect the group form information that might weaken resolve (such as reports from spies).

People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realize that they are already trapped inside a box - their brain - which is locked within a bigger box - human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

What this all means is that no living create can evolve and survive in the real world by processing information in an objective, measured and proportionate manner. Some degree of bias and illusion is unavoidable.

A free press can serve as the opium of society.

After all, the US press has been second to none in exposing the follies of the US government. But have all their exposures served as opiates, creating the illusion that something is being done when really nothing is being done?

That perhaps 30 years of discussion of African-Americans’ problems have served as a substitute for 30 years of action, creating an illusion of movement when there has been little or none.

Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems. Of course, power plays a role in history, as does economics. But the same can be said of jealousy, love, hunger, sex, cooperation, revelation, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, religion, compassion, disease, technology, hatred, and chance — none of which can definitely be reduced to another. The attraction of doing so is, however, obvious: simplicity, ease, and the illusion of mastery — and, let us not forget, the frequent discovery of a villain, or set of villains, upon which the hidden motivations of the ideology can be vented.

When domestic production faced a crisis, it was hard to resist the temptation to protect the national economy against foreign competition and as soon as action of this kind was taken by one country, others followed. Furthermore, the 19th-century division of the world between competing empires provided the industrial societies both with an illusion of self-sufficiency and ready-made structures within which they could shelter. The result was a cumulative decline of world trade that made the depression worse.

The reality, painful for French self-esteem, emerged more clearly after Germany’s reunification. Until then, the Franco-German reconciliation did have the appearance of French political leadership riding comfortably on German economic dynamism. That perception actually suited both parties. It mitigated the traditional European fears of Germany, and it had the effect of fortifying and gratifying French illusions by generating the impression that the construction of Europe was led by France, backed by an economically dynamic West Germany.

The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not. Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the 20th century’s other major conflicts. WW1 was the “war to end wars” and to make the world safe for democracy. WW2, as FDR put it, would “end the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed.” Instead we will have “a universal organization” of “peace-loving Nations” and the beginning of a “permanent structure of peace.” WW1, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. WW2 produced a Cold War that was truly global. The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and “ethnic cleansing,” the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the “diplomacy of smiles” and “policy of yes” in Russia’s relations with the West, the inability of the UN and the US to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China. In the 5 years after the Berlin wall came down, the word “genocide” was heard far more often than in any 5 years of the Cold War.

Members of a close-knit group cultivate team spirit by (unconsciously) building illusions. One of these fantasies is a belief in invincibility: “If both our leader and the group are confident that the plan will work, then luck will be on our side.” Next comes the illusion of unanimity: if the others are of the same opinion, any dissenting view must be wrong.

Forget trying to amass all the data. Do your best to get by with the bare facts. It will help you make better decisions. Superfluous knowledge is worthless, whether you know it or not. The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.

There is no such thing as a free option, but in most other realms, options seem to be free. This is an illusion, however. They also come at a price, but the price tag is often hidden and intangible: each decision costs mental energy and eats up precious time for thinking and living. CEOs who examine every possible expansion option often choose none in the end.

No American who lived through that Sunday will ever forget it. It seared deeply into the national consciousness, shearing away illusions that had been fostered for generations. And with the first shock came a sort of panic. This struck at our deepest pride. It tore at the myth of our invulnerability. Striking at the precious legend of our might, it seemed to leave us naked and defenseless.

“See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joe. You should learn to like us. We’re Yanks, and Yanks like to be liked. We’ll tear this place apart if we have to, but we’ll put everything back in its place.” The effect of such imperial denial were ultimately crippling to American strategy. Within a short time, the reality — that imperialists are seldom loved — began to sink in, as one disillusioned veteran put it: “We’re supposed to be saving these people and obviously we are not looked upon as the saviors here. They can’t like us a whole lot. If we came into a village, there was no flag waving, nobody running out to throw flowers at us, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’”

Napoleon was famous for taking the time to study the battlefield and to think through every possible eventuality of the pending battle. He prepared with no illusions and with an attitude that dealt with the worst possibilities and reverses that could occur.

