The willingness to believe what we want to believe without evidence or even in the face of evidence is, I suppose, a form of insanity (not all that serious a form, though). Maybe it's no more than just a bad case of dishonesty.
This is a genuinely interesting psychological and philosophical observation. A few thoughts:
It's probably both, and they're connected. The willingness to believe what we want to believe — what's technically called motivated reasoning or wishful thinking — sits at an uncomfortable intersection of self-deception and plain old dishonesty. The distinction matters:
- If you genuinely can't see the evidence clearly, that's closer to a cognitive distortion — something like a mild irrationality baked into how the mind works. In that sense, calling it a "form of insanity" is fair, if generous.
- If you can see the evidence but choose to look away, that's closer to dishonesty — specifically, dishonesty with yourself, which philosophers call self-deception, and which is arguably the most corrosive kind.
The trouble is that the two blur together. We are remarkably good at making ourselves not see what we don't want to see. The motivated reasoner often isn't consciously lying — they've arranged their mental furniture so the uncomfortable truth is simply... not visible. That's what makes it feel like irrationality rather than dishonesty, even when it functionally is dishonesty.
Your instinct that it's "not all that serious" is worth pushing on, though. At the individual level, a little wishful thinking is probably harmless — sometimes even adaptive. But scaled up, it becomes the engine behind some of the worst things humans do collectively: ideological blindness, denial of atrocity, the persistence of demonstrably false beliefs in the face of mountains of contrary evidence. At that scale, it's quite serious indeed.
The philosopher's term for what you're describing is epistemic cowardice — the failure to follow the evidence where it leads because the destination is unwelcome. It's considered a vice, and not a minor one, precisely because honesty about reality is a foundation for almost everything else that matters.
Your instinct to connect belief and honesty is, I think, exactly right. What we choose to believe — especially when it costs us nothing to believe correctly — is a kind of moral act.
We see all kinds of what appears to us to be deliberate self-deception. I think a more generous way to interpret it may be that people deliberately avoid confronting what they don't want to hear, so they don't hear it and remain ignorant.
That's a genuinely important distinction, and I think it's more accurate as well as more generous.
There's a real difference between actively constructing a false belief and simply never going to the place where the true one lives. The first requires a kind of ongoing mental effort to suppress what you know. The second is more like a permanent, comfortable avoidance — you never pick up the book, never have the conversation, never follow the thought to its conclusion. The ignorance that results is real, not feigned. In that sense the person isn't lying to themselves — they've just carefully arranged their life so the truth never gets a chance to introduce itself.
This matters morally too. We tend to judge sins of commission more harshly than sins of omission, and this maps onto that distinction fairly well. The person who looks at the evidence and consciously inverts it is doing something more culpable than the person who simply never looks. Both are failing some duty to truth, but not equally.
The philosopher's term for this is culpable ignorance — ignorance you are responsible for because you could have known, and on some level knew you could have known, but arranged things so you wouldn't. It's a kind of moral negligence rather than active fraud.
What makes your framing generous — and I think rightly so — is that it allows the person a kind of psychological coherence. They aren't constantly fighting themselves. They've just built walls, and inside the walls everything is consistent and comfortable. That's a very human thing to do. It doesn't excuse it, but it explains it in a way that doesn't require us to attribute a constant, grinding bad faith to people who are, most of them, just trying to get through life without too much discomfort.
The uncomfortable corollary, though, is that the walls have to be actively maintained. At some level, you have to keep not going to certain places. That's not quite innocent.
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