When a bird is put in a cage, it tries to look for a way out. As time goes by, the bird gradually reduces its struggle. It gets grains to eat, a water trough to drink from, its cage is covered to save it from the elements, it gets to see the same people whom it starts to trust as friends, and one day, the bird totally forgets its initial struggles and starts to sing. You can open the cage door now but the bird will not fly away.
It has forgotten that it has wings and it can fly to wherever it wants once outside the cage -- the open blue sky that once beckoned, beckons still, but the bird cannot read its language anymore. It has become a prisoner of its illusions, and its perception of freedom has changed. Now, when it sees a free flying bird, it thinks of it as a poor creature with no guarantees of security and misreads the other bird’s freedom as unnecessary struggle, and no freedom at all.
We as people are also prisoners of illusions. We like to stick to the established ethos of the society, we develop a herd mentality and feel uncomfortable doing anything contrary to what the herd is doing, the past becomes a lesson for the future and the present is lived by following rules that remain mostly unquestioned. We suffer from insecurities when someone talks of ways beside the accepted ones, because we have stopped to think for ourselves.
We fear death because our society has not taught us to take it as a natural end to life. We fear any type of chaos that a contrarian view may create in our minds, we fear change because it may deprive us from the security that the herd ostensibly provides -- thinking for ourselves makes our illusion of being a part of the whole, shatter into pieces. We have started to love the cage and avert our eyes from the open skies. There is a comfort in conformism albeit at the expense of our individual freedoms. We surrender ourselves and merge as if to a “collective self” of society.
Nietzsche said: “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
Hence, the need for deception becomes all important.
People use deception more than they would care to admit. It starts from quite an early age. Parents use deception to keep things from their kids, they tell them fairy tales; in doing so, parents apparently teach certain morals to their kids -- there is always a moral at the end of a story -- but also deceive them about the actual ugliness of the world that they have just entered. Children learn the art soon enough, and use deception to hide things from their providers -- complete disclosure may cause disturbances in getting parental favours.
Deceptions are prevalent in the romantic relationships between men and women. They don’t always make confidences to each other; men, however, tend to divulge more than women. Does that mean women know men better than men do women? Well, the answer would differ from person to person, depending on individual experiences of a particular person. It has worked well for all parties so far. Too much naked truth about the world we live in may become a hindrance to living in denial, the cornerstone of happiness in the Earthly life.
In Chance, Joseph Conrad has these words come out of Marlow, his fictional friend, who is narrating the story to the author about a ship’s captain who suddenly marries a young woman and brings her on voyage in the ship Ferndale where Charles Powell, a new entrant to the seas and the replacement second officer of the ship mentioned, finds much chagrin among the captain’s old mates (subordinates) who have served him loyally for years; the mates are unhappy with the marriage of their long-time captain for whom they have had tremendous respect as he seems to have lost his pre-marriage demeanor and has become aloof. Powell finds this attitude of the mates rather silly.
Marlow’s words:
“It’s true that the sea is an uncertain element, but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women. And Mr Powell, being young, thought naively the captain being married, there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I suppose that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was something still in the nature of fairy tale with a ‘they lived happily ever after’ termination. We are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected in a world that prides itself on being scientific and practical, in possession of incontrovertible theories.”
