Tag Archives: self-deception

Trump is Getting “Pelosi’d”

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What does Trump to hide? The threat of “investigations” is now present.  The House of Representatives is now controlled by the Democrats and the comfort of the “swaddling clothes” the Republican-controlled Congress provided Trump is not there.  Trump is getting Pelosi’d.  Nancy Pelosi is now presenting the limits to Trump that a bedrock principle of our government, “separation of powers” gifted our nation with.  But people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, and the rest of the Republican cabal, made a commitment to cover for Trump’s political, ethical, and moral excesses.  And, that damned “evangelical council” facilitated the cover of many evangelical Christians. (Yes, I’ve got an axe to grind with them for betraying rank-and-file evangelicals.)

Trump is the “word fitly spoken” for the Republican Party, the perfect articulation for their decades long effort to hide the racism, bitterness, jealousy, calumny, and deceit they live in denial of.  He has put on the table all that they never had the courage to acknowledge, demonstrating that human quality that none of us like to embrace, a penchant for being dishonest with ourselves. Trump has so much to hide and should fear these “investigations”; for two years he lived in the comfort of an enabling Republican-controlled Congress but now Reality has intervened and is now pecking away at the bubble of narcissism they live in.

None of us like “the Truth.”  We all live inside a persona but usually that façade is not such a self-imposed prison that we cannot handle those moments that come our way when we get exposed and have to utter the famous word of Rick Perry, “Oops!”  Brings to mind the wisdom of T.S. Eiiot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, of things ill done and done to others’ harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.”

Have We Been Bamboozled?

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Before I deactivated my Facebook account last month, I ventured into a discussion of truth.  One astute individual noted, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.”  Another observation discovered decades ago put it this way, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we’ve already been led by our desires.”

It is sobering to toy with the notion that we believe only what we want to and avoid anything that challenges this belief system.  This is graphically being illustrated currently with the power of the Trumpian delusional system to capture the reins of power in our government. This phenomenon is not intrinsically “bad” as it is merely an intrinsic “human” quality which each of us begin our life with and often grow beyond as we reach maturity.  But it becomes “bad” and even evil when our maturity does not include spiritual maturity so that we can have the humility to recognize this narcissistic tendency and be open to acknowledging self-deceit.

Self-deceit is the primary dimension of the Bible quip I offered yesterday about sin, noting that the essence of sin lies in the “thoughts and intents of the heart.”  It is easy to live in a religious culture and glibly acknowledge being a sinner but it is frightening to toy with the notion that sin goes deeply into our inner-most being (i.e. “heart”) and influences our view of the world, even including our view of ourselves.  Our usual response, when threatened with this truth is to utilize our ego’s defense system and simply cling more tightly to our customary view of the world and of ourselves, not daring to venture near the anguish of disillusionment.  This is most significantly an issue with respect to our certainties, including our religious certainties.  As W. H. Auden noted, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand.  But he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”  The “Gospel” of Pogo put it this way, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The Elusiveness of Truth

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Truth has always been important to me.  That probably stems from my discovery early in life that truth was a scarce commodity in the world I was born into…which, of course, was and is the only world there is!  What I didn’t realize then was the extent to which duplicity consumed me also even as I began to ponder the duplicity that I saw everywhere around me.  I was well into my adult life before I realized that truth was not something that one “has” but something that “has” us though can get past our blinders only if we come to realize, in the depths of our heart, just how resistant we are to it.  We always prefer the comfort of seeing “through a glass darkly” without much appreciation of the “darkliness.” In fact, those of us who talk most about it are often the ones to whom it is most a stranger. Gwendolyn Brooks, a mid-20th century American poet captured this wisdom with the following poem:

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes. 

Humility Comes Hard to the Humble!

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By this, I mean that if you have been enculturated with “humility” then it is really difficult for Humility to penetrate your “humble” heart. Most pieties come to us first through enculturation and we subscribe to them because of  ego satisfaction that comes from a very basic need to fit in, to adopt the values of our culture. And this was the problem that Jesus saw with the Pharisees, reproaching them for the very premise of their “humility”, calling them “whited sepulchers.” And people never like having their premises, their preconceptions, questioned and those who deign to put them on the table are asking for trouble.

With this in mind, I don’t really think it is possible to be “humble.” For it is basic human nature to take ourselves too seriously, to defensively cower before the scrutiny of “otherness”, and fight vehemently against anyone who tries to challenge our smugness. But, I do think there is Humility in the world, and active in the human heart, and always seeking to find expression. I like to think of it as a process of “humility-ization” that is always underway, the process of bringing to our conscious awareness our shortcomings, including the “thoughts and intents of the heart.” But this process, this Divine operation, will not force itself upon us but is always there awaiting our willingness to examine our heart. And, if we are willing to submit ourselves to this scrutiny, from time to time we will be stung with sudden insight that our noble vision of ourselves are less noble than we wanted to assume. “O blessed be bleak exposure on whose sword we are pricked into coming alive,” said W. H. Auden.

There is a danger with this line of thought that I will be understood to mean that human nature is dark and evil. No, but this nature is “human” and therefore naturally prefers blinders rather than the light of the Eternal day. And, when we are “pricked alive”, we merely bleed “human” for a moment before we find the Grace to accept the insight and grow.. And, when we are so “exposed”, we might ask ourselves, “Why did I ever assume otherwise”? Maturity means learning to accept short comings as a routine part of being a human and being open to learning about them when circumstances bring them to our attention. Sure, we can then be overwhelmed and even grovel before god and man, but why? Why not just recognize, “Oops! There I go being human again.” And we can discover that there is Beneficence in this universe that forgives us, a Beneficence that I like to describe as “the Grace of God.” But this Grace is always awful at first in that we must first experience the “awful” pain of “self” awareness, recognizing that we weren’t quite as virtuous as we thought. So it is not that this Grace is “awful” but that our experience in being disillusioned of our pretenses is “awful”.

I think this is relevant to what the Apostle Paul meant when he cried out, “I will to do good, but evil is present with me.” He sincerely wanted to do good…and did a lot of good…but occasionally he would be exposed by God’s “discerning Spirit” and would see his shadow side at work. He would then bleed human for a moment, then ask himself, “Why am I surprised?” and then get on his feet again and resume his walk of faith. In the words of Auden, “We wage the war we are.”