Chaerim Kang
Claremont High School
Original Oratory
Sour Grapes Rationalization
You’ve all probably have heard the famous Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Grapes. It goes something like this: One hot summer's day, a fox was strolling through an orchard when he came across some juicy grapes just ripening on a vine over a lofty branch. Excitedly drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jumped, but barely missed the branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last he gave up, and walked away with his nose in their air, grunting : ‘I’m sure they are sour.' Well, how did he know the grapes were sour? He didn’t! But not wanting to face his disappointment and failure as an agile fox, he chose to make an excuse.
The defense mechanism used by the fox is often called the “sour grapes rationalization ” or in psychological terms, self deception. It is the process of convincing oneself of a truth or lack of it so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception. This type of dishonesty is far harder to detect, and roots way back into the deepest, darkest parts of our hearts. The alcoholic who believed that his drinking was under control, the husband who believed that his wife was not having an affair, and the jealous colleague who believed that her coworker's greater professional success was due to sheer luck. Starting from knitty bitty details to life changing choices, we all have our fair share of sour grapes, fooling ourselves into believing false notions to shield out the truth. So today, let’s identify why we lie the sweet grapes to be sour, examine the different types of sour grapes in life and lastly, find a healthier coping mechanism to eat that sweet grape.
The first engine that fuels self deception is a disturbing state what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”. Psychologist Leon Festinger explained this as a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two inconsistent ideas. This dissonance between conflicting ideas produce mental discomfort that human instincts attempt to resolve. But when one fails to directly resolve the problem the next best option is to reduce the dissonance by convincing oneself in ingenious, self- deluding ways. Smokers typically experience a high level of cognitive dissonance for example. To decrease the tension between the idea that smoking is dangerous and will cause various deadly illnesses, they could quit the smoking itself, but often after failing that option, turn to denying the evidence that links smoking to life-threatening conditions, that smoking isn’t really so harmful, it helps us relax, helps us lose weight.. It’s worth the risk.. the loop is endless.
Another reason for self deception is self constructed memory. Just as history is written by the victors, we write our own histories in form of memory. We do so just as the conquerors of nations did: we justify our actions and portray ourselves as honest, compassionate people. The everyday, dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the world and our place in it. Fueled by the need to protect our fragile ego from the storms of reality, we choose to delete bits and pieces of our experiences that are dissonant with our core self-images.
As scary as it seems, sour grapes are common, those little denials or rationalizations that cover up our unpleasant imperfections. In fact, adequate self-enhancement is psychologically healthy and entails many benefits. Without a good dose of self justification, we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment and torture ourselves over the road not taken. I mean, how else would politicians sleep soundly at night without self deception? In a similar vein, we would agonize over almost every decision- did we do the right thing, marry the right person, choose the best car, enter the right career?
Yet mindless self deception is just like quicksand, as it draws us deeper into disaster. It makes us use our potent minds to rationalize and justify self-serving and expedient choices rather than seeking to mature by breaking the barriers. Allergic to uncertainty and ambiguity, we end up prematurely viewing the world in reductionistic terms: black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, now or never. It prolongs widened rifts between lovers, friends and even nations. It permits the guilty to avoid taking responsibility and lets professionals to use outdated information that harm the public.
Leo Tolstoy compared this as walking over a deep chasm on a poorly constructed bridge. He wrote in his book Anna Karenina, “The chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life.” While the bridge of self-deception may hold for many years seemingly safe and sound, there is always that looming risk that the bridge will break and throw us down into the endless abyss of life. Losing the identity of who we are after years of denying, we will be feeble and ill-equipped to climb out of that crevasse.
This was precisely the story of Alex Shafer, who by the time he was a teenager, was sure he was gay. He never daydreamed about girls but had crushes on other guys. Although his feelings were strong and clear, he knew his community, his church, and his family would not approve of his homosexuality. Consequently, he vowed to become the person everyone else wanted him to be. For years, Shafer tried as hard as he could not to be gay. He was not sexually active. He saw three different therapists. Toward the end of college, everything seemed to have changed and he married a wonderful woman. But years of denying his identity could not mask his real self. As much as he loved his wife, he eventually had to admit that his attraction to men was not fading. After years of living a life of someone who he wasn’t, Shafer felt that he’d failed and slid into depression. The dilemma of the risk of alienating friends and family or continue to live a lie gnawed at him every second. Only after huge courage was he able to tell his wife that he was gay, and they agreed to divorce. Shafer has paid a high price to put self-deception behind him. Even as an individual, the cost of self-deception was huge -hurting not only himself but also those who cared about him.
Given the brevity of life, it is far better to become aware of our deceptions while we still can to prevent such disasters. The antidote to self deception is self awareness – the capacity for objective self observation. It is a way for us to recognize our limitations, to make choices reflectively, not reactively. The more we understand what role self-deceit plays in our lives, the further we can pull ourselves out of the gravitational pull of self deception. We must be the investigative reporter, the grand jury, the whistle-blower, willing to rock the boat, to uncover the facts that have been hidden away in the service of keeping things comfortable.
Think about this. While society continues to make extraordinary leaps in mastering the external world, we often lose connections with our inner selves. Technology breakthroughs lets the world’s information more accessible everyday, there is no comparable revolution to map the landscape of our innerselves.
Fortunately, German philosopher Nietzsche suggested that one way to do this is by viewing the development of our character as the creation of a work of art. In its initial stages, a work of art is full of imperfections, however, an artist who deceives himself regarding these flaws never creates anything of worth. Instead, a true artist knows how to observe the flaws and make necessary corrections. In a similar vein, like an artist, with an awareness of our own flaws we can attempt to overcome our weaknesses , or when this is not possible accept them and see them as an expression of our uniqueness. As Nietzsche wrote – To “give style” to one’s character – a great and rare art.