Self-delusion

Years ago, before the Enron scam came to light, I heard Jeffrey Skilling in an interview say about Enron’s business activities that “we are on the side of the angels.” The moment I heard him say it I knew something was wrong, even without knowing anything about the business or what was going on behind the scenes. It was the language of the strenuously self-deluded.

Tuesday on CSPAN I heard the same language of strenuous self-delusion from Marc Thiessen. Whether or not Thiessen’s other claims are true (that torture worked), much less relevant to the argument of whether we should torture, his statement on CSPAN and in his Washington Post op-ed, that our torturing detainees “helped” them “do their duty to Allah”—indeed “liberated [them] to speak freely”—, is so far outside of what he might need to support a reasoned argument that he really believes is true, that it makes me wonder if deep down he knows he’s full of it. The same could be said about Liz Cheney’s claim on Thursday on MSNBC to the effect that because we use these same techniques on our own people for training, they’re not torture. Abuse of language like this doesn’t call for direct refutation, but it might be a clue that the people speaking don’t quite believe their own line.