 The Sandman is out now on Netflix, and it's based on the hit graphic novel from Neil Gaiman. The show centers around Morpheus, aka Dream, aka The Sandman. And for the sake of minimizing confusion, I'm just gonna call him Dream throughout this brief video essay. The creators of The Sandman managed to fit multiple stories within one season, which is amazing because most shows focus on one primary story and villain. Instead, Dream faces off with multiple enemies throughout the series, like his siblings Desire and Despair, his rogue nightmare The Corinthians, and Lucifer Morningstar. Although each of these stories is unique, one of my personal favorites was with John D. John has a traumatic past which fuels his belief that the world would be a much better place if everyone told the truth. As we soon find out, the truth isn't all that it's cracked up to be. So today I wanted to explore this theme and have a start asking some questions. A lot of us, we believe at least that we value the truth above all else. But is this actually what's best? Is this actually what we want? And are lies ever okay? And can self-deception ever actually be beneficial? What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Rewired Soul. If you're new here, make sure you subscribe because I love making video essays on a whole wide range of topics. I really do like pulling themes from different movies and TV shows because I love watching them. Because mainly I read non-fiction, but I get my fiction fix from movies and TVs. But anyways, a little backstory about my personal history with The Sandman. I've only read one Neil Gaiman book because I never read fiction. I read the book American Gods when one of my friends recommended it to me. And she's actually just, I don't like using the word obsessed, but she loves The Sandman. And she actually has like a really sick tattoo sleeve of a bunch of different Sandman characters that you can see on the screen right now. So since she loved it so much, and she's a pretty smart woman, I decided that when the show came out, I was going to check it out. So my girlfriend and I, we watched the show, we binged it, we absolutely loved it. I really hope that they make more seasons. But yeah, I wanted to dive into this topic of lies and self-deceptions. So by the way, if you have not seen the show, there are going to be some spoilers. So if you don't mind, hang out. If not, save this video, go watch the show, come back, and we'll chat about it. The show starts with Dream getting captured by a cult who thought they were capturing death. They steal Dream's tools and hold him captive for nearly 70 years. Early in his captivity, the pregnant mistress of the cult leader stole the leader's money as well as Dream's tools, which were his sand, his helm, and the Dream Stone. When Dream finally escapes, the last of his tools that he needs to find is the Dream Stone. Around this time, the mistress, Ethel Crips, learns Dream escaped and is coming for her. She ends up giving the Stone to her psychopathic son, John D., and tells him to kill Dream. The Dream Stone is extremely powerful and has the ability to make Dreams come true. It's basically a genie, but with unlimited wishes. For John, due to his traumatic childhood, he believes lying is what's making the world a terrible place. John decides that he's going to make the world better by forcing everyone to tell the truth. We see how that plays out in episode five, titled 24-7, when a married couple, a lonely waitress, an in-closet cook, and other patrons are forced to tell the truth to each other as well as themselves. It doesn't take long for them to slaughter one another and take their own lives. Because John thinks the truth is the ultimate virtue, he believes that this is just the way things need to be. After all of the chaos ensues, Dream shows up. Dream asks John what it is that John thinks he's doing, and John says, saving the world from its lies, and that this is the truth of mankind. Dream goes on to say, you're wrong. This is the truth of mankind. And we begin to see a replay of when the husband and wife sat down and were pretending to be happy in a marriage. John tells Dream that they're lying to themselves. Dream says they're not lies, John. They're dreams. And he tells John that Kate, the CEO, dreams of running away where no one will find her, and that the husband, Gary, dreams of proving that his father was wrong about him. Beth, the waitress, dreams of writing a book that matters to people. The Sandman tells John that their dreams are what inspires them and keeps them alive. Then yes, what John saw as these people slaughtered each other, as well as themselves, it would be the truth of mankind. This isn't just an idea from a fictional story either. Science writer and host of the Hidden Brain podcast, John Carr Vedantum, discusses this in his book, Useful Dilutions. He writes, We need hope in order to function, but the world gives us endless reasons not to be hopeful. For most people on the planet, to forswear self-deception is to invite despair and dysfunction. And this is exactly what I wanted to talk about today. Are lies and self-deception always bad or can they actually be helpful or useful? When we start out by looking at the lies we tell each other, most of us believe that white lies aren't wrong. If we go to a friend's house and they cook us a not so great dinner, we say that we like it. If our significant other asks us if they look good in a new outfit, we tell them