There is a famous psychological experiment conducted by a group of marketing researchers back in the 1970s. They tracked the progress of a group of people who had bought a particular model of car.
They observed that, after deciding, they sought out and dwelt on every piece of information they read about the benefits of that specific brand. And they tended to overlook negative reviews.
What these researchers deduced is that, once they have decided on an option, our minds resist being contradicted. They want to see that they were right in their decisions, and it is hard to admit that they were wrong.
A century earlier, these ideas had already been embraced by one of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche. The German philosopher (at the time, Prussia) pulled back the veil on many of the habits of his society. He held up to the mirror of logic morality, religion, and, in general, the Western way of being.
Living off our Illusions
As provocative as he was, one of the aspects he personally observed is that people find it hard to accept new ideas that clash with their own. “We no longer value different opinions; we simply hate them,” Nietzsche asserted. He captured this very well in one of his most famous works, Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886.
It is within this context that another famous phrase is attributed to him: “Sometimes people do not want to hear the truth because they do not want their illusions to be destroyed.” It is not literal, but a paraphrase of some of the ideas he expresses in this book and that he would revisit in later essays.
If you think these words come from the man who told his fellow citizens that “God is dead,” you won’t be surprised by the reflection. Nietzsche accepted that people do not want their illusions to be shattered. To speak of illusions is to speak of beliefs, faith, and hope. “We have art so that we do not die of the truth,” he stressed, as if indicating that we cling to stories to avoid succumbing to the logic of fear of the unknown.
The philosopher would say that we live surrounded by this kind of illusion: about who we are, what we are worth, how justified our beliefs are, or how stable the world is. He contends that what we call “truth” is nothing more than metaphors and social agreements.
The Difficult Art of Listening
I imagine talking with Nietzsche would be, today as yesterday, a devastating challenge. Someone who rips the ground from under your feet and leaves you hanging. How would we react? Most likely we would dismiss him as radical or excessive.
Listening attentively and with a willingness to change one’s mind is not easy. He himself realised that you need a deft touch to present your arguments and avoid outright rejection. “Most of the time we take issue with an opinion, even though, in truth, it is the tone in which it is stated that makes it disagreeable to us,” he said.
The people do not seek to engage in conversation and exchange viewpoints. “What people want is to convince the other,” asserted in Cuerpomente the philosopher José Carlos Ruiz as well.
When Nietzsche speaks of “not wanting to listen to the truth,” his idea broadens to all that challenges our own self-image: that we are not as good as we thought, that our opinions are not as objective as we suppose, or that our life might be built on failed expectations.
Today We Remain as We Were Yesterday
Think of day‑to‑day examples we may have heard or witnessed in ourselves or someone close: someone who insists that their partner “will change deep down” even though the evidence suggests otherwise. Or someone who would rather not look at the bank account to avoid facing the reality of their spending. It’s not that they don’t know there’s a problem; it’s that they don’t want to see it at all.
We cling to optimism. And note, we’re not saying that optimism is inherently bad. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and philosophers advocate a degree of optimism as a healthy mental stance. What is unacceptable is irrational optimism, detached from any logic. We must assess our options in a realistic way.
In the social sphere, the situation is equally worrying. As we dislike the world as it is, we cling to easy solutions offered by extremist leaders who prevent us from questioning bigger problems. And the more moderate among us do not vote for the opposite party; at most we abstain from voting for our usual choice, ashamed by the disappointment their leaders provoke.
All of this is explained more fully by the theory of cognitive dissonance, proposed by psychologist Leon Festinger. It explains that when information clashes with our beliefs, we feel discomfort and tend to minimise it, justify it, or, indeed, ignore it.
