WHY WE TRUST THE STORIES WE INVENT epub

Ask a man why he did it and the answer arrives in under a second. Fluent, grammatical, sincere, delivered in his own voice — and composed by a department of the mind that was closed on the day of the event. That is ordinary. What is strange is what happens next: he believes it. He repeats it to his friends, who hand it back as evidence. He revises his sense of who he is around it. Then he makes decisions costing money, years, and other people on the strength of a report whose author was not there.
This book takes fifty-one of those sentences and finds out what each is made of. We just grew apart. I had no choice. I am my own harshest critic. I will start Monday. I would have behaved differently. Every one is examined the same way: what the sentence is actually doing in the second it is spoken, what in the body produces it, who handed you the wording and why they reward you for it, what the arithmetic says, and what it costs to keep.
Some of them turn out to be load-bearing. Plans, promises, budgets and vows are all invented, all trusted by the people who invented them, and nothing sturdy in a life stands without them. Others are decorative: compatible with every possible observation, never revised, and repeated with tremendous conviction precisely because nothing could ever disturb them. One question separates the two, and this book asks it fifty-one times. What does this sentence forbid?
What is not on offer is the usual instruction to stop lying to yourself, which has never worked for anybody and appears here as one of the fifty-one. These sentences cannot be beaten on their own ground, because the opposite is just as empty — more willpower and less willpower are the same axis, and both ends cut. The way out runs sideways. Not the quantity of resolve but the distance to the hand. Not who stopped loving whom but how long it has been without a pause.
Warm, unsparing and frequently funny about matters usually handled with a straight face, this is a field guide to the private mythology every one of us maintains and none of us audits — written by an author who spends the final chapter in the dock.
Keywords: self-deception, cognitive science, psychology of belief, human behavior, decision making, popular philosophy, self-knowledge