21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

winners of lottery tickets after a few months apparently return to the same level of happiness prior to their win. So it seems that if you don’t know how to party now, money’s not going to help you learn!

For all the liberation of the last century or so we are also still quite a prudish nation. There is a strange ambivalence between licence on the one hand and an embarrassment about the body and sex on the other. The British seem to be strangely fascinated and yet disapproving of other people’s nudity. We have high rates of teenage pregnancy. Somehow we just cannot get over our guilty fascination and so we just communicate our ambivalent hang-ups to the next generation. Why do we not celebrate our own bodies? Instead, we are presented with (or present ourselves with) images of what we ‘ought’ to look like and are left with the dilemma of what to do.

Society has turned play into a strangely serious enterprise. Sport has become big business. It is discussed as part of news programmes with at least equal seriousness as major world events. One imagines that if a reporter were to dare to say: ‘Its only a game’ they would not last long in their job! Even amateur involvement in sports is not often that playful. By contrast, if we watch young children at play, or think back to our own childhood then of course there is total absorption in the moment. Cares are forgotten and a child is completely unselfconscious in their imagination and enactment of games and stories. (Perhaps this is partly what is referred to when we talk of the ecstasy that adults have apparently lost.) If you are fortunate enough to

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