The Two Faces of Self-Deception: A Commentary on Kierkegaard

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
— Søren Kierkegaard

It is a short sentence, almost deceptively so. You read it once and think you have understood it. You read it again and realise it has understood you.

Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism, had a gift for compressing enormous philosophical weight into aphorisms that feel, at first glance, like common sense — and then, on reflection, like an indictment. This particular observation is one of his most penetrating. It identifies not one but two distinct traps of the human mind, and in doing so, it maps the full geography of our capacity for self-deception.

Let us take each path in turn.

The First Way: Believing What Isn’t True

This is the more familiar form of being fooled. We recognise it readily in others — the friend who trusts the wrong person, the investor seduced by a fraudulent scheme, the citizen who swallows propaganda wholesale. Credulity, we tend to think, is a weakness of the naïve, the uneducated, the emotionally vulnerable. We distance ourselves from it with comfortable assurance.

But Kierkegaard is not merely describing the mechanics of deception from the outside. He is speaking from within. The beliefs we hold that are not true are rarely the ones we consciously chose to believe after weighing the evidence. More often, they are the beliefs that arrived uninvited — through upbringing, through desire, through fear — and settled so quietly into our inner landscape that we never thought to question them.

We believe we are more capable than we are, or less. We believe we are loved in ways we are not, or unloved when we are. We construct narratives about our own lives that protect us from uncomfortable truths, and we call these narratives identity. The philosopher William James once observed that the greatest revolution of his generation was the discovery that human beings could alter their lives by altering their attitudes, but the darker implication of that insight is that we are perpetually altering our perception of reality to suit the life we wish we were living.

Kierkegaard understood this not as an abstract philosophical problem but as a profoundly personal and spiritual one. For him, self-deception was not merely an intellectual error; it was a form of existential cowardice. To believe what isn’t true is, at its root, an act of will disguised as an act of reason.

The Second Way: Refusing to Believe What Is True

This is the subtler trap, and perhaps the more dangerous one precisely because it wears the costume of discernment. The person who refuses to believe what is true is not, typically, someone who throws themselves at obvious falsehoods. On the contrary — they are often someone who prides themselves on scepticism, on rigour, on not being easily taken in.

And yet there is a kind of scepticism that is not the love of truth but the fear of it. There is a refusal to believe that masquerades as intellectual caution but is, beneath the surface, a defence mechanism of the first order.

We see this everywhere once we know to look for it. The doctor who refuses to believe the patient’s symptom is as serious as it appears. The parent who cannot accept that their child is struggling. The politician who dismisses inconvenient data as partisan. The lover who will not acknowledge that the relationship has run its course. In each case, the truth is available. It is even, in some sense, visible. What is lacking is not information but willingness.

Kierkegaard’s genius was to place this second form of foolishness on equal footing with the first. We tend to view credulity and denial as opposites — one the failure of the critical mind, the other its excess. But Kierkegaard sees them as symmetrical expressions of the same underlying condition: the reluctance to encounter reality on its own terms.

The Common Root

What unites both forms of self-deception is the primacy of comfort over truth. Whether we rush towards a comforting falsehood or retreat from a discomforting fact, the governing motive is the same. We are, in both cases, engineering our inner world to minimise the friction of existence.

This insight sits at the very heart of Kierkegaard’s broader philosophical project. Throughout his work — from Either/Or to The Sickness Unto Death — he returned obsessively to the idea that the self is not a given but an achievement, and a difficult one. To become who we truly are requires a willingness to look without flinching, both at the world and at ourselves. Self-knowledge, for Kierkegaard, is not a pleasant afternoon’s introspection. It is a confrontation.

The Danish language has a word, selvbedrag, meaning self-deception — literally, self-fraud. Kierkegaard used it with forensic precision. To deceive oneself is not merely to be mistaken; it is to be complicit in one’s own mistaking. It is to participate, knowingly or not, in the sabotage of one’s own clarity.

Why This Still Matters

We live in an era saturated with information and starved of wisdom. The tools available to us for verifying facts have never been more powerful, and yet the capacity for collective self-deception has never seemed more robust. We are bombarded, simultaneously, by false things dressed as truth and by true things dismissed as false. Kierkegaard’s two paths converge, in our moment, into a single disorienting landscape where sincerity and cynicism have become almost indistinguishable.

His aphorism, written in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, reads in our age less like historical philosophy and more like a diagnosis.

The antidote he offered was not a method but a disposition: an honest relationship with oneself, cultivated not once but continuously, as a daily existential practice. Not the easy belief, and not the comfortable refusal — but the harder, quieter discipline of remaining open to what is actually there.

To be fooled, Kierkegaard suggests, is always a choice at some level. Which means that not being fooled is a choice too.

What do you think? Have you caught yourself in either of Kierkegaard’s two traps? Share your reflections in the comments below.

🇬🇧 There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. Søren Kierkegaard

🇮🇹 Ci sono due modi per essere ingannati. Uno è credere a ciò che non è vero; l’altro è rifiutare di credere a ciò che è vero. Søren Kierkegaard

🇪🇸 Hay dos maneras de ser engañado. Uno es creer en lo que no es cierto; el otro es negarse a creer en lo que es verdad. Søren Kierkegaard

🇵🇹 Há duas maneiras de ser enganado. Uma é acreditar no que não é verdade; a outra é se recusar a acreditar no que é verdade. Søren Kierkegaard

🇫🇷 Il y a deux façons d’être trompé. L’une est de croire en ce qui n’est pas vrai ; l’autre est de refuser de croire en ce qui est vrai. Søren Kierkegaard

🇮🇳 धोखा देने के दो तरीक़े हैं। एक यह विश्वास करना है कि क्या सच नहीं है; दूसरा यह विश्वास करने से इनकार करना है कि क्या सच है। सोरेन किर्केगार्ड

🇷🇺 Есть два способа быть обманутым. Один из них – верить в то, что не соответствует действительности; другой – отказаться верить в то, что является правдой. Сёрен Кьеркегор

🇨🇳 有兩種被愚弄的方式。一個是相信不真實的東西；另一個是拒絕相信真實的東西。索倫·基爾凱加德

🇩🇪 Es gibt zwei Möglichkeiten, sich täuschen zu lassen. Das eine ist zu glauben, was nicht wahr ist; das andere ist, sich zu weigern zu glauben, was wahr ist. Søren Kierkegaard

🇩🇰 Der er to måder at lade sig narre på. Den ene er at tro på noget, der ikke er sandt; den anden er at nægte at tro på noget, der er sandt. Søren Kierkegaard