Tao Te Ching
Deception
Espionage, spy, and detective stories (cf. Sherlock Holmes and The Americans) depict how easy it is to deceive and how common. We believe people’s acts, seldom become aware of their true selves… by design? Natural Selection’s way of assuring the survival of the species? Are we somehow served by believing in the illusions? Can braving the dangers of seeing things as they really are bypass the natural disasters of social ostracism, depression, and despair? Finding this balance may open the doors of creativity, innovative problem-solving, and inventive solutions.
Deceiving ourselves and other has obvious, short-term advantages. Evolutionary biologists even argue that the ability to delude ourselves increases our ability to delude others which makes us more successful in life. This success has produced more offspring which has increased and passed on this particular trait. The “success” of self-deception however has serious down sides and easily becomes a selling of our souls to the devils of materialism. It pads us in a cocoon of illusion that blinds to any kind of authentic, truly meaningful life. If—as Sun Tzu said—the art of war is deception, the art of peace is authenticity.
Quotes (119)
“It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized.”
“Words have influence only when they are pertinent and clearly related to definite circumstances… If words and conduct are not in accord and not consistent, they will have no effect.”
“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
“Flattery's the food of fools and whoso likes such airy meat, will soon have nothing else to eat.”
“When leaders work for personal reward, honesty fails and deception rules.”
“We all sit around complaining that we have never been worse governed... but really listen only to those who support our desires... the masses like better a person who flatters them than one who really benefits them.”
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”
“What does ‘understanding words’ mean? With half-truths, it means knowing what is concealed; with seductive words, knowing the trap created; with deceitful words, seeing the lies; with evasive words, understanding the desperation behind the language.”
“When those above treat those below with dishonesty, those below respond with deceit.”
“Clarity is the enemy of self-deception and of the larger deception know as ideology.”
“Fools admire and love falsely claimed truths that only sweetly stroke the ears.”
“No other evil we know is faster than Rumor, small and timid at first, then borne on a light air, she flits over ground while hiding her head on a cloud-top.”
“One may rely on strategy and deception to impress but these can hardly compare with an impression made without these.”
“Unless you become like little children, you cannot know the meaning of Life, for your minds must be cleared of the falsehoods of this realm if you are to be taught Eternal Truth.”
“Merchants were the great men of the earth, because all the nations were deceived by their sorcery.”
“Put an end to wisdom that leaves tracks and reason that deceives and people will benefit greatly.”
“Even your belief in deception is a lie.”
“To see truth, contemplate all phenomena as a lie… contemplate all experience as inherently deceptive, all form as inherently deceptive, all sound as inherently deceptive. In time, you will discover that even your belief in deception is a lie.”
“Directness can be used in governing, but nowhere else. Deception can be used in warfare, but that is all. Only those who practice non-action are fit to rule the world.”
“Only if you can forget the words and embody the meaning will you (have)... the ability to kill people's false selves and conditioned perceptions”
“Without deceit, spiritual and temporal affairs are one;
With deceit, spiritual and temporal affairs are different.”
“It is a world full of lies, and we shall make no mistake if we make up our minds that what we hear is really not at all strange and unusual but merely exaggerated in the telling.”
“If a statement is true or false depends on the heart of the speaker, not on the words he uses. Without meeting the person in question, it is impossible to tell.”
“Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation… lies are accepted and transmitted”
“Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. Animals have little, but that little is useful and true. Better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.”
“And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts… Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there is no living.”
“Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.”
“Cunning and deceit will serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.”
“Never suppose that either the evil or the good that you do will remain secret, however strict may be your enclosure.”
“Reducing democracy to ‘government by the best orator,’ political rallies and popular assemblies are as subject to evil counsel and the seduction by orators as a monarch by flatters.”
“It's imprudent to like people too easily because lies may be told by deeds as well as in words and this kind of deception is more dangerous.”
“Distinguish people of words from people of deeds and never accept wages in windy words or in politeness which is only polite deceit.”
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”
“What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on…”
“We retail and mangle truth. So that we may deceive others with a tranquil conscience, we begin with deceiving ourselves.”
“If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.”
“The charlatan… is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.”
“The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.”
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
“Theology is the science of the divine lie, jurisprudence the science of the human lie, and metaphysics and idealistic philosophy the science of the half-lie”
“If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace, can get into Parliament and deal in millions, then there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable, that the dishonest after such a fashion are not just low scoundrels.”
“An orator whose purpose is to persuade men must speak the things they wish to hear; an orator, whose purpose is to move men, must also avoid disturbing the emotional effect by any obtrusion of intellectual antagonism; but an author whose purpose is to instruct men, who appeals to the intellect, must be careless of their opinions, and think only of truth.”
“Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”
“when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.”
“Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself.”
“Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.”
“There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one--on the part of the instigator of the war… Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked… and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
“Black sheep dwell in every fold;
All that glitters is not gold…
Gild the farthing if you will,
Yet it is a farthing still…”
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
“Just as the spider weaves his silky web, to lure flies into the larder of his banqueting hall in order that he may at his leisure, pick the flesh off their bones, so deceitful Ideals are cunningly woven by dexterous, political spiders, to capture and exploit Swarms of human flies.”
“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of it is half of them are true.”
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
“only when we have found the sense in apparent nonsense can we separate the valueless from the valuable.”
“Do you believe in this false measure, that laughter is lower than worship?”
“People rarely tell a deliberate lie, in most cases they think they speak the truth. And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth, both to themselves and to others. This is why most never understand either themselves or anyone else.”
“It is very difficult to have a free, fair, and honest press anywhere in the world. In the first place, as a rule, papers are largely supported by advertising, and that immediately gives the advertiser a certain hold over the medium”
“‘You can’t fool all the people all the time,’ but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”
“If a person tells me he has been to the worst places, I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly—it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.”
“Advertisers are a far greater threat to journalistic freedom than government censorship.”
“People lie all the time and most times we are clueless and fall for it. Sometimes, we choose to believe the lie and then blame someone else when it catches up to us. You can pick the lie, fall for it, turn your back on the truth; but, don’t bother screaming when it stabs you in the back.”
“Never have so many capable writers warned mankind against the dangers of wrong speech—and never have words been used more recklessly by politicians or taken more seriously by the public.”
“Deception arises when I want, when I am greedy, when I say, 'All experience is hollow, I want something mysterious'—then I am caught.”
“The ‘speakers of fine words’… were the itinerant sophists and sages who at that time went round from capital to capital, selling their services to the ruler who offered them the highest inducements.”
“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
“The naked truth, terrifying to behold, is not to be covered with robes of self-deception. This is the first vow of the scholar. Please keep it though it costs you your life.”
“"I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight."”
“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“Tristan and Iseult do not love one another... Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another's presence, but one another's absence”
“It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral”
“All thoughts are completely without substance… Once you recognize this, they can no longer fool you.”
“Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.”
“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
“By refusing to face facts… they accelerate the tendency toward greater tour de force adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then desperate solutions… all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless politicians to the top.”
“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”
“entertainment has the merit not only of being better suited to helping sell goods; it is an effective vehicle for hidden ideological messages… the contemporary equivalent of the Roman ‘games of the circus’ that diverts the public from politics and generates a political apathy that preserves the status quo inequality”
“'Sir, you are offering a fake, an imitation of the authentic'… Akin to primal childhood awakening; facts of life… Synthetic image distilled from hearing assorted talk. Myth implanted subtly in tissue of the brain.”
“When news is packaged as entertainment, the inevitable result is disinformation—misleading, misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, superficial information. We begin to take ignorance as knowledge.”
“Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show.”
“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”
“First impressions - almost always based on the new person’s acting skills, are almost always far from truth.”
“It's a Barnum and Baily world, just as phony as it can be. But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me.”
“Fake news isn’t the problem. There has always been and probably always will be fake news. The problem is only people believing it which seems to be an increasing trend in our digital age.”
“Our capacity to avert our awareness from the moral and metaphysical contradictions of our own nature—moral autohypnosis, the sleep of conscience, the sorrowful capacity of fallen man to hide from our profound betrayal of the good—is a fact that cannot be seen and studied without a serious commitment to truth”
“It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask”
“There are enormous problems with thinking that we can only trust in what we were told rather than in how we feel… we are trying to become perfect actors rather than real people.”
“On the whole, it could be said that the discovery of confusion is enlightenment. When we discover confusion, the enlightened state becomes redundant. Discovering the confusion is the most important thing of all. It is facing reality and getting beyond the many kinds of self-deception.”
“Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime, life outside goes on
All around you”
“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time… People thus very often act against their own interests… It happens in all class systems, all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.”
“You can always fool yourself into seeing a decline if you compare rose-tinted images of the past with bleeding headlines of the present.”
“Natural selection may favor males that are good at deceiving females about their future devotion and favor females that are good at spotting deception… the better one side gets, the better the other side gets.”
“We deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better… Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue”
“Self-deception may be a natural by-product of features of brain organization that help us deceive others... flourishing in precisely the areas of life where these costs matter most: in business, in politics, and in love.”
“Science, like a general, is identifying its enemies: received wisdom and untested assumptions; superstition and quackery; the tyrants' fear of educated commoners; and , most pernicious of all, man's fondness for fooling himself.”
“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
“Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.”
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