The only people who crave change are wet babies.  I first heard that maxim from my grandmother, and it has remained a favorite of mine ever since.  At first, I heard it as a way to heap opprobrium on my elders, including grandma herself, who refused to see how my generation was the one sent by the cosmos to transform a wicked society into a much better one.  I was ready for change, I told myself; it was just the older generation that stood in the way with their resistance to the inevitable, the true, and the just.

As I grew older, I realized that we were all in it together:  None of us really want change.  Grandma was even more right than I had realized.  We’d rather be right about the seaworthiness of a sinking ship, and drown, than we would to admit the flaw and climb into the lifeboats.

We go to great lengths to maintain our current beliefs, including self-deception, which may be the most dangerous way we hang on to the mess we’re in rather than leave it for greener pastures.

In fact, so good are we at self-deception as a way of avoiding change, that we maintain a portfolio of four options to stay on our own straight and incorrect.

The first is when we want to continue to believe or do something difficult and would find the truth inconvenient or de-motivating.  This tactic can look like a strength in the short run, as when we persevere in pursuing a music career, say, when the brutal truth is that we are no-hopers.  Society tells us not to give up, and it is true that the spoils often go to the stubborn and the unwilling to quit.  But knowing when you are beat is an essential and underrated aspect of self-knowledge, especially in this era of long shots and improbable successes.  And yet — what if we are the ones who, despite being told we had no talent by the judges on American Idol or its heirs, keep going and get on the Billboard Top 100?  Or we keep trying, finally get that movie made, and it makes $300 million?  Pop culture lore is filled with this sort of rags-to-riches story.  The statistically unlikely nature of the outcome is merely evidence of the truth of the story we told ourselves.  Somebody has to win the lottery, after all – and it might as well be me.  Deciding which story to follow in our own lives may be the most difficult choice we ever have to make.

The second device we use to avoid change is to hide from facts that threaten to disprove one of our beliefs.  This coping mechanism is rife in the political world; in fact a certain political party in the United States has threatened democracy itself by avoiding the inconvenient fact that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any election in living memory – and continued to maintain the specious belief that voter fraud is common thus pushing us to pass laws making it harder for people to vote.

A third strategy is to discredit the source of the unpleasant truth.  This ugly response to hearing things we don’t like used to be called “shooting the messenger,” or an “argument ad hominem,” but now it’s just everyday politics.  It’s so common, in fact, that most members of both political parties don’t even realize its logical shakiness.  An idea is not disproved simply because we dislike or defame the person who speaks the idea.  Wise truths may come from unpleasant sources.

And the final strategy for self-deception is to take advantage of the vagueness of an argument or a set of facts and make up your own story explaining them.  In this context I often think of the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who are ready to kill someone accused of witchcraft whether she floats – or doesn’t float.

It’s depressing to think that humanity is so ready to fool itself in order to avoid change.  The recent resistance in the United States (and elsewhere) to life-saving vaccinations demonstrates that people would rather risk death than change their world views.  At the seemingly inexplicable heart of this resistance is that wet-baby problem.  In the long run, resisting change because it makes us feel uncomfortable is hazardous to our health, to our country’s health, and to the planet.