Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

424 HOW THE MIND WORKSclear enough how natural selection engineered our instincts to suit ourneeds. We shouldn't blame selfish genes, either. They endow us withselfish motives, but they just as surely endow us with the capacity forlove and a sense of justice. What we should appreciate and fear is thecunning designs of the emotions themselves. Many of their specs are notfor gladness and understanding: think of the happiness treadmill, theSirens' song, the sham emotions, the doomsday machines, the caprice ofromance, the pointless punishment of grief. But self-deception is perhapsthe crudest motive of all, for it makes us feel right when we arewrong and emboldens us to fight when we ought to surrender. Triverswrites,Consider an argument between two closely bound people, say, husbandand wife. Both parties believe that one is an altruist—of long standing,relatively pure in motive, and much abused—while the other is characterizedby a pattern of selfishness spread over hundreds of incidents.They only disagree over who is altruistic and who selfish. It is noteworthythat the argument may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little orno preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information processingappear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning ofanger to show themselves.In cartoons and movies, the villains are mustache-twirling degenerates,cackling with glee at their badness. In real life, villains are convincedof their rectitude. Many biographers of evil men start outassuming that their subjects are cynical opportunists and reluctantly discoverthat they are ideologues and moralists. If Hitler was an actor, concludedone, he was an actor who believed in the part.Still, thanks to the complexity of our minds, we need not be perpetualdupes of our own chicanery. The mind has many parts, some designedfor virtue, some designed for reason, some clever enough to outwit theparts that are neither. One self may deceive another, but every now andthen a third self sees the truth.