Introduction
Very few people avoid the subtle allure of self-deception. In fact, you may be lying to yourself right now without even knowing it. Usually, we deceive ourselves when we seek to hold onto an emotionally founded belief that does not line up with reality, so we choose to deceive ourselves about reality instead of change the belief. To break away from self-deception requires a means of speaking truth into our deepest emotions and breaking through complex mental defenses. While there are certainly many ways to do this, one method particularly suited to identifying and eradicating self-deception is to take a journey in the strange realm of faerie by reading fairy tales. Fairy tales have the special ability of creating a sense of unfamiliarity about things usually taken for granted, an occurrence called defamiliarization, that can help to disarm some common tactics of self-deception. Additionally, fairy tales tend to address questions of human existence in new and unfamiliar ways. This can help a person break out of habitual thought patterns that may enslave him to self-deception and see life in a new light.
Self Deception
To begin this journey let us ask what, exactly, is self-deception? Self-deception is when “truth ceases to be the primary goal of inquiry” and we choose to “manage our beliefs with no regard for the truth” . Here, the type of inquiry is the seeking of self-knowledge, specifically as regards internal beliefs affected by internal and external factors or experiences, and truth is the correct internal belief that properly corresponds with those given experiences. So, self-deception occurs as the truth about the self or about a situation becomes too difficult to accept and the mind quietly and discretely begins to believe something different. For example, victims of traumatic car collisions sometimes create false memories to help cope with the accident. These internal beliefs, being the false memories, do not correspond with the true experience, the actual events of the accident.
While most self-deception happens more subtly than the example, the root cause still springs from incongruence between a person’s beliefs and truth. Ten Elshof, a scholar on the philosophy of self-deception, explains that self-deception springs from a deeply emotional need for personal well-being. A person’s felt well-being depends on their beliefs about important life questions: Am I acceptable and loved? Am I succeeding? Am I safe? Often when the answers to these questions are not pleasant the mind will make changes to its way of thinking, manipulating its own perceptions. The mind chooses to deceive itself into thinking difficult situations are not as difficult as they seem. Or, it may choose to think the situations are worse and create reasons to sink into a wallowing depression. Either way, the mind trades a more acceptable explanation for a painful truth.
Take for example a girl who is looking to find the answer to her “am I acceptable” question. She lives in a family where her younger brother is chronically ill and she sees that the family’s attention goes towards caring for the ill person. Mistakenly, she appropriates value to illness. Even while her parents tell her that she is loved and valued for other reasons, she consistently tries to make herself sick or conjure reasons to go to the hospital. Self-deception has created an incongruency between the truth that her parent’s value her and her belief that she must be sick to be valued.
In this illustration, two primary characteristics of self-deception can be seen. First, the girl has formed an emotionally-based belief. She feels that illness is better than health because it receives more attention and therefore has more value. Second, she has taken this belief and created a personal habit that ties into her identity. In self-deception, when the mind begins changing its manner of thinking, these redirections become ingrained into a habit that becomes so comfortable the person may mistakenly believe this habit to be a part of her identity. The girl has created such a habit, where she associates her identity with consistently seeking a way to be ill. This creates a secondary problem, where the self-deceptive way of thinking becomes so familiar and tied to identity that all other input must be tweaked to conform to it. This tweaking, or filtering, becomes a mental habit where everything familiar immediately goes through this mental filter. This is the reason why, despite her parent’s best efforts to tell her, she cannot receive the information that she is valued regardless of illness.
When generally looking for a way to eradicate self-deception in the mind, these two characteristics must be considered. The means of speaking to self-deception has to simultaneously address the questions of well-being and have a way to slip past the mental filters of the person. It is precisely these two considerations that make fairy tales a prime candidate for eradicating self-deception.
