Deception is an election year staple, so it’s nice to keep in mind that the candidates aren’t just lying to us: they fool themselves first. Everybody does. So sayeth pot-smoking big-thinking bipolar theorist Robert Trivers in The Folly of Fools,his incisive look at how our genes drive our delusions. We’re all inveterate liars. We start when we exit the womb, pretty much. Here’s the best part: our favorite victim is ourselves. There’s no deceit like self-deceit, Trivers reports, and proves it by showing how he’s deluded himself over the years.
Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and others have told us about this fibbing gene autocracy before, in big popular tomes, but Trivers’ version stands out for being scarier.