Turning what we have to say into an attack — a sarcastic question — can feel safer. But this safety is an illusion, and we lose more than we gain. Saying “I’d like you to pay more attention to me” is more likely to produce a conversation (and a satisfying outcome) than “Is it impossible for you to focus on me just once?”

However powerful America is, no country has the capacity to impose all its preferences on the rest of mankind; priorities must be established. Even if the resources for it existed, undifferentiated Wilsonianism would not be supported once the American public clearly understood its corollary commitments and involvements. It runs the risk of being turned into a slogan to escape difficult geopolitical choices by means of pronouncements involving little apparent risk. A gap is threatening to open up in America’s policy between its pretensions and its willingness to support them; the nearly inevitable disillusionment too easily turns into an excuse for withdrawing from world affairs altogether.

Perhaps the most serious, and surely the most hurtful, domino which fell as a result of the Vietnam War was the cohesion of American society. American idealism had imbued both officials and critics with the misconception that Vietnamese society could be transformed relatively easily and quickly into an American-style democracy. When what optimistic proposition collapsed and it became apparent that Vietnam was far from being a democracy, disillusionment was inevitable.

Churchill, of course, was far too sophisticated and had studied too much history to have any illusion that, at the end of the war, Great Britain would still be the premier world power or even in the front rank.

In retrospect, it is easy to disparage the often naive pronouncements of the appeasers. Yet most of them were decent men earnestly seeking to implement the new dispensation contrived by Wilsonian idealism under the cloud of general disillusionment with traditional European diplomacy, and the pervasive sense of spiritual and physical exhaustion. In no previous period could a British prime minister have justified an agreement, in the way Chamberlain had Munich - as a “removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air” - as if foreign policy belonged to a branch of psychology. Still, these views had all sprung from an idealistic effort to transcend the legacies of Realpolitik and European history by appealing to reason and justice.

They make a leap from being “life’s protagonist” to becoming “the world’s protagonist.” For this reason, whenever they come into contact with another person, all they can think is, What will this person give me? However — and this is something that does not hold true for princes and princesses — this expectation is not going to be satisfied on every occasion. Because other people are not living to satisfy your expectations.

Then when those expectations are not satisfied, they become deeply disillusioned and feel as if they have been horribly insulted. And they become resentful, and think, That person didn’t do anything for me. That person let me down. That person isn’t my comrade anymore. He’s my enemy. People who hold the belief that they are the center of the world always end up losing their comrades before long.

Yet, the illusions of Great Power status lingered on, even among Labor ministers intent upon creating a “welfare state.” The history of the next few years therefore involved an earnest British attempt to grapple with these irreconcilables — improving domestic standards of living, moving to a “mixed economy,” closing the trade gap, and at the same time supporting a vastly extended array of overseas bases.

At first glance this discovery may not sound all that extraordinary to you. In fact, it may sound quite obvious. But if it were that obvious, then surely we’d do it all the time, because it’s only when we’re caught up in all the thoughts that we get stressed. So for me it was the realization that the mind can only be in one place at one time. Sure, sometimes it moves so quickly from one thing to the next that it gives the impression of being in more than one place at one time, but that’s just an illusion. The reality in that situation was that by placing 100 percent of my attention on the physical sensation of walking, the mind was no longer lost in thought. I became quite excited about this idea, with visions of how wonderful my new life would be, always living in the present, never distracted by thinking. In fact, I got so carried away with it that within just a couple of minutes I’d lost all the sense of awareness and was completely lost in thought again! As I said before, I think it’s best to think of insight as drips of water filling a bucket, rather than any great thunderbolt that might transform your life instantaneously.

It was just as well that he died at his zenith; added years would almost surely have brought him disillusionment. Perhaps if he had lived, he might have been deepened by defeat and suffering, and might have learned — as he was beginning — to love statesmanship more than war.

The other path to salvation takes the opposite approach. It does not use images to reach what is beyond appearance. It tries to empty itself of the illusion of the self by the practice of meditation. By learning to sit still and ignore the discomfort of their bodies and the distractions that race through their minds, its practitioners try to empty themselves of the illusion of the self and achieve union with the Real. But meditation is not a quick fix either. The sense of union it brings is fleeting. And the empty mind soon fills up again with all its familiar cravings and distractions. That is why, in pursuit of a permanent state of self-forgetfulness and union with the One, some abandon all earthly attachments and become wandering beggars who live a life of complete self-denial. They suppress the needs of the body that bind them to this life in order to lose themselves in the One who alone is real.