that they do, regardless. Although we think these things are harmless, some philosophers believe that lies are never okay. One of the main schools of thought when it comes to moral philosophy is deontology, which comes from Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that we should make moral decisions by running a thought experiment and asking ourselves what if everyone did this thing all the time? For example, with lying, we can test and see if it's ever okay to lie by asking what if everyone lied all the time. Obviously, we wouldn't want that. So Kant says that we should never lie. People challenge Kant on this, but Kant stood his ground. Kant goes as far as to say that if a person is running away from a murderer and hides in your house, if the murderer shows up at your door and asks if the person is there, you should tell the murderer that they are. Personally, when I learned this about Kant when I first started studying moral philosophy and seeing the different schools of thought and everything like that, when I heard this story, I'm like, yeah, maybe deontology isn't the right one for me if it demands this sort of rigorous honesty. Now, let's take a look at another philosopher who is actually still alive. In Sam Harris's book, Lying, he mostly agrees with Kant by saying that we should never lie. And by the way, for any of you out there, I know that Sam Harris is kind of a D-bag sometimes, okay? And I may actually make a video eventually about how I used to be like a massive Sam Harris fan, but over the years, as I kind of saw his ideas and beliefs and things like that, I've kind of distanced myself away from him a little bit. So stay tuned that might be coming in the near future. So in his book, Harris says that we should never lie. And he gives a very realistic scenario that makes sense. Let's imagine that you have a friend who loves to paint or draw or do some kind of art, and they're terrible at it. Every time they ask you what you think, you lie and you say that it's good because you want to spare their feelings. But because you gave them such positive feedback all the time, they believe that one day they can quit their job and become an artist. Well, your friend is probably going to go broke pretty quick. And this is why Sam Harris says that we shouldn't lie. He does say that there's a way to tell the truth without being a jerk about it, but he believes lying isn't a healthy way to have relationships with others. Sam even says that you shouldn't lie to someone if you're throwing them a surprise party. He argues that even if the person loves the surprise party, in the back of their mind, they're going to be a little bit concerned that so many of their friends and family members were able to lie to them for so long. Going back to the Sandman, should Gary have lied to his wife and went along with her strict diet that she was enforcing on Gary? Dream would argue yes. Although he didn't say it explicitly in the episode, Dream believes that these lies are what keep relationships together and maybe he's right. Sometimes we may be irritated or annoyed with our significant other, but we say we're fine because it's not worth the fight. Maybe we realize that it's our problem and not theirs and we should just keep our mouths shut. So personally, I would have to agree with Dream on this one. I cannot tell you how many relationships I've saved and not just with a significant other like my wonderful lovely girlfriend who I've been with for I believe about six years now, but I can't tell you how many relationships like that I've saved, but also with my son's mother or even friends just because I decided to I guess lie by omission and it comes from kind of my own personal well-being and my mental health journey and my sobriety journey. I learned that a lot of the times when I'm upset, angry, frustrated, not all the time, but sometimes it's because of this thing right here and my twisted mental filter. So sometimes I take a step back. I don't say how I actually feel and then I sit on it, right? And then later I can come back around kind of like we were just discussing with Sam Harris's book lying. I can circle back and have an honest conversation while I'm not really high in my emotions and have a real honest conversation about how I'm feeling if that's still the case. So I do think that Sam Harris and Emmanuel Kant make great arguments, but as with everything in life, I kind of believe that we need to find balance. For example, the other main philosophical school of thought when it comes to morality is utilitarianism. And when you meet the people who are like extreme utilitarians, you're like, all right, you guys are a little bit too much as well. So I do believe that it's good to run these kind of thought experiments. Like what if everybody lied all the time? Would that be good? You know, I think it's good to kind of run that through our brains just so we can make better decisions about how we're going to act and what we're going to do. But since getting sober, I try to tell the truth like 90% of the time, maybe even a little bit higher because in my active addiction, like it was the opposite, right? Like lying was 90% of my life. It not only damaged my relationships, but it caused me so much unnecessary stress because in if any of you are or were chronic liars, you know exactly what I got, what I mean because you got to keep up with those lies all the time. But what about when it comes to lying to ourselves? Dream tells John