Deception and self-delusion came up big in the final part of the Kenneth Hammond Lectures, Sustainable Development: Mandate or Mantra?. (The lectures are available as a book, and the CBC Ideas program RealAudio as well, at least for a little while.) David Lavigne is the science advisor for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and he gave a talk entitled “Ecological Footprints, Doublespeak, and the Evolution of the Machiavellian Mind”. I'm going to try to make the material concerning decetion, politics, and evolution available, somehow. Thinking back over David Lavigne's material, what keeps coming to mind is the idea that a certain self-delusion is required in order for an individual be be taken in by deception ... there's something in there I need to work on. What came horribly clear for certain is how the thinking that underlies globalization is the same neo-liberalism that is gutting our environmental safeguards, in the name of "wise use", a that's a prime example of double-speak if ever there was one.
Basically, my point in all of this is to introduce the buddhist conceptualization of a method to break free of the animal-realm processes that make us suckers in a post-modern hustle, i.e. we need to recognize the real basis of our own potential happiness in order to fight off the compulsive consummerism that is symptomatic of stress and ... and madness, sheer brute madness that destroys ourselves as well as everyone and everything around us.