We should guard against the illusion that the Chiang Kai-shek and Anglo-American troops will bring us our freedom. In our struggle for national liberation we must obviously seek allies — even if they are temporary, vacillating, or conditional — but the struggle must no less be the fruit of our own efforts.

In situations such as job interviews, customer service, preaching and lecturing, and other professional encounters the performance character of our behavior is very apparent, but we have ideas and scripts about our self in the private sphere, too. That we can “let loose and be ourselves” is an illusion in that we cannot shed off our socialization and do not cease to exist as social beings once we close the door behind us and retreat into solitude.

A long period of stability creates the illusion that change must necessarily take the form of a modification of the existing framework and cannot involve its overthrow. Revolutionaries always start from a position of inferior physical strength; their victories are primarily triumphs of conception or of will.

French spokesmen have charged the US with using high-sounding phrases such as Atlantic community to maintain its hegemony in the Alliance. Leading Americans have dismissed French policy as reflecting the illusion of grandeur of a bitter old man who cannot forget past slights, real or fancied.

Though de Gaulle has performed enormous feats in lifting his country’s sights almost by an act of will, there are objective limits which great and strong-willed statesmanship may extend but cannot change altogether. De Gaulle’s insistence that France and the US are equal is true in a moral sense but, if pushed too far, it must bring into the open a permanent disparity of strength. In any collision the superiority of American resources is likely to prevail regardless of the validity of the competing views. By generating so much personal ill will among American leaders, de Gaulle may rend the fabric of illusion on which his policy depends. The irony of Franco-American rivalry is that de Gaulle has conceptions greater than his strength, while US power has been greater than its conceptions.

Kissinger was more optimistic about the negotiations than Nixon, while Nixon worried more about raising expectations among voters within the US each time Kissinger met with the North Vietnamese in Paris, as disillusionment could be harmful politically — a lesson learned from the 1968 election.

We have the same response when we watch performers who put too much effort into their act: Seeing them trying so hard breaks the illusion. It also makes us uncomfortable. Calm, graceful performers, on the other hand, set us at ease, creating the illusion that they are not acting but being natural and themselves, even when everything they are doing involves labor and practice.

Today the soul of Western man knows a double disillusionment, for in the space of one lifetime it has lost the bright faith of its childhood and the hopeful utopias of its youth. Where shall we find again a belief to give us stimulus, a conscience to give us decency, a new devotion to give nobility to our little span?

But the immunity bestowed on the Bill of Rights has fostered the illusion that the Supreme Court possesses a neutral perspective impervious to political vicissitudes.

Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. When the showers started to run, we all tried very hard to make fun, both about ourselves and about each other. After all, real water did flow from the sprays!

Bitterness was caused by a number of things he came up against in his former hometown. When, on his return, a man found that in many places he was met only with a shrug of the shoulders and with hackneyed phrases, he tended to become bitter and to ask himself why he had gone through all that he had. When he heard the same phrases nearly everywhere — “We did not know about it,” and “We, too, have suffered,” then he asked himself, have they really nothing better to say to me?

The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one’s fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.

Because safety behaviors bring quick, reliable relief, they give us the illusion of control. We think, If I do something, I won’t have to feel this. Doing something provides only temporary relief and keeps us trapped in a cycle. Trying to control necessary feelings is exactly what maintains them. As the saying goes, what we resist persists. Yet we cling to this illusion of control because the alternative, feeling pain, is so counterintuitive and has no short-term rewards.

For in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, the Bodhisattva knows a despair beyond suicide, the absolute despair which is the etymological meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion from every hope of safety, or rest, or gain, suicide itself being no escape since “I” awakens once more in every being that is born. It is the recognition of final defeat for all the artfulness of the ego, which, in this disillusion, expires — finding only emptiness in its most frantic resistance to emptiness, suffering in escape from suffering, and nothing but clinging in its effort to let go. But here he finds in his own dissolving the same emptiness from which there blazes the whole host of sun, moon, and stars.