that lying to ourself or self deception is what gives us hope and inspires us to keep going. While self deception can get us into trouble, it can also be beneficial. So if you're new to me or my channel or the types of books that I like to read, like I am fascinated with human behavior. And one of the most interesting things to me is self deception. The ways that we lie to ourselves. Like we often notice it in others, right? When we see that the truth is just right there. Like there's evidence like in this crazy world with like conspiracy theorists and people who believe in things that we don't have evidence for, right? We look at them and we're just like, how are they lying to themselves so much? So this is a topic that I think is really important. And I think it's typical of us to think that this is always a bad thing. So I've really enjoyed learning more about this and reading books on how sometimes these forms of self deception can actually be useful. So another example is, and I'm actually working on a video about this, which will probably hopefully be my next video. It'll be a little bit longer and a more in-depth, but this self deception around racism, because if you pay attention, not many people think that they're racist, but if you were to ask them if racism exists, many of them would say yes, right? But nothing that they ever do or nothing they see someone else does is racist. So there's something going on in their head where they know it exists, but they can't think of a single example. But there are many beliefs that we actually evolved for self deception for a pretty good reason, not for denying racism, but for survival. Evolutionary psychologists believe that we originally evolved for self deception because we're the first species to become aware of our own mortality. That's pretty crazy when you think about it. Your dog or your cat has absolutely no awareness that someday they won't be alive, but we do. The best book on this is Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. In his book, Becker writes, Yet at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is a paradox. He is out of nature and hopelessly in it. He is dual, up in the stars, and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gassing body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the Gilmarks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways. The strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two. He has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and despair forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. We had to be able to lie to ourselves in order to continue to survive. This is why we often act as though we're going to live forever and make so many mistakes along the way. Due to our denial of death, we put things off because we think we have all the time in the world. Some of the top regress of the dying, according to a hospice nurse, include not living true to oneself, spending too much time working, not having the courage to express one's feelings, not keeping in touch with friends, and not letting oneself be happy. How often do we work long hours while neglecting the people around us because we tell ourselves we'll have all the time later? How many of our friends do we lose touch with because we think that they're going to be around forever and we could just get in touch whenever we want? In addition to lying to ourselves about mortality, like the people in the diner, we lie to ourselves so we have hope. Self-deception is an adaptation for survival. Without self-deception, we'd never be motivated to do anything. How could we ever improve our lives if we didn't hype ourselves up? We'd never apply for a job that we thought we couldn't get, or we'd never ask out someone that we thought was out of our league. This is something I think about a lot because when it came to getting sober, I had to lie to myself. I was a chronic relapser. I had tried to get sober multiple times, right? But 10 years ago, I finally got sober and I stayed sober. I haven't had a single drink or a drug ever since then. And a lot of that came from lying to myself in the beginning and telling myself that I could do this. I'm not a fortune teller. I had no idea if I would be able to do this, but I had to do it just to keep going. In her book, The Optimism Bias, psychological researcher, Tali Sharad, discusses a study with some interesting findings. More often than not, people expect to do better personally in the near future while anticipating that the rest of the country will go down the drain. For example, a few months before the financial collapse of 2008, the majority of British people said they thought the condition of the country was getting worse. They would soon discover that they were correct. At the very same time, they expected their personal circumstances in the coming years to improve. Many of them would find out that they were wrong. 