Lies Are Bonds: Self-Deception Psychology and the Books That Won’t Balance
Oct 22, 2025
The first sound in the room isn’t a confession; it’s scratching. Quills on parchment. The ledgers are already open before you enter. This is self-deception psychology in its native habitat: a masquerade ball in the palace cellar where accountants in carnival masks tally your evasions. Every lie is a line item. Small spins are penciled under “temporary,” but they compound interest faster than any bond. The most dangerous entries aren’t spectacular fabrications—they’re habitual deferrals. The “later,” the “not now,” the “it’s fine.” By the time you read the balance sheet, the figures have turned into architecture.
Lying as Debt Issuance
Psychologically, lying is a bond offering. Each spin promises comfort now for truth later. At first, the payments are light—an awkward conversation delayed, a minor feeling hidden. But as the bonds pile up, the maturities overlap. The future becomes crowded with owed explanations, buried shame, and twisted narratives. Eventually, every waking moment is spent rolling over old debts with new fabrications. Self-deception psychology operates like a Ponzi scheme: you borrow from tomorrow’s credibility to pay today’s discomfort. The Hydra doesn’t even need to intervene; your own accounting system enslaves you.
Machiavelli observed that “the promise unkept teaches contempt more than the insult,” because every unpaid truth corrodes authority—including self-authority. Pushkin understood the beauty of unadorned honesty; lies looked bloated beside his sentences. Montaigne mocked his own evasions before anyone else could. They all knew: falsified ledgers rot thrones, including the one inside your head.
Historical Receipts: When the Books Burned
Theranos is a case study in self-deception psychology at scale. Elizabeth Holmes’ lies compounded exponentially—investor guidance, board assurances, FDA claims. Each spin required another. The maturities stacked. When the audit came, the collapse was overnight. Not because one lie was discovered, but because the entire ledger was fiction. The books couldn’t balance, so they burned.
Enron followed the same pattern. Mark-to-market accounting let executives lie to themselves first, then to markets. They cooked the books internally before presenting them externally. The self-deception preceded the fraud. Once your internal reports are spun, every decision is built on warped terrain. You fight shadows, misallocate resources, and end up besieging your own citadel.
Traders know this intimately. “It’ll bounce back” becomes “I’m averaging down” becomes “I’m hedging a long-term position” becomes blown account. Each lie defers the cut. The trader isn’t lying to the market—he’s lying to himself about the loss he can’t accept. Self-deception psychology turns a manageable drawdown into a wipeout because the books never balanced. The truth was there on the screen; the lie was in the narrative.
The Compound Interest of Small Lies
Clausewitz warned that friction in war accumulates from countless small delays, misreports, and inaccuracies. A general who receives bad intelligence plans bad campaigns. The Self is no different. If your internal reports are spun, every decision compounds the distortion. You’re not fighting reality; you’re fighting the version of reality your lies constructed.
Small evasions are the deadliest because they don’t trigger alarms. “I’ll deal with that later” feels reasonable. “It’s not that bad” feels prudent. “They don’t need to know” feels protective. But self-deception psychology operates on compound interest. Each deferred truth accrues penalties. The longer the lie sits, the more architecture it builds. Eventually, you’re not lying anymore—you’re maintaining an entire narrative infrastructure.
The Paradox: Lies Promise Ease, Create Exponential Work
Here’s the sharpest inversion: lies promise ease but create exponential work. Every spin needs another spin. You have to remember what you said, to whom, and when. You have to manage the story, anticipate questions, preempt contradictions. The cognitive load is crushing. Truth, by contrast, promises pain but creates compound peace. One disclosure clears pages of debt. A single line in the ledger—”I lied there”—detonates the entire column. Truth kills through immediacy. Lies survive on deferral.
The loneliest moment in self-deception psychology is the gap between recognizing the lie and saying it out loud. That’s where most people live—aware of the spin but unable to face the audit. The relief comes not from being forgiven, but from stopping the roll-over. After disclosure, your shoulders drop, breath deepens, the future feels less crowded. You just freed up bandwidth you forgot you were spending on spin-maintenance.
Operational Truth Audit: Close the Books
Self-deception psychology isn’t solved by insight; it’s solved by practice. Here’s the toolkit:
Weekly inventory: Write “Where did I spin this week?” List the deferrals, the omissions, the comfortable edits. Then write the truth in one sentence per item. Don’t send it—just write it. The act of articulation is half the audit.
