Collective self deception

My considerations are typological in nature. A lie is a disingenuous assertion made to another person with the intent of deceiving the other person into believing both that the assertion is true and that the liar believes it to be true. This definition is morally neutral. It requires a further, moral judgment to determine whether a lie is a good or a bad thing, or whether, in specified circumstances, a lie is morally right or wrong. However, what if the truth is not only occasionally contaminated but lies are spread en masse in order to make the addressees question their ability to judge or to induce collective self-deception? Beginning with small-scale use of lies, related variants of dishonesty – especially large scale, propagandistic uses of lies – are conceptually characterized and evaluated. Lies can be systematically distinguished via their purposes.

The present paper proposes an integrative account of social forms of practical irrationality and corresponding disruptions of individual and group-level emotion regulation. I will especially focus on disruptions in emotion regulation by means of collaborative agential and doxastic akrasia. I begin by distinguishing mutual, communal and collaborative forms of akrasia. Such a taxonomy seems all the more needed as, rather surprisingly, in the face of huge philosophical interest in analysing the possibility, structure and mechanisms of individual practical irrationality, with very little exception, there are no comparable accounts of social and collaborative cases. However, I believe that, if it is true that individual akrasia is, in the long run, harmful for those who entertain it, this is even more so in social contexts. I will illustrate this point by drawing on various small group settings, and explore a number of socio-psychological mechanisms underlying collaborative irrationality, in particular groupthink. Specifically, I suggest that in collaborative cases there is what I call a spiralling of practical irrationality at play. I will argue that this is typically correlated and indeed partly due to biases in individual members' affect control and eventually the group's with whom the members identify.

In a well-known passage in the 'Big Typescript' Wittgenstein suggests that a philosopher’s unwillingness to renounce certain combinations of words as nonsensical arises from her seeing what she wants to see.  He seems to be postulating a combination of two problematic psychological phenomena: self-deception and illusions of meaning.  Accusations of self-deception in philosophy naturally invite counter-accusations of the genetic fallacy but, quite apart from that, there is, I argue, a special problem for Wittgenstein.  In examples of ‘normal’ self-deception someone believes what she wants to believe (sees what she wants to see) but what she believes (sees) has a content.  It makes sense, even though it might be false.  What is the analogue of this when it is nonsense that is in question?  Can the CONTENT OF A BELIEF be nonsensical?