Jackal42

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Consciousness seems to be nature's ingenious mode of self-torture.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“…the individual must blind himself from seeing that which his group claims does not exist, or accept as truth that which the majority says is true, even if his own eyes could convince him that it is false. The herd is so vitally important for the individual that their views, beliefs, feelings, constitute reality for him, more so than what his senses and his reason tell him.”
― Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud

“Only by massive denial, repression of affect, and severe numbing of our human faculties and sensitivities could a person not feel a sense of remorse, apprehension, and dread.”
― Jerry S. Piven, Death and Delusion: A Freudian Analysis of Moral Terror