In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut coined the term “foma” and defined it as “a harmless untruth, intended to comfort simple souls.” In times like these, sometimes it helps to tell yourself you’re awesome just to get out of bed. Who hasn’t needed a little dose of foma from time to time? Maybe the illusion that you’re good at something keeps you plugging away at it, and helps you go further than you otherwise would. Severe self-consciousness has probably kept any number of wonderful things from happening in life, art, and politics. Whatever one’s ultimate goal might be, having confidence that your goals are achievable can’t hurt in the effort to achieve them.
This is the premise for Shankar Vedantam’s Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. Vedantam is the host of the Hidden Brain podcast, which explores how the unconscious mind defines the choices of everyday life. Useful Delusions suggests that “one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological, or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology, or villainy.”
One major example is the Church of Love, created by middle-aged writer David Lowry, who “invented dozens of fictitious women and wrote hundreds of love letters in their voices to thousands of men scattered across the United States.” Some shrugged it off, but others fell deeply for these imaginary women. As a “card-carrying rationalist,” Vedantam initially scoffed at this obvious con job, which had inspired lots of people to send millions of dollars to fictional pen pals and make Lowry rich.
What especially interested Vedantam was that at Lowry’s trial many of the people who got hooked into the Church of Love didn’t feel duped at all. They defended their decisions and even volunteered to testify in his defense. If anything, they were more hostile to the outsiders who were slamming the door on their emotional needs and became deeply unified in their collective fantasy. “They were part of the same tribe: they were the deluded members of an organization that the media treated derisively. The public mocked them. Reporters hurled questions at them. Onlookers laughed at them.”
As he tells the story of Joseph Enriquez, one of the men who became enamored of “Pamala,” “what initially seemed absurd slowly became brave, even beautiful.” Enriquez suffered wrenching family tragedy in his life and had always been a loner who loved escaping into horror movies. Pamala’s letters made him feel understood, sympathized with, and wanted. He had an emotional connection that he’d longed for all his life. In one letter, Pamala confided that she really cared for him and added “we all need someone, don’t we? Well, I think you and I need each other.” She told him that he was a good person, which he was, and that he needed a friend, which he did. And he wasn’t alone—“in response to concerns that the hoax had to be brought to an end, some said they had never belonged to another organization that provided better value for the money.”
But how far can a delusion go before it ceases to become useful and becomes dangerous? It’s a serious problem when someone’s emotional crutch morphs into a weapon and their emotional needs push them to demand their version of reality to the detriment of everyone else’s. Vedantam is certainly aware of this and points out the political implications by discussing the idea of “imaginary communities” that make up a nation’s essential idea about itself and its destiny. It’s a particularly concerning topic given how many of our fellow citizens doubled down on their delusions about what the “real America” is supposed to look like, and stormed the Capitol in part because of them. Maybe the line between essentially harmless, fanciful delusions and the more dangerous variety gets increasingly thinner the more people’s voracious emotional needs are fed.
The Daily Beast called Vedantam to talk about self-delusional thinking and its relationship to parenting, social media, the insurrection, and whether it’s you or the world that is crazy.
What inspired you to write the book?
A lot of people are worried about delusions. They look at their political opponents, their colleagues, and, sometimes, their friends and neighbors and think, “How in the world could anyone believe such nonsense?” If you spend time watching conservatives talk on Fox News or progressives talk on MSNBC, you will notice the same underlying subtext. Both sides are convinced the other side doesn’t care about facts, is indifferent to the truth.
Now, it’s possible that one side is entirely right, and the other side is entirely wrong. But what interests me is the fact that both sides believe they can see the truth very clearly and are outraged that the other side systematically ignores the truth—is “delusional.” So, the subject of delusional thinking seemed ripe for analysis. I’ve also found in my own journey as a science journalist that “facts” often matter much less than journalists believe. We science writers have written hundreds of thousands of words about the reality of climate change, for example. Political writers have written reams about the falsehoods and untruths that came out of the Trump White House. But in both cases, facts largely seem to “convince” only those who already believed those facts in the first place. I was interested in exploring whether they were more effective ways to talk to people who disagree with us, and to potentially get people to clearly see and reject their delusions.
You argue that we should be paying attention to the emotional subtext of delusional thinking. What do you mean by that?
I think one of the insights that I’ve had in recent years is that when logical and rational people like me recommend that everyone be logical and rational, it’s often the right advice. But what we rationalists fail to see is why people fail to be rational and logical. Yes, sometimes it has to do with not knowing enough—with ignorance—or being fed misinformation and fake news. But we miss a much more powerful driver: Our emotional needs routinely shape what we see and what we hear, and how we think about both our friends and our enemies. Our vulnerabilities and fears shape our perceptions. Some delusional beliefs soothe those vulnerabilities and address those fears. When we ask people to give up their delusions, we think we are only asking them to give up something they believe. But in reality, we are asking them to ignore something they feel, or to set aside loyalties to groups that provide them with comfort and emotional sustenance. From the outside, this is easier said than done. Such advice, in fact, arises comes from a position of privilege, from not experiencing that vulnerability ourselves.
