How Our Delusions Keep Us Sane

[MysterionMuffles]

I found this article very interesting https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/04/david-mcraney-self-enchancement-bias/

To me it begs the question: does self-knowledge fill in that gap between objective happiness and self deluded happiness, or are we always to some degree fooling ourselves about ourselves in order to stay sane? What are your thoughts?

 

 

 

Your wildly inaccurate self-evaluations get you through rough times and help motivate you when times are good. [Research shows] that people who are brutally honest with themselves are not as happy day to day as people with unrealistic assumptions about their abilities.

 

 

 

 

At one end is a black swamp of unrealistic negative opinions about life and your place in it. At the other end is an overexposed candy-cane forest of unrealistic positive opinions about how other people see you and your own competence. Right below the midpoint of this spectrum is a place where people see themselves in a harsh yellow light of objectivity. Positive illusions evaporate there, and the family of perceptions mutating off the self-serving bias cannot take root. About 20 percent of all people live in that spot, and psychologists call the state of mind generated by those people depressive realism*. If your explanatory style rests in that area of the spectrum, you tend to experience a moderate level of depression more often than not because you are cursed to see the world as a place worthy neither of great dread nor of bounding delight, but just a place. You have a strange superpower — the ability to see the world closer to what it really is. Your more accurate representations of social reality make you feel bad and weird mainly because most people have a reality-distortion module implanted in their heads; sadly, yours is either missing or malfunctioning.

 

 

 

The desire to see yourself as better than average and more competent, skilled, intelligent, and beautiful than you truly are is likely embedded in your psyche as a by-product of millions of years of forging ahead against the same odds of survival that have erased 99 percent of all species that once roamed this planet.

[Matthew Ed Moran]

Why do they act as if you're not self aggrandizing, that you are in despair?

 

It makes me pause about the self esteem of the writer, that she thinks if she is not always lying to herself about her abilities, that she will despair. 

 

"Depressive realism" is what they call objectivity? Sounded more like nihilism/determinism to me. 20% of people are definitely not philosophically consistent, so it seems like a very deceptive straw man to liken depression as the epitome of sanity and reality.

 

But I didn't see one single mention of morality in this article.

 

The real danger to a conscious and virtuous person of self deceiving would be to condone immorality.

 

Isn't that kind of important to leave out? I felt annoyed reading this article, I think it was trying to pull a fast one on me.

 

Lastly, obviously a positive outlook is superior to a negative outlook, and if a negative outlook were realistic for an endeavor, then any other action should be chosen so you can have a positive outlook. If people need to be positive to accomplish their goals, then it's not really a bias or a delusion, it's a condition by which great accomplishment is facilitated. It's empirical. If it were a delusion, it wouldn't effect reality and people would be frustrated when their "self bias" didn't alter their outcomes.

 

Hope that makes sense. 

[MysterionMuffles]

Yeah good points I was wondering if there was gonna be a mention of any OBJECTIVE way to measure being realistic and positive because they are NOT mutually exclusive as this article seems to imply.

 

I can see the case for grandiosity pulling us further beyond perceived limitations, but there isn't much regard for perhaps even Nathaniel Branden's approach to self-esteem which requires an objective as possible view of one's own capabilities.