Self-Assurance or Self-Justification?

“I am a good driver, he jump out of nowhere”; ”I studied hard enough, the test was a wack”; ”I was qualified for the job; the interviewer was a dumb”; ”I am a responsible employee, the company is a zoo” …

Have you ever been in any similar situation that you needed to justify an event? Do you think it is a positive attitude to justify our actions in one way or another? I think that to some degrees, as long as we are in the arena of self-assurance, Yes! Maybe, I am a skilled driver, and the accident had nothing to do with me; I was well-prepared for the test, and the examiner did not have enough time to come up with a well-designed test; I maintain all the job qualifications, and the interviewer had a different background; … maybe …

Self-assurance is an optimistic view of events that protects us from regrets and losses, and helps us to stop blaming ourselves and move on; however, if we incautiously exceed in applying this attitude, we’ll end up in the other side of the spectrum, which I call self-justification or self-deception. It happens because taking an action or occurrence of an event that is in dissonance with our beliefs or self-image creates internal "irritation"; therefore, we tend to use self-justification to fade the irritation by interpreting the action as a match to our beliefs, instead of admitting the action was a mistake or the beliefs were wrong.

Self-justification is a negative attitude because it wipes out the opportunity to learn from the mistakes by running the vicious cycle of mistake-> self-justification-> action. Self-justification gradually enters us into this loop, and without our notice, it starts rotating us in this circle so fast that not only it makes us blind to the reality, but also it gets the chance to create its own fake world of evidences and beliefs. Judgments and decisions are powerful tools employed by self-justification engine to label and categorize people and events (“out of nowhere”, “wack”, “dumb”, etc.) to create a false reality. Then, it convinces us believe in the false simply by making us close our eyes to the truth or distorting it. Self-justification also enforces the memory to distort or purely forget the past events that do not fit in its world. It’s always amazing to hear a self-justified person’s version of a story!

Finally, I think self-justification is similar to brain-washing: The influenced person either is blind to the truth, or distort it in a way to proof his network of erroneous beliefs; therefore, he always resists to leave his world of fallacy.