Have you ever wanted to believe something that wasn’t true?
Perhaps you wanted to believe your lottery ticket was a winner after the winning numbers were announced. Or that a credit card bill was smaller. Maybe you wished that a certain someone also had butterflies when they saw you. Or that a recently promoted employee at your company had terrible character and did not deserve the elevation (and that you did).
What would happen if you started believing untruths? Sometimes not much. But sometimes, it can change everything.
A classic example is a high performing individual who takes a new job (with a higher salary). The increased compensation serves as the primary purpose for the job change, along with other reasons like gaining additional experience. As it turns out, it takes additional hours to earn that additional salary. So many hours, in this case, that this person has considerably less time with their loved ones. This trade-off seemed only theoretical, and temporary, at the time. Yet years later, this person is trapped in that job with an expensive mortgage.
Or maybe you have seen one of the QAnon flags flying. Despite the fact that this conspiracy has been thoroughly debunked, many adherents remain. Why? One explanation is that these followers simply want to believe it.
There’s a famous book in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures called Judges. In it, the people of Israel repeatedly do what is right “in their own eyes” until God sends a judge and many of the people then see the truth—but only for period of time.
In other words, history teaches that our default human condition is to believe what we want to believe. And to avoid getting lost in a thicket of untruths, history also teaches that we cannot simply do what is right “in our own eyes”.