To be self-deceived but by truth…. (who believes in anything so much as the deceived and self-deceived do?) If only those possessed of truth, or the intellectually honest, let us say, could be as obdurate as the brainwashed and deluded… If believing in truth made one as stubborn as believing in falsehood.
…The way the self-deceived and deluded, among whom we must include ourselves much of the time, have a unique capacity to be unaffected by ideas they haven’t thought of before. In contrast, someone we might call intellectually honest would be troubled by such ideas, which have the capacity to overrule the basis for ones beliefs.
Idea that self-deceit is our natural state, our baseline state, meaning by deceit perhaps our individual mode of filtering perceptions.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 