We feel like we're doing what's right
We feel like we're doing what's right. Without even knowing it, we're deceiving ourselves, and cycles of self-deception are easy to get going but incredibly difficult to disrupt.
— from The Mind in the Cockpit · Life Worth Living: a Guide to What Mattesr Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ry
In the book
And we are devastatingly good at it — the best cons, the saying goes, are never discovered, so we have no idea how many times we have been conned, least of all by ourselves. Most of the time we genuinely feel we are doing what is right even as we deceive ourselves, and the cycle never announces itself. The engine of nearly all of it is the simple, hidden desire to be right: the moment we form a belief we begin to defend it, and from then on we are no longer weighing the evidence, we are recruiting it. — The Mind in the Cockpit