If the self is a delusion, who is it that is being deluded?

Why do they keep trying to persuade me to freely decide I have no free will?

Who you gonna believe, the world or your lyin’ eyes?

In Lehi’s dream, the folks jabbermocking in the great and spacious building manage to persuade the people eating the desirable fruit that it doesn’t taste very good. Even though most of the mockers have never tasted it and the people eating it have the very juice in their mouths.

I always thought that was peculiar.

The more fool I. I’ve seen good friends walking away from the tree, unconsciously licking the last drops from their lips while muttering that the grapes were actually sour after all.

Bruce Charlton argues that denying our immediate experience is fundamental to the modern structure. At the Cartesian zero coordinates of our consciousness, we know that we exist, we know that we are agents who choose and decide, we know what love is, we know that there is a right and wrong, we directly experience the Holy Ghost. Moving out from there in great arcs to the far regions of the graph, further and further out, experience and knowledge attenuate into heat death. Elite social consensus is manufactured there, with all the credentials that a sneer can confer.

C.S. Lewis has an interesting discussion in Mere Christianity. It is a curious thing, he says, that everybody who has seen through the sham of morality still talks in moral terms when they aren’t thinking about it. I can’t be the only one who has had a conversation like this:

Some Fellow: You shouldn’t believe in morality. It doesn’t exist.

Me: I shouldn’t believe in it. I have some kind of duty not to believe in it.

Some Fellow: No, I didn’t mean that. I’m just stating a fact, that’s all. It doesn’t matter what you believe.

Me: Then why were you telling me this?

Some Fellow: Because I felt like it. Seriously. It’s just an impulse.

Doubting your primary experiences isn’t humility. Humility is retreating from what you’ve learned and reasoned and from your wants back to the center place of the soul. Doubting your primary experience is the opposite of that. It’s apathy at best and likely cowardice at worst. Christ told us that only the child-like would enter Heaven. Only children have the lively interest and the lack of fear to blurt out that the Emperor, after all, is naked.