The Murky Psychology of Self-Deception
By Yaakov Astor
A Dairy Restaurant and a Movement
The Alter of Slabodka once offered a sharp little mashal —
half joke, half diagnosis of human nature. He said the man who started
the vegetarian movement, the one who preached that it’s wicked to
slaughter animals and eat their flesh, had a milchige
restaurant. A dairy business. That’s why he started a movement.
That’s funny. But the Alter wasn’t really joking.
His point, as Rav Avigdor Miller brings it down, was that all the big
movements in the world were started because of middos —
character traits — not ideas. People tend to think that people launch
movements because they sat down, thought deeply, and arrived at some
righteous new philosophy. The Alter said no. All such movements begin
because of some character flaw. The idea comes second. It’s the costume
the flaw puts on before stepping out in public.
Pure logic, seichel, is not what drives people. There’s
always some middah lurking underneath — anger, retaliation,
envy, a desire for glory, laziness, or some other character inclination.
The big idea is the press release. The middah is the
engine.
Which brings us to Korach.
A Great Man, Not a Fool
Here’s the part that should keep us up at night.
Korach was not some hotheaded nobody. He was a great man. Rav Miller
stresses this — Korach wouldn’t have gained a following in such a noble
place as the camp in the Midbar if he weren’t genuinely
impressive. This was a generation that had heard Hashem speak at Har
Sinai, that listened to Moshe Rabbeinu daily. You couldn’t build a
coalition among people like that unless you carried real weight.
And Korach was not careless. He examined himself. He made a
cheshbon hanefesh. He suspected his own motivations, turned
them over, held them up to the light — and concluded that he was acting
purely l’sheim Shamayim. For the sake of Heaven.
And he was wrong.
After all that introspection — genuine, serious self-examination —
Korach failed to detect the deepest and truest motivation behind his
actions: the desire for glory. For kavod. For the position he
believed should have been his.
That’s the terrifying part. It’s not that Korach didn’t bother to
look inward. He did. He just couldn’t see what was actually there.
The Costume Envy Wears
Look at the language Korach used. “Kol ha’eidah kulam kedoshim
u’vesocham Hashem, u’madua tisnasu al kehal Hashem — The entire
congregation is holy, all of them, and Hashem is among them — so why do
you raise yourselves above the assembly of Hashem?” (Bamidbar 16:3).
It sounds noble. Democratic, even. It sounds like humility — like a
man standing up for the little guy against a power-hungry leader. If you
didn’t know the backstory, you might cheer for him.
But that’s exactly how gaavah works. It doesn’t announce
itself. It wraps itself in the language of idealism. Korach didn’t say,
“I want the kehunah because I think I deserve it.” He said,
“Everyone is holy — who are you to lead?” Ego dressed up as
equality for all. His idealistic language was just the cover story.
Rav Miller says it plainly: “Korach’s deepest motivation was the
desire for glory. His envy blinded him. His emotions caused him to have
a warped judgment.” Over time, that envy didn’t just influence Korach —
it became his personality. And once a middah becomes your
personality, you can’t see it anymore. It’s not a feeling you’re having.
It’s just… you.
Pirkei Avos (4:21) tells us that three things remove a
person from the world: kinah, ta’avah, and
hakavod — envy, desire, and the pursuit of honor. Envy, Rav
Miller notes, is first on the Mishnah’s list — “and therefore the
worst.” It’s meant to push people toward virtue — “kinas sofrim
tarbeh chochmah” — but when it goes wrong, it becomes “a major
peril in the histories of men and nations.”
So What Chance Do We Have?
This is where it gets personal.
If Korach — a man of stature, living in the generation that received
the Torah, someone who actively practiced cheshbon hanefesh —
couldn’t catch his own subconscious motivation, what are we supposed to
do?
The reason self-deception is so dangerous is that the “self” is both
the detective and the suspect. You can’t investigate yourself with
perfect objectivity any more than you can see your own blind spot.
That’s not a flaw in the system — it’s a feature of being human.
Which means we need outside help.
A Rav who knows us well enough to say, “I think something else might
be going on here.” A spouse who can gently point out that our righteous
indignation looks a lot like wounded pride. A friend — a real one, not a
yes-man — who’ll tell us the uncomfortable truth when we’re building a
beautiful case for something that’s really about kavod.
A Small, Doable Thing
The next time you feel strongly about something — especially when
you’re convinced you’re in the right — pause and ask one person you
trust. “What do you think is really driving me here?” And then
actually listen. Don’t argue. Don’t explain. Just take it in.
You might hear something you didn’t expect. That’s the point.
Korach had everything going for him except this one thing — someone
who could break through the elegant self-deception and say, “It’s not
l’sheim Shamayim. It’s l’sheim Korach.”
We don’t have to make the same mistake. We just have to be humble
enough to let someone else hold up the mirror.
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