Lies we tell ourselves only work when we stop checking whether they are true.

Evidence

Nolan’s films are preoccupied with, to paraphrase Memento’s Teddy, ‘the lies that we tell ourselves to stay happy’. Yet the situation is worse even than that. It’s one thing to lie to oneself; it’s another to not even know whether one is lying to oneself or not. This might be the case with Cobb in Inception, and it’s notable that, in the Wired interview, Nolan says that ‘The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.’ Not caring whether we are lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness – or at least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 520

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting observation packaged as film criticism: the condition of a comforting self-narrative is that the self stops auditing that narrative for truth. Dense and resistant to one-sentence summary.
• XREF: connects to: Self-deception about our own limits, not deliberate lying, drives overconfidence. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 114; Genuine self-deception works by staying willfully uninformed, not by believing falsehoods — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 704; Self-deception requires precise knowledge of the truth being concealed, not ignorance — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1397

Broader Connections

• Genuine self-deception works by staying willfully uninformed, not by believing falsehoods #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 704
• Self-deception about our own limits, not deliberate lying, drives overconfidence. #corroborates (0.80) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 114
• Self-deception requires precise knowledge of the truth being concealed, not ignorance #corroborates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1397