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The Roman Catholic governor of the state of New York, Al Smith, once remarked, “It is a venial sin to deceive someone else, but it is a mortal sin to deceive oneself.” In a poem by Robert Burns we find the prayer:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

After tomorrow’s election this grace will be granted to our political leaders.

The theme of self-deception is found in a number of Biblical authors, and today’s dramatic narrative of The Man Born Blind (John 9) is perhaps the most powerful example. In the contrast between physical blindness and the spiritual blindness of self-deception, it reminds us of the greatest of Greek tragedies, Oedipus Rex. When Oedipus is finally forced to admit to himself the aweful truth that he has murdered his father and married his mother, his response is to put out his eyes.

Self-deception is not only a theme in world literature; it is also an everyday experience, which takes on significance in the light of modern depth psychology. Freud recognized Paul’s role in bringing the repressed to consciousness, and he thus made the apostle a forerunner of psychoanalysis. Jung taught us that we project onto others those negative traits in our own personality which we are unable to acknowledge.

We have a strong expectation that life should be fair, and we routinely single out people, groups, and beliefs which we find offensive, hateful, or evil, in consstrast to other people, groups, and beliefs which we admire, love and idealize. The constant reminder of the threat of terrorism aids and abets this tendency to divide the world into “them” and “us.”

We hardly realize that those strong feelings are in fact projections of the dark and light sides of our own unconscious psyche. Thus we are beset by disturbing influences, both inner and outer, and are therefore in as much need as primitive people to have charms to ward off evil. We may no longer rely on magic or incantations, but we seek to rid the world of whatever ails it by means of drugs, rational argument, and will power.

We seldom acknowledge to what extent our instinctive drives, passions, and ego colour our view of the world, which we unconsciously identify with reality itself. Our identification with our family and with the ethnic, cultural, national, or religious groups to which we belong produces a severe blow to our sense of self when we discover how little any of these count for in the broader picture.

The result may be a chastened humility, but it may also be the fanaticism, all to familiar in the world today, which seeks to annihilate whatever does not conform to our idea of what the world should be.

We all need to be healed of our spiritual blindness and self-deception, and the first step is to stop trying to convince ourselves that we have 20-20 vision.

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