Like visual illusions, cognitive illusions are automatic — that is, even when we know they exist, it is difficult or impossible to turn off the mental machinery that gives rise to them.

Both mystics and physicists tell us that time is an illusion, simply a creation of our minds. In this respect, time is like color — there is no color in the physical world, just light of different wavelengths reflecting off of objects; the light waves themselves are colorless. Our entire sense of color results from the visual cortex in our brains processing these wavelengths and interpreting them as color. Of course that doesn’t make it subjectively any less real.

The beginning of wisdom in politics is attention to signs of change. As a theatre of illusion, politics does not reveal its meanings to the careless eye. Reality and illusions are central categories of political study. The problem begins with the very names of institutions. The dominance of Western fashions means that every country now has a kind of politics, and a complement of institutions — parliaments, constitutions, schedules of rights, trade unions, courts, newspapers, ministers, and so on — which suggests that the same kind of thing is going on all over the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not unknown for politicians to lie, but much more confusing is the complex relation between names and reality.

When slaves revolt, they will not create a free society, but merely change their masters. The paradox of freedom is the fact that it can only be a possession we already have. As an ideal to navigate by, it must always be an illusion.

The End of History Illusion is what psychologists call the tendency for people to be keenly aware of how much they’ve changed in the past, but to underestimate how much their personalities, desires, and goals are likely to change in the future.

All of us are walking around with an illusion — an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. We tend to never learn this lesson.

Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us an illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.

We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.

Satisfying that need is a great way to put it. Wanting to believe we are in control is an emotional itch that needs to be scratched, rather than an analytical problem to be calculated and solved. The illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty. So we cling to stories about outcomes being in our control.

Picking up information about our world is not a passive, reflective process, but a complex, active one in which the senses and the brain work together, helping us to construct a perception (or illusion) of reality. We do not just see patterns of light, dark, and color — we organize these patterns so that we see objects that have meaning for us.

The study of illusions has revealed the degree to which, normally, we actively construct our notions of reality, and the enormous amount of brain activity that remains out of awareness. Yet we assume that we can know the real world and are not just hallucinating. How do we know? Why do we suppose that reality is normal and hallucinations are not, given that our knowledge of reality is the product of constructive processes, and therefore could itself be called illusory?

The ancient world had no illusions about romance; they knew that these feelings came, fleetingly, as a gift from the gods. There was less inflation here: humans were only carriers of divine energy. Today when this energy is bestowed on us, we need a ritual of thanksgiving to contain it, and a way of returning it to its rightful source.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. “Thank God!” we say, “those illusions are gone.” Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

The majority of ordinary people lack fulfillment and peace of mind because their values are confused and internally conflicted. We waste our lives chasing after an illusion of Happiness, based on a mixture of hedonism, materialism and egotism — crazy, self-defeating values absorbed from the foolish world around us.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment, but again that is only the beginning of wisdom, as doubt is the beginning of philosophy; it is not also the end and fulfilment. The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.

Putting things away creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

No Arab leader, however moderate, could accede to Israel’s demand and survive in the climate of humiliation, radicalism, and Soviet influence of the period. No Israeli PM could stay in office for a day if he relinquished the claim to the occupied territories as an entrance price to negotiation. Israel chased the illusion that it could both acquire territory and achieve peace. Its Arab adversaries pursued the opposite illusion, that they could regain territory without offering peace.

I have no use whatsoever for projections or forecasts. They create an illusion of apparent precision. The more meticulous they are, the more concerned you should be. We never look at projections, but we care very much about, and look deeply at, track records. If a company has a lousy track record, but a very bright future, we will miss the opportunity…

I do not understand why any buyer of a business looks at a bunch of projections put together by a seller or his agent. You can almost say it’s naive to think that those projections have any utility whatsoever. We’re just not interested.

If we don’t have some idea ourselves of what the future is, to sit there and listen to some other guy who’s trying to sell us the business or get a commission on it tell us what the future’s going to be — like I say, it’s very naive.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

The Polish leader confided in Brzezinski that he had two major life-defining moments. The first came as a young man when he left feudal Poland and saw the Soviet Union as a force of modernity and social justice. The more painful revelation had to do with what was happening in the late 1980s — when the grand promises of Marxism-Leninism were exposed as a cruel illusion.