Now, instead of starting with contempt or anger, if we start from a position of compassion and empathy and ask why people believe what they believe, I think that what we will find is that even the most logical and rational of us can gravitate very easily to self-deceptions when we are in a position of vulnerability. There is a reason we say, “There are no atheists in the foxhole.”
One of the roles of the self-deceiving brain is to function like an emotional immune system—there’s a biological immune system that we are all familiar with, but we also have an emotional immune system that responds to threats, anxieties, worries, and trauma. And one of the ways that we respond is to believe in things that soothe us, that limit the effects that trauma has on us. Now, it’s not always healthy or functional—sometimes these delusions can be very detrimental to us or to other people—but the solution to these delusions is not to mock these delusions or provide a peer-reviewed study to counter them, but to ask what the source of the delusion is, what emotional purpose it is serving. Starting with compassion, I believe, also gives us the greatest chance of dismantling dangerous delusions.
I think sooner or later everyone has to ask themselves, “Am I crazy or is the world crazy?” Depending on the extent of the conflict, you’re inevitably going to ask yourself is it me or is it them? And for most people it’s somewhere in the middle. But some people are very inspired by saying nope, the world is crazy, and I make total sense! Sometimes great people do that, but sometimes, though, the ones who decide that they make sense and everyone else is crazy are terrible people for the rest of their lives. I wonder how useful delusions fits into that.
I think you’re asking a really profound question. When you look at some of the greatest dictators, demagogues, people who have hurt many human beings over the years, many of them have built their world views on profound self-deception and delusions. So, it is not at all surprising that people look at what happened in Nazi Germany and say, “My God, let’s fight delusions and self-deceptions because you can see how terrible their consequences can be.” I fervently share this concern. The point I’m trying to make in the book is not that delusions are always useful—many delusions and self-deceptions are not only harmful to us but harmful to other people.
I think my book is trying to make the case that just because self-deception can do terrible harm, does that mean that it always leads to terrible harm? I would say no, there are in fact situations where certain parts of our lives are made better by self-deception. Let me give you the simplest of examples that I think many, many readers will relate to. Everyone has parents, and many of the people reading this have children. The relationship between parents and children is a relationship that has profound elements of delusion and self-deception. When I became a parent, I was transformed overnight. I was convinced that my daughter was the most special child in the entire universe. Of course, this a common phenomenon; there are plenty of parents who will constantly show you pictures of their children and drive you nuts because they think that their children are special.
Now we know that this is a delusion. But is it a useful delusion or a dysfunctional delusion? If you could wave a magic wand and cause parents to stop thinking that their children are special or unique, would you be doing a service to children and their parents? I would argue that parenting is so profoundly difficult and challenging that if it weren’t for the profound self-deception of parents that their children are special and unique, parents would not devote the resources, time, effort, and attention to be good parents. From an evolutionary perspective, the delusional beliefs of parents make perfect sense: you want parents to be profoundly self-deluded about their offspring and the importance of protecting their offspring against all threats real or imagined. You can see why that would be very functional.
Now do parents also do all kinds of things that are problematic to ensure that their children do well in life? Absolutely. I’m not saying self-deception is always good. But if you could wave a magic wand and remove all the self-deception of every parent in the world, I think many of us would be worse off, not better. Many of our accomplishments are the result of our parents doing countless painful, difficult, and self-sacrificing things, and they did those things because their self-deceiving brains told them that we were special.
That’s the point that I am trying to make. Not that you can’t show many examples of delusion and self-deception having harmful consequences—you certainly can—but that you can also see many areas of life where some delusions might in fact be functional.
I’m interested in what you would say to the epiphany that I had a little while ago while I was on Twitter. Some fairly successful and famous people—including the president—were all complaining about the same thing: why don’t I have more Twitter followers? Maybe it’s indicative of something that’s happening in the zeitgeist—“why don’t more people appreciate my specialness?”
(Laughs) Yeah, well, I feel that the world has a great deal of narcissism and grandiosity and we see that every day on social media, and cable TV, and talk radio, etc. We have a lot of self-important people with delusions and they are often pretty annoying and irritating people. My book is not a defense of them at all.
But there are also many people who would benefit in having more confidence in themselves. Many of us can point to people who believed in us and recognize that their belief in us was an important ingredient of our success. And it’s not just people who said, “I believe in you because I can see you are special.” It was also people who believed in us even when they didn’t have any legitimate grounds to believe in us. The faith (sometimes, the unwarranted faith!) people have in us can be an important driver of our success. There are all kinds of ways that narcissism and grandiosity can be unpleasant, annoying, and even dangerous. But this does not mean that “false beliefs” are always bad.