A Different World
The primary strength in fairy tales for addressing self-deception is their ability to defamiliarize the commonplace. When reading fairy tales, the things that seem so familiar in the ordinary world, become suddenly strange. After reading only a few fairy tales, one quickly learns that a tree is anything but just a tree in the world of Faerie. Who knows but in just a moment a beautiful dryad may emerge from its bark? Or it could rise up on its roots like legs and terrorize the surrounding cottages, eating the children who cannot escape quickly enough? A fairy story can take us to places of magic, where we can never be quite sure what is happening or what will happen next. These stories create their own rules for existence, so strange and yet so perfectly acceptable - if they resonate with an internal congruency - that we are willing to suspend disbelief, abandon our preconceptions and jump to another world. The defamilarizing effect here is so pervasive, that not only do individual objects appear strange and “other”, but the whole world becomes Other…it becomes Faerie.
Given the array of stories that dabble in the unusual, before progressing it is helpful to consider what exactly makes a “fairy tale”. Tolkien limits the definition of fairy tale to stories about strange wonders that take place outside our own world and that are presented as entirely true. While this is a good definition, for the purposes of this paper, I wish to expand it to include works that create different types of “other” experiences in a different world. This means dream stories, certain traveller’s tales, tales that explore the inner “otherness” of the mind (for example the film Mirrormask written by Niel Gaimen), and even sorts of magic realism could be included. This is due to their defamiliarizing effect on the mind, and the elements of Other these stories contain, even if not being full fledged fairy tales according to Tolkien’s definition.
Looking to the content of these stories, they seem to derive their external subject matter from nature and its fantastic variations, such as mixing trees and girls to get dryads. But the meaning of these stories emerges from the tellers themselves, people intimately acquainted with human experience both external and internal. Given this human element, these stories, like most good literature, grapple with the deep and intrinsic questions of human existence. Included in these questions are the deeply emotional questions that are at the core of self-deception.
For its ability to resonate with human experience, fairy tales serve as a beautiful mirror for our world. In fairy tales, the mind cannot grasp all that occurs since strange events and wonders keep baffling reason and preconceptions of how things work. So, it is often the subliminal, emotional aspect of humanity that drives the story and is most deeply affected by hearing the tale. When we make the enchanted jump into the Otherworld, we have to leave behind our preconceptions of how things work in “reality” and approach the experiences with a childlike wonder and awe. This process of suspending disbelief, where readers must lay aside their preconceptions and habitual ways of processing information, is what makes the fairy tale work. During this laying down of habitual mental patterns, those filters created by self-deceptive thinking can be laid aside as well, providing a unique opportunity to present ideas and answers about the questions of human experience in a fresh light. It is in this moment that the fairy story can slip past the person’s mental defenses so impenetrable in the ordinary world, and deliver a fresh perspective to the root of the self-deception or cause the person to start thinking about the question at all and serve as a catalyst towards identifying points of self-deception and successfully eradicating it.
These principles will be exemplified throughout the paper by the story of “Donkeyskin” written by Charles Perrault, a classic French fairy tale author from the 17th century. Perrault, along with the Grimm brothers, has provided most of the classic fairy tale stories such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, etc. In “Donkeyskin”, after the death of the queen, the king begins to have incestuous desires for his daughter. Counseled by her fairy godmother, the girl tells him she will concede only if he gives her “ a dress the color of the seasons” thinking “he will never be able to fulfill [her] request.” When he presents her with the dress, the request is repeated for two more such dresses. Both times the king provides the garments. Finally, the girl asks for the skin of the donkey that provides the kingdom’s wealth by excreting gold coins. The king kills the beast and, full of fright, the girl flees wearing the donkey’s skin and taking the beautiful dresses with her. She becomes a scullery maid at a farmhouse near the castle of another king. She works and toils, always wearing the donkeyskin and hiding her beauty except in her spare moments alone in her room, when she will chance a moment in one of the dresses. One day, the prince sees her through the keyhole and immediately falls in love with her beauty and “most of all…a wise and modest reserve that bore witness to the beauty of her soul”. In the throes of lovesickness, he asks for a cake made by her hand, into which she bakes her ring. The prince decrees that the woman whose finger fits the ring will be his bride. Women go to many lengths to try to fit the ring, even shaving off parts of their fingers to make them smaller, but none fit. After every other woman in the kingdom is tried, Donkeyskin is called, the ring fits and they are married.
