At What Cost Truth? Ignorance as Denial

Someone expressed curiosity at the phrase found in my profile, of the determination to seek truth, "cost what it will."
How would truth COST anything, they wanted to know. Isn't truth always better, doesn't truth set us free?

Well, yes, in the end of it, truth does set us free. The problem is often that it may not not a truth or a freedom we really wanted to find. We are attached to our delusions for a variety of reasons, and will even fight to defend the illusions that allow us to continue in them, because our delusions are woven into the very fabric of our sense of reality, and our place within that reality, even our very sense of personal identity. When a delusion falls, our sense of reality and sense of personal identity, and feeling safe in our perceived reality is threatened, and can, often does, come unraveled. Even more threatening is the risk that as a delusion falls away and a truth revealed, relationships with others that are important to us may be damaged or even destroyed, as others are not yet ready to see what we see, accept what we have been brought to accept.
It is here we can come our attachments to the world we hadn't realized we have. When we are brought up against 'the way it is' and 'that how everyone else thinks.' And that's what everyone else expects US to be and think, too. When we experience a truth revealed, trying to bring that truth from revealed to realized can be the harder part, that of having recognized a truth to begin with. Pressures to conform to how everybody else, the world, thinks, and would have us think, can easily press us to find ways to reject, deny, that we know what we now know, to pretend we don't. But a truth about truth. Once revealed, once known, we can never really hide it from ourselves, we can never un-know what we know. We will try to, but any seeming success in it is just that, seeming. Illusory, delusion. We may put a truth we know out of sight, but we will never be able to truly put it out of mind. It will always be there, somewhere in the shadows of our mind, lurking, waiting to jump out at us, maybe to bite us, at the most uncomfortable and inconvenient times. 

We may find ourselves unable to continue under a pretense of belief. Even if we are willing to try, to go along to get along, we can only maintian the facade to a limited extent for a little while, before it wears thin on ourself and those around us. At times, however, pretense may be the only way we can find to survive. When that is so, we may find that there are some truths so important that they rise above the importance of truth in some other sense. While an ego defense may serve only to protect some non-essential part of the ego, there are times when the defense is in truth protecting something more important. It can serve to protect the well being and even very life of not only ourself but
others around us.

"If our mind were to have tricked us into believing that we don't know something that we really do know but don't want to know that we know, how would we go about knowing that our mind has tricked us into believing that we don't know something that we really do know but don't want to know we know so that we can know we know whatever it is?"

Actually, that is exactly what our minds do, all of us have at least some measure of this going on in our beliefs systems. When we know things we don't want to know, or consciously acknowledge even to ourself that we know, it creates what is called 'cognitive dissonance'  which our mind must attempt to deal with in any way it can. Since at some level we really do know what we don't want to know, and it takes a lot of mental energy to keep all those inconsistencies locked away from our consciousess, this is a primary source of our anxieties and depressions.

Freud presented this conflict as being between the ID's selfish urges and desires and restraining internal moral guide of the Superego.
The Ego, whose job is to mediate between the desires of the ID and the demands and restraints of the Superego, when unable to construct an acceptable compromise between the two, uses devices call 'ego defenses' to protect itself from the unresolved conflict. Ego defenses serve to effectively place a wall of ignorance, denial, between the conflicting beliefs to allow us to continue to hold both while not being able to lay them out side by side in order to reveal and recognize the inconsistencies.

This internal state of conflict arises when our mind encounters conflict between two or more of our beliefs, or between professed belief and a conflicting reality, which is most often manifested in inconsistencies between what we would say we believe, and what we would say we believe at some other time and/or when our behaviors/actions are inconsistent and/or incompatable with our professed beliefs.

We may encounter inconsistencies between what we believe to be true about ourselves and what our actual behaviors and real choices would reveal. One may believe one's self to have a high moral standard, while at odds with that belief, engaging in behaviors that violate one's own view of morality. We hold conflicting beliefs when we would believe two or more different beliefs, that, when examined individually, simply cannot be equally held at once. These are things that if you believe this, you can't also believe that, and vice versa.

A common source of these internal conflicts involve things we are taught to believe as true, to accept as true, often under pressure of negative response and even risk of rejection by individuals or social groups important to us, but which our personal experience and observations about reality would discredit. These beliefs are often passed on through a social group or even down generations in the the form of succinct, pithy sounding wisdom sayings, until they have become part of a social group's traditional folk wisdom lore.

