Actually, one of the strangest persons I have ever met was a compulsive liar. She spent several months at the math department at my previous university successfully pretending to be a PhD student. I mean she managed to get a desk at the student room, she would go to student outings, she even had a topic for her thesis, which was at the same time appropriate for the department and sufficiently obscure that no-one else was interested in it.
I don't know what motivated her to do it, but I was told that once she was discovered she moved into some other university to do the same thing. From one long interaction I had with her (we actually went on a date!) I eventually came to believe she lacked an inner life of her own, and perhaps she tried to get it by proximity with others...
But quite unlike James, she never came clean, she never admitted to her lies.
Heck if James has actually gone through these phases in which he deceived himself of having attained some valuable mental condition (I am referring to his magick phase, his enlightened phase and his actually free phase), I can certainly empathize with that: self-deception is a malaise I have had intense contact with in the last year or so.
People are prone to believe what they want to believe. Here is an excerpt from the lovely book "How we decide," by Jonah Lerer .
"How we decide," by Jonah Lerer:
It's now possible to see why partisan identities are so persistent. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory University, imaged the brains of ordinary voters with strong party allegiances during the run-up to the 2004 election. He showed the voters multiple, clearly contradictory statements made by each candidate, John Kerry and George Bush. For example, the experimental subject would read a quote from Bush praising the service of soldiers in the Iraq war and pledging "to provide the best care for all veterans." Then the subject would learn that on the same day Bush made this speech, his administration cut medical benefits for 164,000 veterans. Kerry, meanwhile, was quoted making contradictory statements about his vote to authorize war in Iraq.
After being exposed to the political inconsistencies of both candidates, the subject was asked to rate the level of contradiction on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 signaling a strong level of contradiction. Not surprisingly, the reactions of voters were largely determined by their partisan allegiances. Democrats were troubled by Bush's inconsistent statements (they typically rated them a 4) but found Kerry's contradictions much less worrisome. Republicans responded in a similar manner; they excused Bush's gaffes but almost always found Kerry's statements flagrantly incoherent.
By studying each of these voters in an fMRI machine, Westen was able to look at the partisan reasoning process from the perspective of the brain. He could watch as Democrats and Republicans struggled to maintain their political opinions in the face of conflicting evidence. After being exposed to the inconsistencies of their preferred candidate, the party faithful automatically recruited brain regions that are responsible for controlling emotional reactions, such as the prefrontal cortex. While this data might suggest that voters are rational agents calmly assimilating the uncomfortable information, Westen already knew that wasn't happening, since the ratings of Kerry and Bush were entirely dependent on the subjects' party affiliations. What, then, was the prefrontal cortex doing? Westen realized that voters weren't using their reasoning faculties to analyze the facts; they were using reason to preserve their partisan certainty. And then, once the subjects had arrived at favorable interpretations of the evidence, blithely excusing the contradictions of their chosen candidate, they activated the internal reward circuits in their brains and experienced a rush of pleasurable emotion. Self-delusion, in other words, felt really good. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want," Westen says, "and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
This flawed thought process plays a crucial role in shaping the opinions of the electorate. Partisan voters are convinced that they're rational—it's the other side that's irrational—but actually, all of us are rationalizers. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 5 5 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called high-information voters—these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news, and can identify their representatives in Congress — weren't better informed than low-information voters. (Many low-information voters struggled to name the vice president.) According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to assimilate only those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points—and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the tax-and-spend liberal stereotype— then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Bartels says, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made." Once you identify with a political party, the world is edited to fit with your ideology.
For instance I have come to find the "silly or sensible" exercise of actualism, at least the way I practiced it, to be a form of rationalization. In the urgency to put an end my human suffering, I have made all sorts of rationalizations, ignoring information and evidence left and right, so as to maintain faith in certain goals and procedures. The ensuing havoc was quite the formidable teacher, my tendency for religious-type thinking suffered severe impediment.