Five Tactics of Self-Deception
To understand more specifically how fairy tales can eradicate self-deception, it is necessary to understand more specifically how self-deception works. Ten Elshof identifies five primary ways that people deceive themselves: Attention Management, Procrastination, Perspective Switching, Rationalization, and Ressentiment. The mind usually combines these tactics to create complex, subtle multi-layered deceptions.
In attention management, “we manage to deceive ourselves by systematically avoiding attention to evidence against those beliefs upon which our felt well-being depends.” Here, the mind knows that there is evidence to contradict its belief, but instead chooses to look the other direction. It distracts itself and feels so comfortable with the distractions and new habits that the contrary evidence seems to vanish. For our girl, she hears her parents telling her she is valuable but if she accepts this information, her belief about value being linked to illness must change. Her mind begins to redirect her attention to all the instances when her brother got nice things because he was sick, or when people fawned over him when he was lying in the hospital and soon her parent’s voices fade into the background. The opposing evidence has been cunningly, and often by the person unknowingly, ignored.
Procrastination occurs when the mind obscures the conviction of knowledge by putting off action until a later point, eventually dulling the conviction so that it can act in agreement with the already established beliefs. When a person feels struck by a conviction he usually feels compelled to act. However, if he puts off that action for a day or two it seems less important – eventually it can be forgotten or the mind could even convince itself that it is better not to act. The overall goal of procrastination is to use time to dull any conviction that does not fall in accordance with the established beliefs.
Perspective switching and rationalization are closely tied. Perspective switching consists of a person disregarding his own view for another’s when he likes it better or to disregard another’s views when he prefers his own. Rationalization is similar but has a broader application. It occurs when someone takes any perspective and talks himself into holding it by reasoning and habit. This perspective does not actually have to be held by any particular person, but only needs to come from a logical rationale for why a belief could be held or actions taken. Logical statements mask established beliefs so the person can continue to function in the belief, sometimes without admitting that he actually holds it.
Ressentiment is a “reordering of…our affections, sentiments, and value judgments in order to avoid severe disappointment” . In this deception, we trick ourselves about whether we believe something at all. When placed in a painful situation we are powerless to change, we tell ourselves that we never wanted what we thought we wanted, or that it would not have been good after all. Ressentinment can also show up as an over-valuing of another sentiment creating an unbalanced mindset or creating a sense that the original belief was actually wrong. For the girl, she has chosen to believe that illness is more valuable than health, so anytime she is ill she enjoys her life more than when she is well and playing soccer, traveling to the mountains or doing other things only healthy people can do. This creates an unbalanced mindset where her mind causes her to experience less enjoyment in things that should be enjoyable and more enjoyment at things that should not be.
Each of these tactics can serve to perpetuate self-deception about beliefs that we hold and avoid a necessary confrontation with them. Usually, these mindsets occur without the person’s even being aware of them since the mind’s goal is to hide them from itself. At times, each of these tactics can actually be helpful and necessary to cope with a traumatic situation or to gain distance from a particularly painful situation, but when they become ways that mask and hide harmful beliefs then they move from being coping mechanisms to means to perpetuate self-deception.
Fairy Tales and Self Deception: Discovering Delusion
Looking at the five ways that people deceive themselves, a general pattern for self-deception seems to arise. All five tactics function on the general principle of shielding or masking the truth by using reason to hide an emotionally based belief. If a person discover the truth of what he believes he must be able to honestly ask and answer the questions of how do I really feel? Think? Act? Relate? If he cannot truthfully answer these questions then he will not escape self-deception. Yet, given the complex barriers the mind puts in place to avoid exactly such honest questions and answers, it seems almost impossible to ask these questions truthfully. For this reason, the fairy tale serves an important role of being able to raise these questions for a person to slip by the mind’s mental barriers though defamiliarization and help a person to begin an honest conversation about what is inside their minds and emotions.
