We talk ourselves into such a great number of things.  Always the tug of war of what is and what we want it to be.   Sometimes our self deception is a cover for our personal failures.   Sometimes it is simply to justify taking for ourselves what we want.   Sometimes the motivation is to cover for underlying questions that we don’t have answers to.   Sometimes it can even be a little reveling in the righteous feelings of the persecuted.   We make models in our brain to simplify and understand the complex world we live in.  Our brain is not the video camera that we think that it is.  I can go down the road of modeling the clay in my brain in a way that eases pain, justifies, or sweeps away doubt as well as any.  

I try to resist.   I resist because I feel in my heart that this can lead to traps and dead ends.  When the clay model gets distorted, the answers and solutions we invent to solve life’s problems start to diverge from the actions that truly match the fixes that are needed.  I also resist because I find the world and the people in it to be fascinating. The clay model in my brain that has been molded to meet specific goals is nowhere near as fascinating as the complexity that is around me.   A little pain is worth a peek behind the curtain.