Disclosure drill: Practice saying “I lied about X” to someone safe—a friend, a therapist, a journal. Note the relief. That’s the interest stopping. The debt isn’t fully paid, but the compounding stopped.
Book-closing ritual: Monthly, list your deferrals—the “I’ll deal with that later” items. Pick one. Deal with it now. One conversation, one correction, one clean cut. Close the account. The ledger shrinks.
This is where the Hydra gets nervous. It thrives in battles, procedures, fatigue. But a truth audit? It hates clean math. Lies were its camouflage. Strip that away, and it’s suddenly standing in daylight, pen in hand, nowhere to hide.
Mass Psychology: Collective Cooked Books
Self-deception psychology at scale looks like market bubbles. “Housing only goes up.” “The market can’t crash.” “This time is different.” Entire sectors run on cooked books until the audit arrives. The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t just fraud; it was collective self-deception. Mortgage originators, banks, rating agencies, and investors all lied to themselves before they lied to each other. The internal ledgers were falsified first. When reality forced the audit, the entire system seized.
The pattern repeats in every mania: tulips, dot-com, crypto. The crowd doesn’t just lie to itself—it builds institutions to defend the lie. Analysts write bullish notes, media amplifies, regulators defer. By the time someone whispers “the books don’t balance,” the architecture is so vast that collapse is the only resolution.
Conclusion: One Line Clears the Page
Self-deception psychology compounds like debt: small lies, heavy interest, eventual collapse. But truth audits strip the Hydra. You don’t need to attend every masked ball. You can close the books. One disclosure, then another. The ledger shrinks. Attention, tenderness, time—previously mortgaged—return like unclaimed inheritances.
Lies promise ease but deliver exponential work. Truth promises pain but delivers compound peace. The accountants of decay can only tally what you give them. Stop issuing bonds. Clear the page. The books won’t balance themselves, but one clean line does more than a thousand spins ever could.
A corrupt Jewish neocon oligarch is a corrupt oligarch, and should be prosecuted for whatever crimes he committed. He would be just as corrupt if he was Eastern Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. If he were Muslim or PC liberal then he is above the law because they don’t intend to commit crimes. (cough cough!) .
The words Jewish Neocon is a meme used by anti-Semites in the US and sometimes in UK and less so in Europe. Neocon is a word coined by PC liberals to denounce conservative followers of Leo Strauss and Christopher Hutchins. Strauss was a refugee from Nazism. He and Hutchins launched the Great Books program as a way of combating Nazi and Communist propaganda. John F Kennedy and many fifties and sixties liberals were educated in programs based on the Great Books.
People who call themselves liberal but who are actually Nazi sociopaths denounce Neocons, meaning conservatives who happen to be Jewish. It is a way to excite opposition to conservatives by throwing in anti-Semitism into the mix. Despicable really, but that is what our liberal brothers are.
It is ironic that the author denounces Putin as, in effect, a Jew lover since he supports the Arabs, Iran and the Palestinians in their quest to commit genocide against Israel. This is an example of how monopoly control of the media creates madness and corruption. The argument the author makes is prima facie crazy but as a PC liberal no one in the mainstream media or academe calls him out.
The Left likes to operate on “reasonable suspicion.”it’s easier than “proof”or probable cause.” So is anti-semitic propaganda in the style Herr ?Doktor Goebbels would recognize.
Be sure to put in the “cough, cough, lest somebody think you mean Hillary!
Hillary for sure, but the effect is much bigger than that. None of Hillary’s staff or associates were accused of crimes despite clear intentions to deceive on revealing classified information, as documented in the State Department Inspector General Report. Obama’s INS law team was excoriated by a Federal Judge in terms I’ve never heard before, and were ordered to take ethics training so they would realize it was wrong to lie and violate direct orders from a Federal Judge. The list could fill a volume and goes on today.
The present and now-ex holdover Attorney General took it upon herself to decide which laws and executive orders (which have the force of law) will be followed and which will not. In essence, or liberal brothers and sisters believe that they are above the law, and can choose which laws to obey and which not to. Even the head of the FBI endorsed their view when he stated that anyone else would be prosecuted for what Hillary did, but not Hillary or her staff because, well, they are special and incapable of intending anything outside the law.. It is a bad precedent to set, but the genii is out of the bottle and, given recent events, is unlikely to get back in.