A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.

People high in self-control did worse because they were likely to be seduced by the illusion of control, to think of themselves as having more agency than they did. Successful people were taking much more credit for the good stuff and dismissing all the bad stuff. I became fascinated by the illusion of control. It’s a very useful delusion. It behooves us to think we’re more in control than we are. If we realized how little agency we have, we’d all go insane.

Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if the above results came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water. Just because we don’t know why it works, we should not be blind to the fact that it does.

You know that when something does not go well, you should analyze the problem, resolve it, apologize, repent, and transform. An unsolved problem seldom sits there, in stasis. It grows new heads, like a hydra. One lie — one act of avoidance — breeds the necessity for more. One act of self-deception generates the requirement to buttress that self-deceptive belief with new delusions. One devastated relationship, unaddressed, damages your reputation — damages your faith in yourself, equally — and decreases the probability of a new and better relationship. Thus, your refusal or even inability to come to terms with the errors of the past expands the source of such terror — expands the unknown that surrounds you, transforms that unknown into something increasingly predatory.

Naive people are possessed of the delusion that everyone is good, and that no one — particularly someone loved — would be motivated to cause pain and misery, either for revenge, as a consequence of blindness, or merely for the pleasure of doing so. But people who have matured enough to transcend their naivete have learned that they can be hurt and betrayed both by themselves and at the hands of others.

It is even more delusional than that, because, of course, if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation of romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it.

There is an element of delusional obsession in the French political elite’s preoccupation with the notion that France is still a global power. When Prime Minister Alain Juppe, echoing his predecessors, declared to the National Assembly in May 1995 that “France can and must assert its vocation as a world power,” the gathering broke out into spontaneous applause. The French insistence on the development of its own nuclear deterrent was motivated largely by the view that France would thereby enhance its own freedom of action and at the same time gain the capacity to influence American life-and-death decisions regarding the security of the Western Alliance as a whole. It was not vis-a-vis the Soviet Union that France sought to upgrade its status, for the French nuclear deterrent had, at the very best, only a marginal impact on Soviet war-making capabilities. Paris felt instead that its own nuclear weapons would give France a role in the Cold War’s top-level and most dangerous decision-making processes.

The delusion of a shared global status with America made it difficult for the Moscow political elite to abandon the idea of a privileged geopolitical position for Russia, not only in the area of the former Soviet Union itself but even in regard to the former Central European satellite states.

Sobriety of spirit and moderation of objective were the Metternich style: “Little given to abstract ideas, we accept things as they are and we attempt to the maximum of our ability to protect ourselves against delusions about realities.” And, “with phrases which on close examination dissolve into thin air, such as the defense of civilization, nothing tangible can be defined.”

With such attitudes, Metternich strove to avoid being swept away by the emotion of the moment. As soon as Napoleon was defeated in Russia, and before Russian troops had even reached Central Europe, Metternich had identified Russia as a potential long-term threat. Metternich’s attitude was the exact opposite of the position taken by the democracies during the Second World War, when they found themselves in comparable circumstances vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Like Castlereagh and Pitt, Metternich believed that a strong Central Europe was the prerequisite to European stability.

Delusion of this type are so routine in war that they are a mainstay of theories about military failure.

It was the height of hubris for Americans — who are, after all, only 5 percent of the world’s population — to believe that they had discovered the only workable model for a modern society and the only possible blueprint for a durable and peaceful world order. It was naive for them to think that they could create stable and successful democracies in deeply divided societies that had never been democratic before. It was positively delusional to assume that this objective could be achieved rapidly and at low cost. It was unrealistic to believe that other states would not be alarmed by America’s efforts to reshape the world politics and to assume further that opponents would not devise effective ways to thwart US designs. And it was stubborn to the point of insanity to keep chasing the same elusive objective after so many repeated setbacks.

This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had different ways of looking at the world, different views on people, different values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to realized this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted to promote were usually bozos.”

Power requires self-discipline. The prospect of wealth, particularly easy, sudden wealth, plays havoc with the emotions. The suddenly rich believe that more is always possible. The free lunch, the money that will fall into your lap, is just around the corner.

