In Martin Scorsese’s violent but exceptional, best director Oscar-winning film The Departed, there is a line early on in which the captain of an anti-organized crime squad (Martin Sheen) says to Billy Constigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), a cop who has gone undercover to infiltrate a crime family: “We deal in deception here; what we don’t deal with is self-deception.” The idea of self-deception is everywhere in the movie, from Constigan becoming what he detests in order to be believed by the criminals he must accept him if they are to reveal themselves, to his counterpart, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a cop who has been cultivated by the mob as a mole inside the Massachusetts State Troopers.
People are complicated. We are all capable of self-deception, probably with more frequency than we care to admit. That is unlikely to be self-deception at the scale at the center of The Departed, but we are all capable of openly act against our own best interests. We certainly delude ourselves unconsciously, but sometimes we do so even as we are aware of what we are doing. Mostly, they are small delusions, like claiming we don’t have time to learn a new skill or pick up a new hobby as we watch hours go by in front of the television. Or fooling ourselves that we will make up for eating that piece of cake by burning the equivalent amount of calories. But the consequences and the delusion can be bigger. Consciously or not, if examined, some people can trace a bad relationship or a divorce as much to self-deceit about who their partner is or how they imagine they will change under their influence.
The exercise: Regardless whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, for this exercise, start with your own life. Explore one part of yourself where you know you are self-delusional. Ask hard questions of yourself. Don’t let yourself off the hook. Try and figure out why this bit of self-delusion is a part of your make-up. Now, if you are a memoirist, continue this exploration in your manuscript and activate it by looking at it in action through a specific experience. If you are a nonfiction writer but you are not the subject of your material, ask a similar question of your primary subject (whether that is an individual or a larger, collective case of self-delusion). If you are a fiction writer, take the self-delusion you examined in yourself, reshape it, and place it as a quality of one of your characters, then write a scene in which the self-delusion is exposed.