93% said they were optimistic about the future of their own family, but only 17% were optimistic about the future of other family. Why would we be wired to do this? Think of Kate and Gary at the diner, the married couple. They're both pretty smart people, and I'm sure that they know the rate of divorce in the United States. According to CDC statistics from 2020, there were 5.1 marriages per 1,000 people and 2.3 divorces per 1,000 people. The divorce rate stats didn't include data from California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico, so the rate of divorce is actually higher. This means nearly 50% of marriages or more end in divorce. This is a stat that most of us are familiar with, but we continue to get married. Why? Because as the research shows, we're more optimistic about our own circumstances than the circumstances of others. We tell ourselves, sure, these people get divorced, but we're different. And although optimism inspires us, psychologists and skeptic Stuart Weiss explains that sometimes we need to be pessimistic. In his book, The Uses of Delusion, Weiss discusses how pessimism can take the form of self-deception, but in a good way. He writes, For the person below the status quo line, the person experiencing injury, illness, or trauma, pessimism makes matters worse. It promotes avoidance and denial and does not facilitate the return to a normal status quo of health and happiness. But what about the people above the status quo line when things are fine but the future is uncertain? In this case, pessimism, particularly a form called defensive or reflective pessimism can be valuable. Defensive pessimism involves maintaining unrealistically low expectations despite a history of success. People who adopt this strategy are more anxious than optimistic and they deliberately imagine worst case scenarios in order to come up with strategies aimed at avoiding possible calamity. By planning for every possibility, they manage their anxieties and often end up performing quite well. When they face a new challenge, the pattern begins again, almost as if their recent success never happened. But for those who employ it, defensive pessimism works on several levels. Furthermore, preventing a defensive pessimist, the chance to employ the strategy leads to poor performance. Just take a look at the recent stock and crypto market crashes that have taken place during the last eight months due to inflation. In 2021, the stock market and the crypto market were hitting all-time highs. People started dumping money into stocks and crypto. During these times of abundance, people become overly optimistic and don't account for risk. If you ask any professional investor, this is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do. Even for new investors, it should be common sense to buy low and sell high, but people were buying these assets as they hit their highest points. You need to look no further than Reddit to see how many people invested their life savings into the crypto market and are now in a terrible situation. And the exact same thing was happening with the stock market. Think about how many people dumped their life savings into GameStop stock or AMC and lost all of their money. For these people, pessimism could have gone a long way. So now, as we come to the end of this video, I want to ask you again. What are your thoughts? Are you in the camp of John Dee that everything would be a lot better if we always told the truth to each other as well as ourselves? Or, now that you know a little bit more about self-deception, do you think that dream was right and that we need to lie? We need to lie to ourselves as well because this is how we maintain hope. This is how we persevere. This is how we maintain, you know, inspiration to do things that we never thought we could accomplish. Go ahead and leave a comment down below. It's like I said, this is one of my favorite topics because I'm always looking around and being like, how are these people lying to ourselves and reading the books like some of the books that I mentioned here? And by the way, if you didn't know, I always link the books down in the description if you ever want to check them out. But one of the reasons I read these books is because I have to remind myself like, hey, self-deception is a good thing. And for any of you who are also interested in this topic or you're aware of self-deception, you probably understand where I'm coming from. Like, there are certain points where I just flat out have to lie to myself, right, to motivate myself to do something. And I know I'm lying to myself, but I keep doing it anyways. For example, I started a new great job earlier this year. I thought I was underqualified. I thought I didn't have the education to do what I was doing. But because I lied to myself and said, you know what, Chris, you have the experience, maybe you'll get the job. Boom. I applied, I landed the job. You know what I mean? What about me starting this YouTube channel up again after taking a year long break? I'm getting nowhere near the views that I got before. But part of me says, keep going, Chris. You're going to hit those numbers again, even though I have no idea. So I don't know about you, but you can leave a comment on that as well. Do you find the balance between lying to yourself and actually having that kind of defensive pessimism that we talked about? All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you're new here, do me a favor, make sure you subscribe. I got more video essays coming. I've been getting to like one a week and like I mentioned, I work full-time and I would really, really like to ramp up to two or three a week. As I record this, it's a three-day weekend. I'm going to try to pre-record one or two more to schedule out during this week. So make sure you subscribe. Anyways, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. Share it. That helps a lot because the YouTube algorithm isn't being too friendly. But anyways, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day and I'll see you next time.