The Vital Lie

Bertolt Brecht wrote a play about denial, among other themes, called Galileo. In one scene a small boy is energetically engaged, like his playmates, in stoning the hut of an old woman. "What are you doing?" Galileo asks. "Why are you throwing stones at that hut?"

"She's a witch!" the boy responds, "everyone knows it." "A witch? Well, let's investigate," Galileo says, raising the boy to the hut's window. "Now, what do you see with your own eyes?"
"Just an old woman stirring porridge," the boy reports. Pleased, Galileo lowers the boy, who runs off to join his friends. "She is a witch! she is a witch!" the boy cries.

As the real Galileo Galilei found from personal experience, people are capable of denying not only what is proven to them, but even what they see with their own eyes or hear with their own ears if the truth conflicts with what they wish to believe. Given that we all want to feel that we are reasonable and open-minded to new evidence, why is this so?

There are many reasons we cling to our perceptions, right or wrong. Sometimes the truth is too painful to admit, or we fear that its consequences might be more than we think we could handle. Other times we might deny to protect our ego, if the truth might force us to admit we are guilty of something, or weak, or lacking in talent or ability, or wrong about something we hold dear. Whatever the reason, it amazes me to what lengths people will go to protect themselves, their families and friends, against truths they don't want to admit. Sometimes it might be a child's not winning a dance contest to a stage mom, or accepting a son or daughter really was disruptive in class, or a third really started that fight. Few of us seem to need truth so much as our own protections and rationalizations.

We will accept only as much truth as we can while still protecting our self-image and retaining our self-respect. We must, to live. We will believe whatever we must to survive, physically and emotionally. Otherwise we can turn on ourselves. So we deny, and spare no means to prop ourselves up with our "vital lies"--the false but cherished perceptions that keep us happy. That is why I am convinced that I'm only forty-something when I shave and brush my thinning hair just so, to one side so as not to see too much scalp shining through; that I'm really about six feet tall instead of five-nine and shrinking; that my waning mental age, which my wife's new Brain Age game tells me is eighty, is only a parlor game and has no basis in fact. It is also why I'm often absolutely convinced I'm right about something when I'm not.

But these things are well-known. Most people realize deep down that we all try to hide our weaknesses and blemishes, that we all kid ourselves. We know it just means we're human. And we still accept one another and care about one another, with all our delusions faults, warts and all and hope others will respond in kind and treat us the way we'd like to think we are. When it arises from good intentions, Denial--and her handmaiden, Tact--provide the balm that keeps us going.

What may not be as well understood is the role of emotion in these false perceptions. If I want to believe something badly enough, if I feel strongly about it, I am apt to believe it because I feel it so much. If I feel it so deeply, I reason, it must be so. The feeling itself creates the "resonance of truth" much the way the mind resonates when a reasoned proof is perceived through argument, or a fact is proven to us scientifically that we cannot deny. Emotion, in fact, is a very physical thing, not just an internal phenomenon. When we feel strong emotion, our galvanic skin response changes, our heartrate and blood pressure change, and our "feeling" can be measured and identified to the trained eye. So a false perception, like an accurate one, can produce the same strong feelings as far as the mind is concerned. Reality is what we perceive it to be, in other words, and we can prove it to the machines and technicians. Is it any wonder, then, that ewe create "our" own truths, and cling to them in the face of nearly every challenge? Denial, in that respect, is simply the affirmation of a different truth: the one we choose to believe, the one we really "feel" is true. Watch the big screen--and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.