If you did not see one our first videos 'Deception and lies in compterorary times' it is a playful video on some modern and postmodern cultural critiques.

https://youtu.be/dYVJOYkLBz4?si=6216y234qPAbQn70

See above.

A full version of this is here in essay form: Thoughts appreciated.

What centuries of deceit looks like

Have we not grown colder despite our replacement of candles and fireplaces with the science of gas and electricity? Have we not grown less empathic despite our global connectedness? How could we be satisfied with the untruthfulness of present-day humanity?

Hitherto we had never masked out our nature so such an extent

Thus you must not have heard the news

“Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself—in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity—is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms." Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life. His moral sentiment does not even make an attempt to prevent this, whereas there are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power. What does man actually know about himself?

…Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger.” Friedrich Nietzche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

In the Postmodern World the Postmodern crowd chants “All that feels good is the good, all that feels bad is the bad, no longer do our thoughts deceive! All our feeling is of equal value! Truth now means for one only the good and to another truth no superior!” Of course, when all truth is of equal value there is no longer truth, which is the exact aim. Meaninglessness, covered by deception in its most pathological form, it seeks to send us all back to the womb and for Eve to have never indulged in her fruit.

Our hyper-consciousness and ability to be ideologically possessed has taken us here, that which we intellectualize we now believe to be true, such intellectualization increasingly slithers us away from our grounded experience. Increasingly we no longer judge our thought either, we only think, this thinking intertwined with our contemporary naïve optimism and narcissism results in ‘truth’. This truth now of course empty by our Postmodern philosophy, it replaces truth with a new truth: that there is no reality, no truth to interpret or delineate. To make an omnipotent claim of no truth is of course paradoxically at odds with the self-convinced correctness of Postmodern ideology, it’s a statement of truth. When Nietzsche predicted the death of God this (post)modern day phenomenon is as close to what he had predicted.

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ‘Where is God,’ he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose.”

Near 100 years later, it is our overgrown hyper-reflexivity (overly reflective conscious thought) and intellectualization that brought us to this empty and valueless corpse of the world (God). There can be no doubt that this is also a (seemingly unwanted) outcome of our obsession with Science and the ‘objective’ world which propagated and promulgated our rationality and intellectual thought. That we now can condition and systematise human experience to whatever we wish either with Scientific methodology or Postmodern ideology, which are ultimately the most severe deceptions of our embodied selves.

It is the objective world (of Science) that is embodied within our subjective human experience and is therefore rooted in value judgements based off our emotional, aesthetic and sensory conscious and unconscious experience. The world of Science of course and Postmodernism (in the assumption that language constitutes meaning) are predicated on conscious experience, they are only interested in what can consciously be thought or seen. This is of course naïve, we are far more than just conscious thinking machines, 95% or more of our cognitions are done unconsciously and the world is far more complex than what our conscious eyes see. We deceive ourselves when we believe consciousness is all that exists, and it is this particular deceit that has also driven us to Science and Postmodern Ideology which are products of left-hemisphere overreliance (I will delineate some of this throughout but see McgilChrist for hemisphere differences).

This increasing division between unconsciousness and consciousness, the division between embodied grounding in experience and that of our conscious reflectivity, the division between non-reflective being and identification with our reflective thought is a cultural increase in schizophrenia. The schizophrenic increasingly deceives himself; he believes truly in what he consciously thinks and identifies with it whilst depersonalising from his feelings, affects and senses. Indeed, schizophrenics show hyperactivation of the left-hemisphere. It is a flight from human existence into an artificial, detached and empty zombie of experience. As McgilChrist puts it:

“It is significant that the ‘normal’ scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines – often robots, computers, or cameras – and sometimes declare that parts of them have been replaced by metal or electronic components. This goes with a lack of transparency of the flesh. No spirit is seen there: ‘body and soul don’t belong together – there’s no unity’, as one patient eloquently puts it. This results in the body becoming ‘mere’ matter. As a result, other human beings, too, appear no more than things, because they are walking bodies. Another patient described by R. D. Laing ‘perceived the actions of his wife – a vivacious and lively woman – as those of a kind of robot, an “it” devoid of inner life. If he told his wife a joke and she (“it”) laughed, this showed no real feeling, but only her conditioned” or mechanical nature.’”

