Self-Deciet

Finally someone noticed that the famous mural is about the Black slaves at the bottom rather than a possible one hooked nose on the top! [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Gilad Atzmon (@GiladAtzmon) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

MacDonald, Kevin wrote:

Self-Deception as an Aspect of Judaism as a
Group Evolutionary Strategy

Quote :

It was Jewish historiography with its strong polemical and apologetic bias, that undertook to trace the record of Jew-hatred in Christian history, while it was left to the anti-Semites to trace an intellectually not too dissimilar record from ancient Jewish authorities. When this Jewish tradition of an often violent antagonism to Christians and Gentiles came to light “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished,” so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separateness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlightenment. Judaism, it was now maintained chiefly by Jewish historians, had always been superior to other religions in that it believed in human equality and tolerance. That this self-deceiving theory, accompanied by the belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive, suffering object of Christian persecutions, actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness…is perhaps one of those ironies which seem to be in store for those who, for whatever reasons, try to embellish and manipulate political Separation and Its Discontents facts and historical records. (Hannah Arendt 1968, viii–ix; inner quote from Katz [1961b, 196])

Evolutionists have shown considerable interest in deception and self-deception as mechanisms for furthering evolutionary goals (Alexander 1987; Beahrs 1996; Trivers 1985, 1991). Evolutionists propose that self-deception is favoured whenever it prevents the detection of one’s deceptions of others. Deception and self-deception are thus interdependent phenomena.
Self-deceiving individuals are able to present an appearance of trustworthiness and sincerity and to believe their own rationalizations: “The agent is now perceived by both self and others as ‘genuine,’ a truly ‘good person’ as opposed to ‘manipulator’” (Beahrs 1996, 6). Beahrs (1996) proposes that the targets of deception also often engage in self-deception or something close to it. These individuals accurately perceive the deceiver’s machinations but act as if they are deceived.
There is reason to suppose that members of cohesive groups would be more likely than others to engage in self-deception that ignores negative traits of themselves or their in-group. In Chapter 1, I argued that Jews are generally quite high on attraction to cohesive groups and have a high need for a group identity. Research on social identity processes indicates that people are highly prone to attributing very positive traits to their own groups, and Altemeyer (1994) notes that people who are highly attracted to cohesive groups are relatively likely to not want to hear unpleasant information about themselves. The suggestion is that Jews, and especially those who strongly identify as Jews, would be relatively prone to self-deception by ignoring or rationalizing negative information about themselves and their ingroup.
Chapter 7 contained a great many rationalizations of Judaism that would appear to be prime examples of deception and/or self-deception. Jacob Neusner (1987, 139) states of the 4th-century writers of Leviticus Rabbah that “the defeated people found refuge in a mode of thought that trained vision to see things otherwise than as the eyes perceived them,” a mode in which “things never are what they seem because they cannot be.” It would be difficult to find a more paradigmatic example of the role of self-deception in constructing religious ideology.
Self-deception may be of general importance in the ability of Jews to cope with anti-Semitism. It has often been noted that the Jewish response to persecution, at least in traditional societies, has been an increase in religious fundamentalism, mysticism, and messianism.
“Judaism’s response to historical events of a cataclysmic character normally takes two forms, first, renewed messianic speculation, and second, a renewed search in Scripture for relevant ideas, attitudes and historical paradigms” (Neusner 1986, 26; Self-Deception as an Aspect of Judaism see also Johnson 1988, 260, 267; Scholem 1971).
The general tendency has been to blame persecution on failure to obey Jewish law, a response which is a recurrent theme of the Tanakh.
Indeed, the idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.

