It’s so easy to pick on people for being self-deluded. It’s like picking on dogs for rubbing their assholes on the carpet. It feels good, so we do it.

Perhaps there’s no greater self-delusion than the belief that after death, the wrongs of this world will be righted by a god who obviously sees no need to do anything about them at the present time. Our need for comfort in a cruel world makes perfect sense. Practically everyone I know takes an anti-depressant. And most feel ashamed of it to some degree. But the rest of us are depressed too, even though we may not choose drugs to manage it. And we feel shame too. How can one live in a human body on this small planet we call Earth and not feel shame?

I loved playing a game (that I thought I invented) in college, called The Would You Rather Game. It’s played by giving someone a choice of two things that they either long for, or that they long to avoid, and then having them choose. (The standard reply from people who don’t like this game is “neither”.)

Would you rather have the power to cure all disease, or to end all hunger?

Would you rather spend a drunken, naked evening with Hillary Clinton or Oprah?

Would you rather fuck Barak Obama or Daniel Craig?

Would you rather have your 10 fingernails pulled out with pliers, or eat a quart of shit?

You get the idea.

The game can be made more textured of course by adding additional circumstances, or by negating certain assumptions, for instance: Can I have anesthesia while my fingernails are being yanked out? If so, what kind? Advil? Percocet? Heroin? Whose shit is it? My own? Dick Cheney’s? Can I hold my nose while I eat it? Can I drink something strong afterward to wash it down?

Isn’t life kind of like an ongoing Would You Rather Game? Except in life, you actually do the thing.

Would you rather stay in the crushingly dull marriage, or face life’s trials alone?

Would you rather buy the new furniture, or call the number on your tv screen and support the starving orphan?

Would you rather go without the condom and feel every nerve ending, or risk getting her pregnant?

The self-delusion comes in when we make one choice and pretend we’ve made another, or when we invent reasons for the choice we made that have nothing to do with why we actually made it, and then continue to make it everyday. Self-delusion means avoiding the truth, and when facing the truth leads to fear of consequences more painful than those caused by embracing a lie, then the game is on. 

I saw Elizabeth Edwards telling her story about her husband’s infidelity on tv the other day, and she was suddenly transformed from the fierce, intelligent woman I had always respected and admired, into a foolish, self-deluded object of ridicule.

She shared a bittersweet recollection of her desire for “just one gift” from her husband when he proposed, the one thing she asked him to promise her was that he would always be faithful.  I wonder why she didn’t ask him to eat only oatmeal for the rest of his life, or never to cut his hair, or only to sleep while standing up. It doesn’t really seem that absurd for a virginal young girl in love to make that request of her husband to be, or even for her young husband to be to think he’s telling the truth when he makes that particular promise. I’ve no doubt that when he’s 20 he fully intends to keep it. And women cheat too, it’s not about men vs. women, it’s about refusing to grow up. For Elizabeth Edwards, in her late 50s, still to believe in the tooth fairy? That’s willful denial of reality, or to re-interpret the words of Bill Clinton, it’s a refusal to see what IS is.

I sat there shaking my head watching E.E. while she calmly and in a ladylike manner so typical of her ilk, expressed her self-righteous rage at being betrayed. I wondered if she is also furious that it rains, and pissed off that when you drop something, it falls to the floor.

When her husband confessed to her that he had been unfaithful, he told her he had sex with this woman only once, and, for a long time she believed that.  Now, presumably, his story is that this other woman is the only other woman he’s ever had, and so now she believes that. And all of us watching are to believe that no one knows anything about whether John Edwards is the father of the child the woman birthed 9 months after their affair.

Yes, reality can be quite painful, but it also makes a certain kind of “realistic” sense. Mrs. Edwards was/is articulate, quiet, chubby, dying of cancer, and familiar.  The other woman was/is cynical, aggressive, skinny, bursting with anorexic “healthiness” and an unknown.

As Mark, a sexy, caustic, deceased love of mine, used to say—“Oh those wacky heterosexuals.”

It’s not just heterosexuals of course. I know several homosexual men living in the closet, and the closet has many levels. The bottom level, the deepest layer of the lie in other words, is the one that embraces complete self-delusion. This kind of homosexual does not acknowledge, even to himself, his attractions toward men. God only knows what he thinks about on the rare occasions when he ejaculates. As men, we know it’s impossible to get off without getting aroused, and to be aroused, there must be some communion with the arousing image or idea, even if it’s only in our heads for the last few moments before we squirt it off. The top layer of the closet (and there are several in between top and bottom) are the ones who have frequent sex with men (living on the “down low”) but pretend to their wives, their co-workers, their friends, that they’re straight.

Hey, whatever works. If something is painful we look for a way to sooth that pain, and we usually have a choice. Personally, I prefer taking my pain up front, usually from the acceptance of a difficult truth that I cannot control, and that makes me feel powerless to some degree, but if you’re the type of human being that likes to postpone, the road to denial is paved with our human need to avoid our fear and shame at being human.