Who Sets the Dose of Self-Deception a Society Runs On?

I have argued before that people do not, on the whole, want the truth. I am not going to relitigate that. I want to ask a different question, one that follows from it and that I have never seen asked: given that a society runs on some quantity of self-deception, who decides how much?

The Inventory

Look at how much of ordinary life rests on believing something that is not so.

Religion is the obvious case, and the largest. Alternative medicine is another: a multi-billion industry selling remedies that do nothing, to people who report that they work. Games of chance run on the conviction that this ticket is different. Romantic love involves, by every honest account, a period of sustained misperception of the other person. Consumerism depends on believing that the purchase will change how you feel, which it will not, which is why the next purchase is necessary.

None of this is marginal. Remove all of it and you have removed a large part of what people do with their days and their money.

The Concession

Here is the point I want to grant fully, because the argument does not work without it.

Some self-deception is probably necessary. An organism that saw its own prospects with perfect clarity might not get out of bed. Optimism about one's own abilities correlates with attempting things, and attempting things is how anything gets done. Depressed people are, by some measures, more accurate about themselves, and nobody proposes that as a goal.

So the question is not whether to have self-deception. It is how much, and about what. That is a real question with a real answer, and it is worth noticing that nobody is asking it.

Who Is Answering It Now

Somebody is setting the dose. It is being set. And when you look at who, the answer is not the general public and not any process of inquiry.

The dose is set by whoever profits from a particular deception and has the means to promote it. The church sets the level of religious belief it can sustain. Corporations set the level of consumer optimism through advertising, which is the industrialised production of self-deception. The alternative medicine industry sets its own level. Astrologers and their newspaper columns set theirs. The government, which runs the lottery, sets the level of belief in luck. Hollywood produces a continuous stream of images of lives that nobody lives, and the gap between those images and reality is where a great deal of consumer dissatisfaction is manufactured.

Each of these is an interested party. Not one of them is asking what quantity of illusion would be good for the people holding it. Each is asking how much it can sell. The total dose a society runs on is not a decision anyone made; it is the sum of what every seller of illusion could get away with.

That is a strange way to set something so important. We would not let the tobacco industry set the level of smoking, and for a long time we did, and we regard that period as a scandal. We let the equivalent industries set the level of illusion, and we do not even notice it is being set.

Why the Current System Cannot Fix It

The obvious reply is that this is what regulation is for. Let the representatives decide.

But the representatives are downstream of the same forces. The church has a constituency and delivers votes. Corporations fund campaigns. The lottery is a revenue line the treasury will not give up. The entertainment industry is a donor and an ally. Every seller of illusion has already bought its seat at the table where the dose is set, and the public has not.

This is a specific instance of a general pattern: concentrated interests beat diffuse ones. The people who profit from any single deception care about it enormously. The people who pay for it, which is everyone, care about it a little, and have no lever.

Opening the Question

The only way I can see to shift this is to make the question public, which means putting it where the public can actually decide it rather than merely complain about it.

Direct democracy is the only arrangement in which the dose of self-deception is set by the people who consume it. Not because a majority is wise about illusion; majorities are not. But because a public deciding for itself has no interest in deceiving itself beyond what it finds useful, whereas every party currently setting the dose has an interest in maximising it.

Would a public vote to abolish the lottery? Probably not. Would it vote to stop the state from advertising it? Quite possibly. Would it vote to require that alternative remedies carry a label stating they have not been shown to work? I think so. None of these is a large step, and none is available now, because none of them can get past the parties who profit from the current setting.

Growing Up

There is a personal version of this that I find more persuasive than the political one.

Growing up, for an individual, consists largely of shedding illusions that were once useful: that your parents are infallible, that effort is always rewarded, that you are special. Each shedding is uncomfortable and each leaves you better able to deal with what is there.

A society can do the same, but only if it is allowed to look. At present it is not allowed to look, because looking is bad for business, and the businesses are the ones deciding what gets looked at. Opening everything to discussion and decision is not a guarantee that a society will grow up. It is the precondition. Without it, the dose stays where the sellers set it, and the sellers will always set it high.