Tolkien identifies two elements of fairy tales that I believe are crucial to addressing self-deception: Recovery and Consolation. Recovery is “regaining a clear view” by seeing truth with a new perspective. The familiar is the hardest thing to see, but given the fantastic and unbelievable nature of fairy stories, they open our minds to the conversation of what we do, in fact, believe. This occurs due to defamiliarization but it also because of the necessary question in any fairy tale: do I believe this? Which eventually leads to the question: what do I even believe and why? Beginning in the fairy world, the questions can bleed out into the ordinary world and open our minds to the conversation of what we believe about our world and ourselves, forcing us to face the beliefs and decide what we actually believe, not just what we say we believe. These conversations leads to points of identification that help us to grasp where we are deceiving ourselves and begin the long, arduous process of gaining a true perspective.
At the end of “Donkeyskin”, Perrault gives the moral of his tale: bread and water is enough nourishment for a woman who knows she is beautiful, both in appearances and in her soul (for the prince fell in love with both). When reading this story, a young woman would wonder if he is right. Is it true that a woman can endure any trial with this knowledge? Surely, Donkeyskin endured great trials: she suffered her mother’s death, she had to decide between honoring her father and keeping her purity, she hid her true identity, and she was subjected to constant ridicule and manual labor. Yet she endured it all because she believed she was beautiful. This brings the woman to question what she thinks about herself. She begins to ask if she thinks she is beautiful, in her appearance? In her soul? This is a difficult question where many of us likely have adopted self-deceptive tactics to avoid addressing how we think about ourselves. Through this story, these questions begin to arise and a person can start to address places where self-deception may dwell.
Fairy Tales and Self-Deception: Healing
Once a person begins to process through the levels of self-deception in his life, there can be a great deal of hopelessness that nothing will change and discouragement about how complex these deceptions are. Here, too, fairy tales can come in and offer us consolation, the second element that Tolkien identified. The greatest consolation that fairy tales give us is hope. There is hope that even in the midst of great trial and hardship, if we keep pressing on there will be good, that there will be some sort of redemption. For Donkeyskin, it was the dresses, the very symbol of her previous hardship that created a way for her to rise again. This shows that it is very often our worst moments that create in us the opportunity and ability to raise up and see the redemption of the hardship. There is no promise in this story that she does not encounter more hardship, she very likely does. However, it does promise a restoration of the pain and a hope that we can eventually rise above our trials.
Fairy tales also offer consolation though showing us new ways of looking at how to think and how to live. For the girl who finds value in illness, the story of Donkeyskin tells her that value does not lay in either her health or illness, but actually comes from a deeper beauty of soul. The story speaks to the truth of her situation, effectively side-stepping her attention management and ressentiment by directly addressing her belief through showing her that she had value statements in the wrong place. Then, the promise of consolation comes to her and promises that by believing she is actually valuable because of her soul she can survive through difficulties. If Donkeyskin could survive, perhaps we can too, and if Donkeyskin gained happiness from her pain, then maybe our pain will be redeemed someday too. Fairy tales can teach us the proper emotional beliefs to have - beliefs that allow for pain and hardship, yet still have hope for a good life in the midst of it. And that hope is the path out of self-deception.
The Dangers of Fairy Tales
This idea of fairy tales being used to solve the problem of self-deception may certainly cause some stir. After all, aren’t fairy tales generally held responsible for creating in children unrealistic hopes of happily-ever-after endings and false assurances of charming princes riding in for the rescue? In short, aren’t fairy tales actually responsible for encouraging self-deception? At the very least, they seem to encourage people not to engage with reality, another self-deceptive tactic. Unfortunately, this can occur however it is due rather to poor readings of fairy tales rather than a fault of the tale itself.
We are often prone to read fairy tales purely for entertainment value, due in part to their enjoyable and fantastic nature, but tend to ignore full capacity and critical reading that they can endure. As already said, these stories are full of questions and statements about how to deal with deep human emotions such as pain and joy, and if one takes the time to read them well, they can reflect reality to us in such a strange and unfamiliar way that we learn to see familiar things in a new light. Very little literature can be read without the danger of learning the wrong lessons, and fairy tales are no exception. When one sits down to read a fairy tale, there is a responsibility to read this story well and work to take the right lessons away from it.