And

“Everything about the body, which in neuropsychological terms is more closely related to and mediated by the right hemisphere than the left, makes it a natural enemy of the left hemisphere, the [left] hemisphere of ideal representation rather than embodied fact, of rationalism rather than intuition, of explicitness rather than the implicit, of what is static rather than what is moving, of what is fixed rather than what is changing. The left hemisphere prefers what it has itself made, and the ultimate rebuff to that is the body. It is the ultimate demonstration of the recalcitrance of reality, of its not being subject to our control. The left hemisphere’s optimism is at odds with recognising the inevitable transience of the body, and its message that we are mortal. The body is messy, imprecise, limited – an object of scorn, therefore, to the fastidiously abstracted left hemisphere, with its fantasies of human omnipotence. As Alain Corbin has argued, we have become more cerebral, and retreated more and more from the senses – especially from smell, touch and taste – as if repelled by the body; and sight, the coolest of the senses, and the one most capable of detachment, has come to dominate all.”

Indeed, schizophrenia is far more prominent in western society than ever before. It is this rejection of the instincts, of our intuition and replacement of an identification with what we consciously believe that has alienated us, the schizophrenic abandons themself as have we in our post(modern) experience.

In the Romantic era which was characterized by the right-hemisphere: pathos, sadness, depression, the era where depression and bipolar were more common which happen to be distinguished by right hemispheric hyperactivation, a society filled though with vibrant art and natural yet extreme expression, we have forsaken this by moving away from the existential tragedy and suffering of real life; to the bland, colourless and mechanistic. We replaced this for characteristically left-hemisphere functions: conscious identification, rejection of the whole (e.g., body), rejection of the divine, (naïve) optimism, pleasure, rejection of emotional empathy, goal-orientated manipulation, mechanistic thinking, scientific thinking ,rejection of tragedy (sadness)… For Nietzsche this was by no means good, and I have to agree.

“Those things which gave rise to the death of tragedy – Socratism in ethics, the dialectics, smugness and cheerfulness of theoretical man – might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of exhaustion, of sickness, of the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And might not the ‘Greek cheerfulness’ of later Hellenism be simply the red flush across the evening sky? Might not the Epicurean will to oppose pessimism be mere prudence on the part of someone who is sick? And science itself, our science … is scientific method perhaps no more than fear of and flight from pessimism? A subtle defence against – truth? Or, to put it in moral terms, is it something like cowardice and insincerity?" – Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy

How far must we deceive our instincts before we implode? How is this not cowardice? This deceit of our embodied experience sets us up for failure. Not only does self-deception hurt you in the present (You lie to yourself) but such deceit and of any kind also sets you up for failure in the future. The belief system you erroneously assumed to be right, that is built on lies that orients you through the world is inevitably going to crumble and with it yourself. In the worst case you’re going to die or be horribly traumatized. The only thing that saves us is the acceptance of our vulnerability so that we can properly orient our belief systems and not on the left-hemispheric optimism, narcissism, conscious identification and compartmentalizing.

It is precisely this left-hemispheric deception (and perhaps increased deception in general) as to why we may see an increase in mental illness and a decrease in mental wellbeing. This left-hemispheric simplified view of the world sets us up for failure and also makes failure feel worse. It is a recently conceptualized western phenomenon that positivity equates to wellbeing.

High self-esteem is (statistically) positively correlated with a proclivity to take offence too easily, to be unrealistic and become demanding or violent if one’s needs aren’t met. Additionally, the idea that positive emotions are a marker of wellbeing implies that absence of positive emotions is pathological, another poorly Western, left-hemispheric, stupid and unscientific claim. It is our sons and daughters that suffer for this the most. Anxiety amongst teens has increased substantially in the most recent years (see Coddling of the American Mind). This is not all, the left-hemispheric mechanisms of increases in conscious identification, the adamant insistence of being right, the naïve optimism and the ungrounding of reality causes further deception in other paradigms.

Classically in psychiatric and medical diagnostic systems there is the tendency that mental illness and mental health is made up of simply the endogenic biological systems correctly or incorrectly working. Unfortunately, it’s a reductionistic claim that doesn’t properly account for any of the absolutely massive and complex contextual aspects e.g., biography, personality, relationships, beliefs, attitudes, needs, social ranking… (I will prevent myself from saying what they all are, I would never reach the end!). One of these non-deterministic and non-biological aspects of mental illness is self-deception of the individual and the milieux.

Non-biological determinism is often frowned upon in medicine and psychiatry as it deemphasizes their overly reductionistic and mechanistic thinking. For example, that the cause of psychosis is hyperactive serotonin or dopamine transmission in the brain, which we now have confirmed is nonsense (or even worse addiction is caused entirely by brain dysfunction). Particularly relating the cause of such mental disorders to the biology is often termed in its cliché manner ‘chemical imbalance’. On top of this the categorical depiction of mental disorders and issues are still mainstream in psychiatry, these categories of course being incredibly heterogeneous and scientifically invalid, not to say they aren’t sometimes useful. Of course, aforementioned are products of left-hemispheric thinking.