In meshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.

A quote by Lucretius.

It's a trap. A quote by Admiral Akbar from Return of the Jedi.

Let's wrap up this series on self-deception by completing our list of self-deception mechanisms.

I promised you a list of over 60 of them. We're going to cover about 30 of them here today

picking right back up from where we left off with part two.

So, I got a really big one for you to begin with which is ignoring one's own conflicts of interest.

Oh man talk about a self-deception mechanism this one is huge and it, this is such a big one that there are some sub-topics, which I include double standards as other self-deception sub-mechanism here,

self-justifications and excuse-making,

backwards rationalization, confabulation,

and wanting or needing a thing to be true.

So let's talk about all of these, but let's begin with this

central point about conflict of interest.

What is a conflict of interest and why is it so deceptive?

Well, think about a tobacco company executive who has built his entire career on climbing the corporate ladder for

20 years and now he's the CEO of this tobacco company.

And let's imagine this was before there was a lot of good scientific evidence which conclusively proved

that tobacco caused cancer. So back then in his own mind it was iffy, you know, he might have suspected that cigarettes aren't really the healthiest thing, but it wasn't conclusive. But then what starts to happen is as he's CEO, all this

evidence and all this science starts coming out. But of course this presents a huge conflict

of interest because his entire career and his entire identity and the way he feeds himself and his family the way he puts his kids through college depends on him being this great executive of this

successful tobacco company. So is he going to really listen to that scientific

evidence when it comes out? Is he going to be objective? Very, very unlikely. And of course, we understand how this works in these sorts of situations.

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