In psychology, there are questionaires that consist of many common 'wisdom sayings' that many people simply accept as if truth, that the test subject will be asked to rate as true or false. These lists of common sayings and folk lore wisdom are designed so as to present statements that actually negate one another, present conflicting beliefs, that are presented at some distance from one another on the list, making it less likely the subject will recognize the inconsistency than if presented along side one another. After scoring the test, the subject is presented with the result of both a numerical score reflecting the degree of inconsistency in the beliefs they chose as being true or false, and presented with the same list in a different arrangment, in which the conflicting beliefs are laid out alongside one another. 

Such lists are an excellent starting point in examining one's own beliefs system, and provide some ground work for beginning to identify one's own perculiar sets of inconsistent and incompatable beliefs. A recent example I encountered was when someone I know to also profess Evangelical Christian belief composed and publicly posted a sentimental piece about soldiers that had died fighting for their nation, and that their souls were all with God in heaven, looking down upon and over America. The irreconcilable conflict here is that according the Christian beliefs, the 'requirement' for souls of the deceased that will be in heaven with God is entirely inconsistent with having died in the service to their country. A similar source of conflict exists for many Christians in the belief in salvation as only for properly confessing/professing believerss, but at the same time also that their circle of loved ones, family and friends, which of course contains both believers and non-believers, will all be reunited in heaven after death. 

Beliefs of this nature most often become a source of anxiety when we realize they are in conflict with what we can easily know through observation of and sound reasoning about reality. When there is on the one hand a high level of social pressure to adhere to the common belief, and clearly evident, even irrefutable, evidence to the contrary in reality as we are able to observe and experience it, we are presented with a crisis in our beliefs system that has potential for either a new level of growth or a deeper level of denial and ignorance.

Ignorance is not the same thing as to be lacking in some knowledge of/about something. Absence of knowledge is innocence. Ignorance is to have chosen at some level to disregard, pretend we do not know, knowledge of something that is available and evident to us to know. The potential for cognitive dissonance when we hold conflicting beliefs or act out of different beliefs standards than we openly profess causes the mind to kick in with ego defenses to protect us from conscious awareness of the inconsistency.

While innocence (lack of knowledge) can contribute to our vulnerablity to unrecognized perils in the material world, ignorance (choosing to disregard, ignore, something we know) brings peril to our mind, heart, and soul. As  (??need script ref) points out, (need to get quote) there is less to fear from that which can destroy our body, than that which can destroy our very soul.

Using the example above, our rational mind has to know that the belief that only proper Christian believers will go to heaven after death simply is not consistent with any belief that all soldiers that die in service to their country or that all our loved ones will be reunited in heaven, presents an inconsistency in our beliefs. It is only by drawing a curtain of ignorance, a mental barrier, an 'ego-defense,'  between these opposing beliefs that we can hold both to be true at once.

The more important to us we feel any certain false belief is, the more strongly our emotional response to protect it will be. The stronger and more quickly strong negative emotion arises when a belief seems under challenge, the more likely it is that belief is false. Response to challenge will be emotional and irrational, since of course, sound reasoning would not protect a false belief. Any and all of what are often called 'fallacies of logic' and 'ego defenses' may be brought into play, even attack on the person seen as the source of the challenging information to the point of death,  as happened when Jesus confronted the religious and political establishment of his day.

Perhaps the greatest risk to the soul in this is that of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the opposite of being honest with ourselves, and accepting the consequences of truths we come to, but cannot allow ourselves to openly embrace. The fear of embracing truths that dismantle the illusions that facilitate our delusions is that of social rejection by others whose acceptance and approval matter to us. This is to give 'The World' the upper hand, over that of truth.

In another essay, I deal with the idea that in matters of faith, the hypocrite and the atheist are but the two sides of the same coin. The coin in this matter is loss/absense in the belief in a commonly accepted god image. The difference is a matter of honesty. The Athiest openly recognizes and professes his or her disbelief, the hypocrite continues to maintain an identity image as an aparant believer before others in their faith community, lest they lose that important source of acceptance and place of belonging within a group.

Openly confronting truth when it is inconvenient or socially dangerous, even physically dangerous,  will always demand an extraordinary degree of courage. But there are situations in which, as mentioned earlier in this essay, that there can be a greater truth that is more important than openly confronting truth in some lesser defense. Perhaps in a more perfect world, this would not be so, but in our present reality, it may at time be neccessary for survival.