Sartre held that self-deception requires exact, simultaneous belief and disbelief.

Evidence

Sartre rejects both the Freudian frame and the divided self on which it rests. We constantly believe and disbelieve the same propositions simultaneously, he argues. Rather than acting ignorantly, “We must know the truth very exactly, in order to conceal it” more carefully from ourselves. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1397

Categorization

• QUESTION: Sartre’s paradox - concealing the truth requires knowing it exactly - would be worth chasing as a lens on how colonial actors both knew and denied the violence of their regimes.