In this delusion the greedy neglect everything power really depends on: self-control, the goodwill of others, and so on. Sudden wealth rarely lasts, for it is built on nothing solid. Never let lust for money lure you out of the protective and enduring fortress of real power. Make power your goal and money will find its way to you.

We’re all delusional — some more than others. Entrepreneurs are the most delusional of all.

Entrepreneurs are particularly good at lying to themselves. Lying may even be a prerequisite for succeeding as an entrepreneur — after al, you need to convince others that something is true in the absence of good, hard evidence. You need believers to take a leap of faith with you. As an entrepreneur, you need to live in a semi-delusional state just to survive the inevitable rollercoaster ride of running your startup.

“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” for knowledge can destroy a happy innocence and many a comforting or inspiring delusion.

In sum, the second sheet of liberalism maintained the idea of individual liberty but rethought the priorities of the state as liberty’s guardian. The task of government was no longer solely to protect against arbitrary oppression but to ensure against obstacles to the smooth running of economic relationships. The second liberal layer marked out a new version of human nature: competitive, potentially aggressive, and insatiable. That such a version could nonetheless bring about “eternal peace” was a massive feat of self-delusion.

Besides these physical causes, there were mental ones, in the form of certain complexes. The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be “somebody”. We we were treated like complete nonentities. (The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?) Without consciously thinking about it, the average prisoner felt himself utterly degraded. This became obvious when one observed the contrast offered by the singular sociological structure of the camp. The more “prominent” prisoners, the Capos, the cooks, the store-keepers and the camp policemen, did not, as a rule, feel degraded at all, like the majority of prisoners, but on the contrary — promoted! Some even developed miniature delusions of grandeur. The mental reaction of the envious and grumbling majority toward this favored minority found expression in several ways, sometimes in jokes. For instance, I heard one prisoner talk to another about a Capo, saying, “Imagine! I knew that man when he was only the president of a large bank. Isn’t it fortunate that he has risen so far in the world?”

But in my mind, I had no peers. I was the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. I was a titan, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. My style was impetuous, my defenses were impregnable, and I was ferocious. It’s amazing how a low self-esteem and a huge ego can give you delusions of grandeur. But after the trial, this god among men had to get his black ass back in court for his sentencing.

To my astonishment, he began to show signs of megalomania. The resounding cheers that had greeted his Hokkien speeches at election rallies had gone to his head. Becoming mayor added to his delusion of power.

Buddhism is profounder than Christianity, because it makes the destruction of the will the entirety of religion, and preaches Nirvana as the goal of all personal development. The Hindus were deeper than the thinkers of Europe, because their interpretation of the world was internal and intuitive, not external and intellectual; the intellect divides everything, intuition unites everything; the Hindus saw that the “I” is a delusion; that the individual is merely phenomenal, and that the only reality is the Infinite One — “That art thou.”

Nietzsche never quite recovered from that hurt. His military experience was so brief that he left the army with almost as many delusions about soldiers as he had had on entering it; the hard Spartan life of commanding and obeying, of endurance and discipline, appealed to his imagination, now that he was free from the necessity of realizing this ideal himself; he came to worship the soldier because his health would not permit him to become one.

There is a time when we tire of sentimentality and delusion, and relish the string of doubt and denial; and the Nietzsche comes to us as a tonic, like open spaces and fresh winds after a long ceremony in a crowded church. “He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it; otherwise the chances are that it will kill him.” Let none mistake this acid for infant’s milk.

Love has its recompenses; and in his greatest sacrifice man finds his happiest fulfilment. Laplace is reported to have said on his deathbed that science was mere trifling, and that nothing was real but love. After all, romantic love, despite its poetical delusions, ends normally in a relationship — of parent and child — far more satisfying to the instincts than any celibate security.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

In the absence of criteria of success, self-delusion took the place of analysis.

Ask: Could our explanation of the event help us predict future similar events?

This is the danger of relying on case-based stories. Stories may be selected to prove something and may give us a delusional sense of clarity. Knowledge about outcomes may also cast some doubt on reconstructions of historical events (given that the historian was not there).