Additionally, there is the question of whether fairy tales cause a person to disengage with reality. This is a valid question and to answer it, we must first ask ourselves, “what is real?” There seems to be two types of things we can call “real”: those things that are present and physical, and then the realm of ideas that engage intrinsic but invisible things such as love, virtue, evil, etc. Fairy tales, while not perhaps real in the first sense, certainly function as real in the second sense. So perhaps a better question to ask is, “what is important?” For while mopeds and silicone bakeware are certainly real, they have very little lasting importance compared to eternal, intrinsic things such as joy or pain or the state of a person’s soul. In fact, would it not do a person good to escape for a time from a world that sees perhaps too much of the “real” things like sex and money at the expense of seeing the more important realities of love and self-sacrifice. Better to be in a place where the questions are asked about what makes a person a person and what makes them virtuous or evil? Faerie has the ability to do this very thing, to engage a person’s mind and emotions with questions of great and lasting importance - a level of engagment that rarely happens in a present “reality” where people are numbed by a bombardment of entertainment. One should certainly not run to faerie and never return, that would be terribly unhealthy. Yet it can be healthy to leave what is physically real for a time to regain a proper perspective on what is intrinsically real. This allows for better vision to see this ordinary world for what it is, and then, not being deceived about what is important, we can truly love it and the people living here.
Conclusion
As we approach our lives and begin to look for places of self-deception, let us be careful not to fall into three common mistakes. The first is the danger of side-stepping the questions that the fairy tales raise by looking at them merely as points of academic consideration. This is nothing more than subject avoidance manifesting itself to keep the self from personally engaging its beliefs. However also be aware of the second mistake, which is the pendulum swing response, where one expects to find self-deception in every single held belief. Thirdly and finally, be aware that the process of eradicating self-deception is exactly that, a process. We do not have to find healing and a proper perspective right away. Places of self-deception have usually formed from years of habits and those habits will also take years to undo. When working through the process, there can be a strong temptation to fall into either procrastination or hopelessness. We may sometimes decide to put off making changes until a better time, but that time rarely comes and a person can quickly find themselves two years down the road having made very little progress. The time to change is now. Yet that change will take time and it can be hard and discouraging. In these times is exactly where the consolation of hope found in fairy tales is of most help. Let us remember that there will be a good end to our trials, and strive to act on our convictions, hoping to look back years from now and see visible progress towards living in the constant realization of the truth, no matter how strange and fantastic may see/
Works Cited
Perrault, Charles. Donkeyskin. Translated by Maria Tatar. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1999.
Ten Elshof, Gregg A. I Told Me So. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing
Company, 2009.
Tolkien, J. R. R. On Fairy S ories. http://direcafe.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=
709453%3ATopic%3A18794 (accessed March 25, 2010).
Willard, Dallas. Preface to I Told Me So, by Gregg Ten Elshof. Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2009.
End Notes:
Gregg A. Ten Elshoff, I Told Me So (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2009), iii.
Ten Elshof, 25.
Ten Elshof, 3.
Dallas Williard, preface to I Told Me So, by Gregg Ten Elshof, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2009): x.
Williard, x.
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories (http://direcafe.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id= 709453%3ATopic%3A18794, accessed March 25, 2010) 14.
Tolkien, 5. Even Tolkien’s definition is broad for the specific term “fairy tale” which much of scholasticism takes to mean tales told of other worlds, with magic happenings, that serve the purpose of teaching moral lessons to children. However, for the sake of the paper the term “fairy tale” will hold a broader meaning.
Tolkien, 8.
Tolkien, 12-13.
Charles Perrault, Donkeyskin, trans. Maria Tatar (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999), 110.
Perrault, 113.
Ten Elshof, 39.
Ten Elshof, 41-45.
Ten Elshof, 52.
Ten Elshof, 54-55.
Ten Elshof, 64.
Tolkien, 15.
Tolkein, 19
Tolkien, 22-23.
This discussion can be found in greater detail in J. R. R. Tolkien’s article On Fairy Stories.
