Having concluded that what held me back for so much of my life revolved around the fact that I continually denied my lack of competence to do the things that I desired to do, I began to wonder what would cause humans to develop such a seemingly damaging behaviour in the first place, especially since so many people indulge in this behaviour to great detriment in their lives. As with many things about human behaviour I imagined how people might have behaved back in ancient times long before civilisation, in fact at the dawning of our species. At that time we adopted behaviours because they gave us an increased chance of survival and then evolutionary factors kept on replicating those traits until we have them in their current state of evolvement.

Imagination as an Evolutionary Advantage

Imagination allows us to think of alternative possibilities, alternative futures, if you will. This proves useful for preparing to do something. The more complex the task; the more advantage comes from imagining alternative possibilities and preparing for them. Going on a long-hunting trip of many days requires advanced preparation in terms of skill building but also in organising equipment, people and provisions. To go out on a hunting trip unprepared could expose a person or group to avoidable dangers, or it could mean losing out on catching wanted game. Imagination allowed hunters to track game with more precision as they took on the characteristics of the prey and empathised as a means to gain accuracy in predicting where to find the game.

Imagination allows preparation in advance for extraordinary events. A hunter might imagine hunting a deer or similar large animal successfully. He would take the necessary men needed, the necessary weapons and tools, the necessary provisions and water to sustain them. They would develop a culture that prepared their men to hunt big game successfully. More often than not they would not find big game due to its natural comparative rarity and to the extra difficulties involved. However, along their route they would encounter other food sources such as birds, reptiles, smaller mammals, fish and such things that they could capture because they had ‘over prepared’. In preparing for catching bigger game they had more than enough men, equipment and skills to capture all manner of other things. Hence such a group would thrive and survive even if they very seldom killed a large animal. Imagination led to advanced planning, organisation and skill development as a method of problem solving. If they did not do this then on the rare occasions that the opportunity to kill a deer arose then they would not have the resources or ability to do so. They also might not have the resources or ability to kill other secondary game found along the way that a prepared group could kill.

Through imagination small groups of humans ended up aiming high but often scoring lower. However, the cumulative results of scoring lower still provided sufficient bounty for easier survival. Evolution favoured the imaginative and hence the prepared.

An advantage of fantasizing comes from the fact that most fantasies focus on a positive outcome and the potential rewards of that outcome get us to take action. Too much negative and fearful fantasizing, where we consciously picture awful things happening would cause us to probably do less than needed to go out hunting and gathering – a scenario that evolution would definitely not favour. Hence fantasizing good results more likely aided survival. Disappointment might come from too high expectations but the secondary results of the process still kept us going. Not meeting the top goal didn’t matter because we gained so many other benefits for survival in the process.

In today’s society we hunt for more abstract prey and we often set things up so that we get no secondary prey from the results of our efforts. Because we don’t pick up much prey along the way our imagined survival depends upon getting the big game, a task which we now often have to do alone and starting off without the skills and experience necessary (for example, getting a college degree or investing everything into a start-up business). We end up having to learn as we go along and hence we design-in more and more difficulties. We put much of our hopes for a prosperous future into achieving scarce events and very often we don’t really know how to get those results that we want. Without the confidence that comes from proven and assured competence we act timidly and uncertainly. It’s no wonder that we get so stressed out. This highlights the fallacy of pinnacle goal setting as an effective means of doing well in life. We do better to engage in processes that reward us continually along the way as we learn and develop, otherwise we get sick from the lack of fulfilment of needs and from the numbing difficulty of the long march ahead and a general sense of impossibility.

Imagination as a Disadvantage

Using imagination to spur development and preparation works well when we want things that have a physical presence in reality. However, humans have the ability to think about and create abstract concepts. If the fulfilment of those abstract concepts become detached from real world results then the system of using negative emotions as a guidance system to detect if we have achieved our desires can break down. This occurs because we end up creating desires for ourselves that we cannot fulfil, either because we desire something impossible to manifest, we desire things that we cannot fulfil solely by ourselves or we set up illogical parameters by which to assess our results.

Covering Up For Incompetence

I can see how evolutionary processes favoured humans with imagination as it enhanced their abilities to survive. However, that does not explain why we deny so much. I thought further to speculate on the reasons and value in fabricating a false identity and a false model of reality in the mind when it leads to so many emotional and practical problems.

We strive very hard to cover up our incompetence and often engage extensively in personal and public denial of our deficits in ability. We lie to ourselves and continuously describe reality falsely and act against the conditions of reality in a vain attempt to bend it to meet our desires. This creates a form of madness and most behavioural maladjustments derive from this denial. Yet, perversely, it has become so common place that we consider it normal.

Having turned things around in my own life so that I have become sane (Incidentally, sane derives from the Latin root ‘to clean’ for example, ‘sanitation’ describes the act of cleaning. In terms of mental health, sane means a clean and healty mind, which I would describe as a mind that accepts and adjusts to reality. The word ‘unsane’ provides a fitting description for my prior condition, as suggested by Wendell Johnson in his book “People In Quandaries”), I wonder what would cause humankind to evolve denial as a survival tactic. The tremendous disadvantages that I perceive and have experienced from acting in denial truly make me curious as to what advantages they bring over and above the disadvantages that they bring.

I begin my speculation by returning to the idea that the biggest motivator for all humans derives from the necessity to avoid ending up extinct as the least fit. As humans we aspire to certain things. On a basic level, we must fulfil our needs for water, food, shelter, warmth and so on. Beyond that we aspire for status within the group as that generally brings both physical and abstract benefits – a better choice of food, better location, better options for attracting a mate, better control over other people and hence better feelings. Within a small group, the development of higher levels of competence would generally lead to advancement within the group and the commensurate rewards.