It may be easier to start with a preliminary: what does everybody agree on? “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Buddhists believe that peace can be attained once all suffering ends. They regard all suffering as stemming from cravings (in the extreme, greed), aversions (fears), or delusions.

The root of all those tendencies to believe in the absolute character of power or to take the permanency of a particular power constellation for granted lies in the contrast between the dynamic, ever changing character of the power relations between nations, on the one hand, and the human intellect’s thirst for certainty and security in the form of definite answers, on the other. Confronted with the contingencies, ambiguities, and uncertainties of the international situation, we search for a definite comprehension of the power factors upon which our foreign policy is based.

He found 4 main symptoms of incompetence governing the outcome of battles: overconfidence, underestimation of the enemy, the ignoring of intelligence reports, and wastage of manpower.

Many of my propositions may be controversial, but where it is a choice between platitudes and personal convictions, I feel it is my duty to state my convictions vigorously, for one great obstacle to a rapid and orderly political development of Malaya has been, and still is, the Malayan habit of ignoring unpalatable facts and avoiding unpleasant controversy.

This nominal equality should not be dismissed. It has enhanced the sense of self-worth and dignity of many people around the world. But when it comes to making hard decisions on how and when the world’s resources will be deployed, we should be under no illusion that all capitals are equal. Just as in the 19th century, a handful of capitals make the big decisions.

You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions. The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition, and questioning your intuitions is unpleasant when you face the stress of a big decision. More doubt is the last thing you want when you are in trouble. The upshot is that it is much easier to identify a minefield when you observe others wandering into it than when you are about to do so.

Common lies:

I have to be perfect
My life is harder than anyone else’s
If I ignore it, it will go away
I’m too young, or too old
I’m just not the happy type
I don’t judge people
If I follow my heart, everything will work out
I don’t have a choice
My worth is determined by my work
If I could just X, then my life would be amazing
If I had more time, I would do X
If I say or do X, people will think I’m stupid
If I just say or do X, then that person will finally change
Everything is great / Everything sucks
There’s something inherently wrong or different about me
I would change, but I can’t because of X
I can’t live without X
I know what I’m doing

The way toward international peace which we have shown cannot compete in inspirational qualities with the simple and fascinating formulae which for a century and a half have fired the imagination of a war-weary humanity. There is something spectacular in the radical simplicity of a formula which with one sweep seems to dispose of the problem of war once and for all. This has been the promise of such solutions as free trade, arbitration, disarmament, collective security, universal socialism, international government, and the world state. There is nothing spectacular, fascinating, or inspiring in the business of diplomacy.

For some intoxicating weeks we thought that we might have simultaneous breakthroughs toward peace in Vietnam and toward China; Winston Lord and I on the way back from seeing Le Duc Tho had sufficient hubris to speculate on which would be considered historically the more significant achievement.

A political leader must constantly feed hope — but he must constantly know what he is doing, without illusion.

Marxist theory may be aware that the individual has no great degree of unity or autonomy, or even of reality; but individual themselves must come to trust that they have, if they are to act effectively. It is the task of socialist ideology to secure this saving illusion. For Freud, much the same is true of the ego, which is actually no more than an offshoot of the unconscious, but which is so organized as to regard the whole world as centered on itself. The ego treats itself as a coherent, independent entity, which psychoanalysis knows to be an illusion; but it is a salutary illusion all the same, without which we would be unable to operate.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

Almost every entrepreneur I’ve worked with falls prey to the planning fallacy.

Nixon, Kissinger, and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s lived with the fresh memory of the era of American greatness that produced victories in Europe and Japan and presided over the rebuilding of large tracts of the planet. They aspired to similar heights and then, having scaled them, discovered that the view was not what they thought it might be. They discovered Gulliver bound to the beach in Liliput. They lived in an era in which people theorized openly on American decline. They would come to epitomize the torment of a nation coming to grips with its own limitations — much like the struggle of men of a certain age coming to realize that for all their achievements, life was not going to be as they had dreamed it, that the things that had raised them up also planted the seeds of their demise.

