Buddhism And Self-Deception
Self-deception belongs to a family of concepts involving psychological manipulation, such as wishful thinking, repression, denial and dissociation (emotionally removing oneself from a traumatic experience to avoid confronting it). Strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow us to conceal our true nature even from ourselves
Somewhere on the scale between extremely damaging and totally insignificant self-deception we find examples that resonate. Skeptics about self-deception claim that any genuine examples would need to satisfy impossible conditions, such as the knowing-dupe or the contradictory belief conditions. For the skeptic’s defeat we must show either: (1) that the fact of somebody holding inconsistent beliefs is reconcilable with the idea of a unified centre of conscious beliefs; or (2) that the skeptic misconstrues the conditions under which self-deception occurs.
Source: aeon.co