Jewish self-deception touches on a variety of issues, including personal identity, the causes and extent of anti-Semitism, the characteristics of Jews (e.g., economic success), and the role of Jews in the political and cultural process in traditional and contemporary societies. Perhaps the most important example of self-deceptive Jewish religious ideology, reiterated as a theme of Jewish self-conceptions beginning in the ancient world, is the view that Judaism is an ethically superior, altruistic group and is therefore morally obligated to continue as a cohesive, genetically segregated group purely for the ethical purpose of providing a shining example to the rest of humanity (see Chapter 7).
Because of their critical attitudes toward diaspora Judaism, Zionists have often been quite conscious of the mental fabrications of their coreligionists. Thus the historian Sir Louis Namier (1934, xxxvii–xxxviii) (himself an Anglican convert and Zionist activist [Whitfield 1988]) describes the “better-class” liberal Jew in pre-National Socialist Germany who was high-minded, broad-minded, open-minded, and without roots, for he lacked the live touch with any living community…His conception of Judaism merely as a religion was curiously superficial and self-contradictory. For that which distinguishes the Jewish religion in its modern form from, say, Christian Unitarianism, is merely the national tradition which most of the adherents of Liberal or Reform Judaism profess to reject. By refraining from complete amalgamation and by maintaining their separate racial and historical identity, of which they deny the existence, they have kept themselves suspended in mid-air—moral Luftmenschen, who provoke criticism among their own people and distrust among the non-Jews. In reality, most of them were perfectly sincere within the limits of their own conscious thinking; they did not avow their insincerity even to themselves.
The German economist Werner Sombart (1913, 264) touched on Jewish self-deception in his work, Jews and Modern Capitalism:
Just as so many Jews do not see themselves—do they not deny their obvious characteristics and assert that there is no difference between them and Englishmen or Germans or Frenchmen?…How many Jews still hold that the Jewish Question is only a political one, and are convinced that a liberal régime is all that is required to remove the differences between the Jew and his neighbour. It is nothing short of astounding to read the opinion of so soundly learned a man as the author of one of the newest books on the Jewish Question that the whole of the anti-Semitic movement during the last thirty years was the result of the works of Marr and Dühring. “The thousand victims of the pogroms and the million sturdy workers who emigrated from their homes are but a striking illustration of the power of—Eugen Dühring” (!)
Sombart’s comments touch on the apologetic nature of Jewish historiography which is a central theme of Chapter 7. Much of this work undoubtedly involves self-deception. In a comment that also stresses the complexity of Jewish identity processes, Lindemann (1997, 535; italics in text) writes that “Jews actually do not want to understand their past—or at least those aspects of their past that have to do with the hatred directed at them, since understanding may threaten other elements of their complex and often contradictory identities.”
Zionist historian Gershom Scholem (1979) describes the massive self-deception among the “broad Jewish liberal middle class” (p. 16) living in Germany from 1900 to 1933. Scholem describes the “contrast between the general principles that were consciously upheld in domestic discussions and the mental attitudes that remained subconscious and in many cases were even explicitly disavowed” (p. 17). They accepted the ideology that Judaism was nothing more than a religion despite the fact that most of them had no religious beliefs and many had developed “Jewish feeling which no longer had anything to do with religion” (p. 20). Many accepted the ideology that “the mission of Judaism was its self-sacrifice for the common good of mankind” (p. 26), despite the fact that Jews were vastly over-represented in all of the markers of economic and cultural success in the society. Jews would lead humanity into a universalistic, ethically superior golden age, while they themselves retained “semi-conscious” feelings of solidarity with international Jewry. Their avowals of anti-Zionism and German patriotism were often “more evident than real” (p. 18)—a comment that brings to mind the much earlier observation of Moses Hess, who wrote in 1840 about the despised assimilated Jew “who denies his nationality while the hand of fate presses heavily on his own people. The beautiful phrases about humanity and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak for his treason…will ultimately not protect him from public opinion” (in Frankel 1981, 12).
The self-image of being completely socially assimilated also coexisted with exclusive socialization among other Jews and criticism of upper-class Jews who socialized with gentiles. Self-images of assimilation also coexisted with very negative or ambivalent attitudes toward conversion and intermarriage.
Moreover, the image of being submerged in completely “German“ activities coexisted with the reality of engaging in activities that only Jews engaged in, and also in taking great pride in Jewish accomplishments, Jewish suffering, and in a Jewish history that was very different from German history. They took great pride in their invention of monotheism and in the concept that Christianity was the “daughter-religion” of Judaism—an ideology that clearly places Judaism in a superior role vis-à-vis Christianity.
Their intellectual idols were people like Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig—all Jews, many of whom were themselves engaged in intellectual work involving self-deception. (Cohen believed that Jews had to survive as a people in order to promote a unique ethical vision [Rubin 1995a, 53].) Their literary idols were Jews who had achieved popularity among gentiles and thus were a source of group pride.