I find it tempting to surmise that people cover up for incompetence because, in reality, it can prove easier to fake ability or hide a lack of ability than to develop that ability itself, i.e. that lazy and scurrilous tendencies lie at the heart of this tactic. However, I doubt that. I think that people initially behave badly more out of desperation than out of intent. The benefits for acting well and behaving well within a long-standing social grouping far outweigh the benefits for acting badly and behaving badly. Only if we get rewarded for bad behaviour do we tend to repeatedly indulge in it and most social systems do not, in the long-term, favour bad behaviour that causes harm or distress to others.

We deny and cover-up if we can get away with it because it requires less effort and less risk. We defend ourselves to the hilt because to be seen as false would cause terrible harm to our social standing within our group. The ferocity of our response can sometimes lead us to do whatever it takes to make the fantasy element a reality. However, in most cases that does not happen and so we defer putting ourselves to the test and publicly risking a a show of incompetence. Maintaining the fantasy proves pleasanter, easier and less risky that making it true in reality even though it diminishes our potential to do good things.

The Greatest Pain – Shame and Humiliation

The concept of shame makes me wonder if this evolved as a response for individual incompetence that led to a disastrous result for the group. Shame could have developed as a response to such a disaster in order to show regret, submission, and the resolution to never do such an action again. It suggests that real world incompetence leading to real world disasters equates to one of the worst things a human can do.

In a group scenario and individual that proves incompetent and unreliable could cause a disaster to befall the group, perhaps even extinction. That would likely lead to whole scale distrust and rejection of that individual. In the past, an individual without a supporting society would surely die or not reproduce. Evolutionary traits that led to putting the group first and to feeling ashamed of letting the group down would lead to better survival and hence more replication of this trait.

The intense pain of shame and humiliation would lead to an alternative tactic – cover up for incompetence, fake it if necessary but do anything to avoid shame and the responsibility for results caused by personal incompetence. In this way a bad behaviour gets adopted as a desperate response and so we begin to live deceitful lives where we do almost anything to avoid shame. We feel so bad about ending up singled out for public shaming or humiliation for making mistakes that we even have a physiological response to this – blushing.

The pain of shame and humiliation put us on a course of action whereby we deny accepting responsibility for our own actions and hence blame others, we cover up our mistakes by lying, we deny that we make mistakes and we deny that we have insufficient competence. We distort our reality in order to avoid the pain of shame – a pain that comes directly from incompetence. Although we deny our incompetence and lie to ourselves our emotional guidance system keeps highlighting the difference between our reality and our fabricated image. Because we deny the truth of our reality we end up besieged with negative emotions and so we engage in countless distractions to escape from that realisation as often and as long as possible.

Sometimes we engage in self-destructive behaviours because inwardly we still feel shame about our lack of competence. We end up procrastinating and perpetually seeking reasons outside of ourselves as to why we can’t get things done so that we don’t have to face the reality that we lack the competence to get things done.

Covering Up Day-to-Day

Today survival has become much easier in developed economies through shared production and higher levels of productive output. Also, knowing for sure what skills to learn for survival has become much more vague and difficult to define. We learn generic skills such as reading and writing and mathematics – skills that can help us to deal with work that becomes increasingly based upon abstract concepts. Because few people really know what set of skills, knowledge, and experience definitely leads to outstanding competence, we can, as a result, fake competence for a long time perhaps without ever learning the necessary skills or undergoing the necessary development to meet our fantasy image of ourselves. To do that development work takes time, effort and risk.

When we know exactly what to do, we often get on with things without much fuss or bother but increasingly in our lives we don’t know for sure what to do and so we end up indecisive and consequently often do nothing. When we have no other option we do necessary development work but when we can get away without doing it then we often will. Most things choose the path of least resistance when possible, including humans. I don’t wish to say that people have inherent laziness but rather that we have an inherent, highly-tuned sense of effectiveness, i.e. we seek to expend low effort and take few risks whenever possible. We will expend high effort and take more risks if we know, with a good level of certainty, that we will get rewarded but if not then we tend to keep doing what we currently do. It might not be brilliant but it keeps us surviving so we choose not to take unnecessary risks that might not pay off.

In today’s societies we can get away with having a grander image of ourselves than our real world competence would justify. We have many ploys to avoid facing this deceit through very strong emotional outbursts to quickly slam down anyone suggesting otherwise and through procrastination and distractions to avoid facing the truth of our lack of competence. The majority of us continually avoid taking the effort and risk necessary to build the competences that would allow us to become our imagined self. In today’s world, if you follow the rules and keep your head down and keep turning up at school, at university or at work and have just enough competence to stay above the absolutely worst levels of performance then you can survive for a long-time without doing any more than that.

Perhaps this accounts for the enormous emotional stresses caused by the difference between our fantasy desires and our reality. The rewards for great competence run very high for any individual and within any social grouping and yet we perceive the cost of developing great competency as also very high and very risky. We end up torn between our reluctance to take on the real world difficulties of personal development and our continuous desire to have the rewards of great competency.

Moving Out of Denial and Into Reality

We can quickly remove all of deceit from our lives by admitting to our inadequacies and inability to do the things that we wish to do. This brings immediate relief from keeping up the pretence. We might not like where we find ourselves when we do that but living a fantasy life did not create the life that we desired. The only way to improve lies in accepting the reality of our current true capabilities and then moving from there. Wishing, hoping, dreaming, scheming and praying for deliverance will not miraculously cause the competencies to do what we want to do to suddenly arrive in our lives.

[Photo by powi...(ponanwi)]