Cognitive heuristics and biases:

Representativeness: Individual’s willingness to generalize from few observations.
Overconfidence
Over-optimism
Availability: Individual is guided by readily available information
Illusion of control
Anchoring and adjustment
Confirmation bias: Individual’s tendency to notice any information that conforms with their views
Planning fallacy
Escalation of commitment
Intrinsic motivation
Perceived self-efficacy: Individual’s beliefs about their own capabilities to achieve a goal
Success syndrome: A post-success disorder caused by the burdens of having made it
Blind spots
Hubris: An individual has lost contact with reality and overestimates their competence or capabilities
Denial
Law of small numbers

These emotional responses happen before we go through any process of conscious reasoning. They exert a powerful influence over us. When deciding whether to believe something or not, we don’t usually make an even-handed search for evidence. Instead, we hunt for any reason to confirm what our models have instantaneously decided for us. As soon as we find any half-decent evidence to back up our “hunch” we think, “Yep, that makes sense.” And then we stop thinking. This is sometimes known as the “makes sense stopping rule.”

Not only our neural-reward systems spike pleasurably when we deceive ourselves like this, we kid ourselves that this one-sided hunt for confirmatory information was noble and thorough. This process is extremely cunning. It’s not simply that we ignore or forget evidence that goes against what our models tell us (although we do that too). We find dubious ways of rejecting the authority of opposing experts, give arbitrary weight to some part of their testimony and not others, lock onto the tiniest genuine flaws in their argument and use them to dismiss them entirely. Intelligence isn’t effective at dissolving these cognitive mirage or rightness. Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to “prove” they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.

Delusions can be regarded as “theories” that the subject constructs in order to impose order and meaning on certain kinds of anomalous experiences.

With success comes the temptation to tell oneself a story, to round off the edges, to cut out your lucky breaks and add a certain mythology to it all. You know, that arcing narrative of Herculean struggle for greatness against all odds: sleeping on the floor, being disowned by my parents, suffering for my ambition. It’s a type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth.

Conveniently omitted were the stresses and temptations; the stomach-turning drops and the mistakes — all the mistakes — were left on the cutting-room floor in favor of the highlight reel.

Craziness can pass for audaciousness. Delusions can pass for confidence, ignorance for courage. But it’s just kicking the costs down the road.

We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds. To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority.

Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. What is selected as a personal memory needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves. This isn’t simply a matter of strategic forgetting. We rewrite and even invent our own pasts. We often make up memories of events that never happened. Memories are very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily. The most important memory distortions by far are the ones that serve to justify and explain our own lives.

So we fight back. We might do so by trying to convince our opponent of their wrongness and our rightness. When we fail, as we usually do, we can be thrown into torment. We chew the conflict over and over, as our panicked mind lists more and more reasons why they’re dumb, dishonest or morally corrupt. After an encounter with such a person, we often seek out allies to help talk us down from the disturbance. We can spend hours discussing our neural enemies, listing all the ways they’re awful, and it feels disgusting and delicious and is such a relief.

We organize much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls. We take pleasure in art, media and story that coheres with our models, and we feel irritated and alienated by that which doesn’t. We surround ourselves with “like-minded” people. Much of our most pleasurable social time is spent “bonding” over the ways we agree we’re right, especially on contentious issues.

All that summer, and even into the following year, security analysts and other experts cranked out their explanations of what had happened, and so great were the logic, solemnity, and detail of these diagnoses that they lost only a little of their force through the fact that hardly any of the authors had had the slightest idea what was going to happen before the crisis occurred.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.

Almost every entrepreneur I’ve worked with falls prey to the planning fallacy.

It’s possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise. But in the real world, day to day, we simply don’t. It’s too hard. We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.

“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” for knowledge can destroy a happy innocence and many a comforting or inspiring delusion.

The average German is misled by masses of goose-stepping soldiers. The average Russian experiences the supremacy of Soviet power, derived from space and population, in the throngs filling the vastness of Red Square on May Day. They typical Englishman loses his sense of proportion in the presence of the gigantic form of a dreadnought. Many Americans succumb to the fascination which emanates from the “secret” of the atomic bomb. All these attitudes to military preparedness have in common the mistaken belief that all that counts, or at least what counts most for the power of a nation, is the military factor conceived in terms of numbers and quality of men and weapons.

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.