LIE: I’m immune to deception

Lie:      I’m immune to deception.

Truth: We are complicit in our own deception.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe. — Demosthenes

We like to be deceived. — Blaise Pascal

Not only are we susceptible to deception – we ourselves are complicit in it. That may seem impossible; after all, how could we deceive ourselves – deception presupposes that we be unaware of it. But we forget that our deception runs deeper than we think. Much deeper. To understand this we must first see what deception is and then how it works.

What is deception?

Imagine deception as a densely tangled hair mat or a snarled wad of string. Although an end may be exposed, pulling on it would only tighten the tangle. To disentangle a mass takes intense time and focus. And if one tangled mass represents one person’s twisted belief system, then imagine a collection of tangled masses, all snarled together! Our deceptions are tied to our relationships with others. But we’ll save that aspect of deception for another time. In this article, we’ll deal only with our own personal deceptions.

Remember, for most Christians what we say we believe is not necessarily what we actually believe. And blindly parroting what we are supposed to believe may actually reinforce a deception when we don’t actually believe it.

Perfectly clear right? You see how quickly the string gets tangled.

So our belief systems are complex and multi-dimensional. They work based on a set of assumptions that we’re usually unaware of. And we carry these assumptions about many things: God, the world, people, time, work, money, ourselves and much more. Our belief systems are really not ‘systems’ at all – they’re built over time, come from many sources, and, if not properly cultivated, become tangled masses. We inherit and implicitly accept our beliefs and sometimes those beliefs may even be contradictory.

How then do we deceive ourselves?

We do it by believing something false because it aligns with or supports another false belief or argument already in place. And no matter how much we may not want to believe that lie, it’s nearly impossible not to because it’s tangled around and dependent on another lie that we cannot imagine being without; we’re simply not willing to loosen our grip on it. As Pascal said, ‘we like to be deceived.’

This amounts to our sin secretly seeking to justify its pet sins. Sin is willful blindness.

Methods of deception

Now that we have a clearer idea of what deception is and how we unwittingly, yet willingly cooperate, let’s look at some of the ways that deception subtly yet sometimes baldly confronts and intimidates us. Because so many ways exist, I’ll use a tabular format to expose the scope of the problem. I could devote a whole article to each of these, but that must be for another book. This list is not exhaustive and the methods are listed in no particular order.

We are not ignorant of his devices. — 2 Corinthians 2:11b

Method of deception	Description	Examples
Falsehood	Straightforward, bald-faced lies	résumé enhancements driver’s license forgeries‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ – Bill Clinton
Omission	Falsehoods that leave out something integral	research report that leaves out key data. crime witness leaves out key detail.
Dissimulation/ False reality	Immersive spectacles	casinos rock concerts holograms
Distortion	Deliberate mixture of truth and lie, even if the lie amounts to only a fraction of the whole	political doublespeak corporate gobbledygook banking obfuscation
Narrow-mindedness	A fixed state of mind that insists upon its rightness and cannot imagine itself wrong, misguided or incomplete	cult followers racism
Faulty logic	Illogical or incomplete logic	ad hominem false dilemma red herring circular reasoning
Sentimentality	The manipulative use of feeling separated from reason	most advertising ‘good old days’ sloganeering
Mystification	The use of overwhelming or powerful images to confuse or distract	pharmaceutical commercials femme fatales
Seduction	The use of an allurement to distract or mislead	‘click bait’ mousetrap of cheese
Subliminal messaging	To influence by deliberately targeting the subconscious mind	highly-produced image ads

Subliminal Messaging

The subliminal messaging deception method deserves its own treatment because of its prevalence and power. Subliminal messaging is the attempt to indirectly plant ideas in the unconscious mind, just below our awareness. Its power derives from its ability to make an implanted idea seem to be our own. The technique was discovered and developed in the 1950s by Ernst Dichter who developed the field of motivational research. He also discovered the persuasive power of product and brand imaging. The marketing and advertising industries adopted his techniques and never looked back.

We know these ads well.

Here’s a few to show you what I mean. They’re all highly-produced pieces of engineered advertising designed to make you salivate for their product without you knowing why.

Pepsi

Ford

Gillette

But even before Dichter, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, had learned to sway the masses by manipulating the crowd’s unconscious desires. Here’s Bernays in his own words from his book Propaganda, first published in 1928.

[The] general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.[1]

In 2010 the New York Times published an article on neuromarketing, a high-tech method used to track and record people’s unconscious brain patterns:

Trying to tap into the consumer subconscious in the hope of moving more merch[andise] isn’t new. More than 50 years ago, Vance Packard, a journalist and social critic, wrote a seminal book called The Hidden Persuaders, which described how advertisers played on people’s unconscious desires in trying to influence them. . . . But should we worry that a technique that probes subconscious brain patterns might be used to unduly influence consumers, turning them into shopping robots without their knowledge and consent? Indeed, neuromarketing is setting off alarm bells among some consumer advocates, who call it “brandwashing” — an amalgam of branding and brainwashing. [2]

So the truth is we are very vulnerable to many deceptive devices.

None of the methods listed in the table above come with a neat label attached, and no one method is necessarily conducted in isolation – most of the time these methods come at us in flurries of one-two punches. And most of the time we passively endure these, either half-awake or completely unaware.

Although TV is not the only media where we find these deceptive techniques, it certainly is the most popular and powerful. So if you watch any TV at all, you’ve chosen to willingly expose yourself to many of these deceptions. We must be careful – passively exposing ourselves or our loved ones to these deceptions without actively confronting them as they occur, will eventually lead to deeper deceptions and a tighter tangle.

In the face of these overwhelming odds, we must realize our dependency on God and his Spirit to check us, warn us, guide us and keep us. We also need shepherds who will safely fold us within a body of believers where others know us and where teachers and pastors guide and correct us. God is faithful to show us the truth but we still must sincerely seek him for it.

It may seem then that we’re doomed into an endless cycle of deception-wrestling. But life is not simply an endless battle of detecting and defusing deceptions. We are not at the ‘mercy’ of Satan and however many darts he chooses to shoot at us. No – the good news is we can dramatically reduce our exposure and vulnerability to Satan’s arrows. And we do that by cultivating environments that, though not perfect bubbles, are nevertheless much less conducive to deception. I’ll lightly sketch these environments here.

Environments that Reduce Our Vulnerability to Deception

Environments that foster	Description	Examples
Faith, hope and love	Spaces and times that are generally positive and are characterized by expressions and demonstrations of faith and hope and love.	serving simple helping
Truth	Spaces and times characterized by expressions and demonstrations of truth and appropriate confrontations with deception.	preaching discussion debate reading studying
Acknowledgment of God	Spaces and times characterized by expressions of praise and conversations that naturally and appropriately include Christ and his life and sufficiency.	music/singing praying artwork gardens parks, natural wonders service

We are not immune to deception – far from it. But our hope is in Christ who will, if we ask him, enable us to overcome our deceptions. He will teach us to be aware of our enemy’s tactics and how to cultivate the environments that are full of the truth of God and the God of truth.

The Apostle John’s words speak to us across the generations:

You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. . . . We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. — I John 4:4; 5:19–21

[1] Bernays, Edward Propaganda, 1928 p. 52

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14stream.html