There have been studies for example that show that many people are deeply lonely because they don’t believe that they are likable. You don’t believe you are likable, so you don’t talk to anyone because you tell yourself, “I’m not likable, so if I talk to other people, all that’s going to happen is that they’re going to reject me.” On the other hand, if you start with even the false belief that you are likable, you’re more likely to try to connect with other people, to talk with them. When you do this, you are more likely to make friends. You are more likely to become likable. Sometimes what we believe actually becomes true.
That leads me to politics. The way I think about the insurrection is in a sense it’s a bunch of people demanding that their version of reality, their assumption about who they are and what they want and literally demanding that at gunpoint. Maybe the great and terrible thing about politics is that if you get millions of people to agree on whatever, something wonderful or something horrific can happen.
Again, you’ll hear no argument from me whatsoever that there are delusions and self-deceptions that can be deeply harmful to us. If someone shows up on your doorstep with a gun and says you better believe me or I’m going to shoot you, the only appropriate response is to call the police. As for the insurrection, the only appropriate response to that was to bring in the National Guard and to bring in the police to restore order. There was no “psychological” solution to the fact people were showing up and demanding at gunpoint that you believe their version of reality.
But here’s a deeper and more complicated question. Let’s say there were a few thousand people on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, and they were defeated by the police and security personnel. Some 30-35 percent of Americans might believe some form of what the insurrectionists believed. That’s tens of millions of people. Do you deploy the National Guard to go after 35 percent of the American population, to say, “You have a delusional belief that I need to fix and I’m going to fix it at the point of a gun?” Is that feasible to do? And even if it were, is that what you would want to do?
Maybe you just can’t reason with some people.
My point is simply that if 50 million people believe something that isn’t true, you’re not going to resolve that with the tactics that were used on Jan. 6. You can’t disabuse 50 million people of their views with firepower. In this situation, I believe it’s much more useful to ask some psychological questions: What does this belief give to the people who hold the belief? What emotional needs does it serve? If I were to disabuse people of this belief, what would I be asking them to give up? What losses am I asking them to accept?
It might be easier to see how this works at the level of an individual, and to step away from politics for moment: Let’s say someone asks you for help. They say, “My wife is out to get me, my neighbors are out to get me, my colleagues are out to get me. Everyone is against me. It’s me against the world of all the time.” You could behave very logically, and point out that these are delusional beliefs, and that the person should give up their delusional beliefs. Odds are you’re not going to get anywhere, even if you are right in thinking these are delusional beliefs.
The better place to start is to ask some questions: Why do you feel everyone is out to get you? What emotional need does that belief serve? What role does it perform in your life? If you were to give up your belief that everyone is out to get you, what would that mean to you? If we don’t try to understand why people hold the beliefs that they have, and the losses they would have to experience when we ask them to give up their beliefs, what chance could we possibly have of disabusing millions of people of their deeply held convictions?
All of us have seen example after example after example where we try and use logic and force to win an argument, and then find that even when we win the argument, we have not changed anyone’s mind. Isn’t our implicit belief in logic itself… somewhat delusional?
That’s the tricky part. If I want to have an opinion about something, I get to have an opinion about something. I saw a comparison made between the insurrection types and infants. At a certain age, children figure out that they get to have some measure of agency and control by just saying no all the time—“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me!”
What you are pointing to is that changing people’s minds and changing their behavior is hard. This starts with small children, and only gets harder from there! Yes, that is absolutely true. If there was a simple way to get other people to change their minds, we would not have interpersonal conflicts, or political conflicts, or wars.
The question is what gives you the best odds of success in changing someone’s mind? I am not suggesting my approach works 100 percent of the time. When it comes to changing other people’s minds and behavior, we should be very modest in terms of what we think we can accomplish. My only point is that you are going to get further, and improve your odds of success, when you do not start from a position of superiority or contempt or anger, and start instead with empathy, curiosity, and understanding.
Even when it comes to small children, smart parents understand that they should not merely use authority and force to get their way. Those things only get you so far. Eventually, the goal is not just to get the children’s laces tied, but to get the children to understand the importance of tying their laces, and to do it themselves. What I’m suggesting is that you’re going to get further with that bigger goal, by having civil conversations, with compassion and kindness. It might be convenient for us to think we can just simply force other people to think the way we think, but this is a very dangerous delusion.
Think of any relationship where someone got you to change your mind about something. Almost always, this came about in a relationship of trust. I am willing to listen to you if I trust you. If I don’t trust you, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re telling me the truth. When we talk about dismantling delusion and self-deception, one of the things we often don’t talk about is how we start to repair the trust that is needed to get people to be able to listen to the facts.
