Self Justification 🤐

Author: Agboluaje Ibrahim

Ever wondered how 'villains', 'hypocrites', 'politicians' and 'the bad guys' live with themselves, don't these 'evil' perpetrators have conscience or don't they see what they are doing as wrong?. The answer is the same way you and I live with ourselves after lying to our loved ones, jumping a queue or cheating in an important examination. As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful. immoral, or stupid. While the scale of the consequences of our mistakes might not be on par with those we accuse, the same mechanism applies to both trivial and tragic consequences. Most of us find it difficult, if not impossible to say 'I was wrong or 'I made a terrible mistake'. The higher the stake, the greater the difficulty.

Most people when confronted with clear evidence of their wrongdoings will not change their point of view or action but would rather justify it even further. Even an irrefutable piece of evidence is rarely enough to penetrate the defence of Self Justification.

We look at the behaviour of politicians with amusement or alarm or horror, but psychologically, what they do is no different in kind, though certainly in consequence, from what most of us have done at one time or another in our private lives. We stay in an unhappy relationship or merely one that is going nowhere because, after all, we invested so much time in making it work, We enrol for a course that we aren't interested in but for the promise of good grades, We self-righteously create a rift with a friend or relative over some real or imagined slight, yet see ourselves as the pursuers of peace- 'if only the other side would apologize and make amends.

Self Justification isn't the same as Lying, in fact lying might be much better than Self Justification because a liar knows he/she is deceiving others while someone that self justify is convinced he/she is telling the truth. ie We are most likely to lie to avoid the wrath of our parents, invent fanciful lies for our lovers, to avoid embarrassment or even save our face in public. But there is a big difference when a guilty man while trying to convince the public of something he knows to be untrue(lying) and when in the process, persuades himself he did the right thing(Self Justification).

That is why self-justification is more powerful and more dangerous than the explicit lie. It allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done. ''In fact, come to think of it, it was the right thing''. "There was nothing else I could have done." "It was a brilliant solution to the problem''. "I was doing the best for the nation. ''Those bastards deserved what they got." ''I'm entitled."

Self-justification not only minimizes our mistakes and bad decisions, but it is also the reason that everyone can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite. It allows us to create a distinction between our moral lapses and someone else's, and to blur me discrepancy between our actions and our moral convictions.

Now, between the conscious lie to fool others and the unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves lies a fascinating grey area, patrolled by that unreliable, self-serving historian-memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped by an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events soften culpability. and distorts what happened. 

When researchers ask husbands and wives what percentage of the housework they do. the wives say, "Are you kidding? I do almost everything, at least 90 per cent." And the husbands say, "I do a lot, actually, about 40 percent." Although the specific numbers differ from couple to couple, the total always exceeds 100 percent by a large margin. It's tempting to conclude that one spouse is lying, but it is more likely that each is remembering in a way that enhances his or her contribution.

Over time, as the self-serving distortions of memory kick in and we forget or distort past events, we may come to believe our lies, little by little. We know we did something wrong. but gradually we begin to think it wasn't all our fault, and after all the situation was complex. We start underestimating our responsibility, whittling away at it until it is a mere shadow of its former hulking self Before long, we have persuaded ourselves, believing privately what we originally said publicly.

Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torment ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision: Did we do the right thing, date the right person, enter the right career? Yet, mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. 

It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information we need and assess issues clearly. It prolongs and widens rifts between lovers, friends, and nations. It keeps us from letting go of unhealthy habits. It permits the guilty to avoid taking responsibility for their deeds. And it keeps many proessionals from changing outdated attitudes and procedures that can be harmful to the public. (i.e; The popular hand washing story of Ignac Semmelweiss, who exhorted his fellow physician to start washing their hands before delivering babies and was ignored even after the result was a lower mortality rate among his patients).

None of us can live without making blunders. But we do have the ability to say: "This is not working out here'', ''This is not making sense." To err is human, but humans then have a choice between covering up or fessing up. 

The choice we make is crucial to what we do next. We are forever being told that we should learn from our mistakes, but how can we learn unless we first admit that we made any? 

To do that, we have to recognize the siren song of self-justification. 

Take a deep breath, look inwardly, what wrongdoing are you justifying? Is it really justifiable?🤔