When you get good at lying to others, you get especially good at lying to yourself. The former will hurt you; the latter will kill you. We don’t lie to ourselves without fooling ourselves about the nature of a lie. Our skill at self-deception is prodigious. We lie by degrees, and so it becomes impossible to tell where the lie begins and where the lie ends. This process produces not an error but a condition. And this condition strips us of more than truth; it strips us of our true identity. We cannot see ourselves and so we cannot see anything else.
