Lessons from Pickpockets

How to Not Be Fooled

The city of Athens is full of pickpockets. They are especially prevalent in the underground metro system which runs throughout the city. Most people who move to Athens have something stolen from them sooner or later; I admit that I took pride in the fact that I never lost anything while I lived there.

A common strategy of pickpockets is to work together to catch you off guard. One will cause a commotion, or beg from you, or offer you a rose (yes, really), and while you are preoccupied, a second one will sneak up behind you and slip something out of your pocket.  

If you ride through Athens naively, you will lose your belongings. If you are not aware of the strategies of pickpockets, you are an easy target.

Likewise, many people ride through life as easy targets of the devil because they are not aware of his schemes. That includes many Christians. We have been warned that the “Prince of this World” is a master of deception, the very “Father of Lies.” But not everyone has considered the full implications of that fact. If you expect truth and falsehood to plainly oppose each other, you are like someone riding through a metro supposing that a thief will simply walk up and try to grab something. But it’s not that simple. Instead, the devil likes to play games with us, throwing up one lie to make us vulnerable to another lie – usually its opposite.

When the Opposite of a Lie is a Lie

To see how this process works, take a recent example. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams advised white people to “get the hell away” from black people. In response, one black writer posted an essay entitled, “Scott Adams Has It Backwards: Black people need to stay away from White people.” The second writer rejected and opposed Scott Adams’s error, and in her indignation backed up straight into a mirror-image error. This is an unusually clear example. Most cases are more subtle, and you have to be alert to notice them.

Consider as another example a development in American history observed by some social critics. It was the lie that people of “noble blood” had a divine right to boss the peasants around as they pleased. The American Founders opposed that, and American society has been opposed to elite oppression of the individual ever since.

But that has made us vulnerable to the opposite error. As Tolkien said, “touching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire, but it’s damn good for you.” With no King, individual pursuit of happiness has become the de facto ruling principle for many of the American people. For many, the idea of “my rights” has become an idol. “My rights” can even allow me to kill the innocent, as long as the person I kill has no voice to assert his or her own rights. Americans have no King, which means in practice that, absent the recognition of a higher authority, everyone is at risk of becoming the lonely king of his own petty one-person kingdom – and in the end, that hasn’t even made the individual truly safe from oppression.

That’s one example, chosen basically at random. You could list examples of this pitfall all day. Once you make a habit of looking for it, you see that it crops up in almost every ideological conflict.

C. S. Lewis observes in The World’s Last Night:

Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it next time on the left … But a thing does not vanish – it is not even discredited – because someone has spoken of it with exaggeration. It remains exactly where it was. The only difference is that if it has been recently exaggerated, we must now take special care not to overlook it; for that is the side on which the drunk man is now most likely to fall off. 

The essential thing to remember is that the opposite of a lie is not usually the truth. It is often another lie, because the narrow way of truth runs through fields of opposing falsehoods. There is only one way to stay on a road; there are many ways to go off it. So, if we allow ourselves to become preoccupied with resisting one individual falsehood, we risk drifting into the opposite falsehood. Or, to return to the original analogy, we risk getting distracted and having a truth snatched from us. So, whenever a falsehood or injustice seems to demand our full unbridled opposition at any cost, that is exactly when we need to glance behind us and see what falsehood or injustice may be sneaking up on us.

Our pride tells us that only other people, stupider people, are vulnerable to this trap. But that’s another lie. I am not immune. You are not immune. No one is immune, because we are human. So, any intellectually honest person must always be asking himself, “What am I most tempted to ignore?” The hard part is answering that question truthfully. The false ideology that seems the most threatening today may not be the one that does the most damage in the world tomorrow – it may be merely a decoy. We don’t know yet.

When the Enemy of my Enemy is my Enemy

Most people will agree with this in theory, but it is difficult to put into practice, because we have to fight against our instincts to do so. (That’s why the pickpockets’ strategy is so effective, after all.) Specifically, our human instincts tell us to love our friends and hate our enemies. Loving truth and hating falsehood, by contrast, is not instinctive – it has to be developed by hard discipline.

In another essay (“Delinquents in the Snow”) Lewis wrote about miscarriages of justice by his country’s leftwing government and voiced his concern that such injustices might cause a reactionary rightwing movement. He wrote:

Revolutions seldom cure the evil against which they are directed; they always beget a hundred others. Often they perpetuate the old evil under a new name… A Right or Central revolution would be as hypocritical, filthy and ferocious as any other. My fear is lest we should be making it more probable.

Of course, “Right” and “Left” are not Platonic forms or ontological realities, but only an essentially arbitrary way of sorting diverse views and opinions into two opposing sides – which is itself part of the process of deception.

It is part of the process of deception because once people are divided into opposing sides, defined by something other than “whatever happens to be true,” independent thought within each group becomes more difficult. A person becomes suspect if he calls attention to evils or falsehoods to which his own group may be vulnerable. So, if he is a conservative, for example, people may ask: “Is he secretly a progressive? Is he trying to sneak in Leftist ideology under the guise of nuance?”

Or he even may be called out as a traitor: “Yes, I know we shouldn’t be reactionary. But if there are actual Satanic ideologies that are threatening to destroy our society, shouldn’t we be focused on opposing them, rather than pausing to trash our own side?”

But in fact, there are no sides, except two: the side of the Truth, and anything not on His side – the side of lies. Truth and lies are not on our side or our enemies’ side – rather, we have to continuously decide what side we are on. If we are ever fooled into imagining that some lies are innocuous because they seem to be on our side, we will learn the hard way later that all lies were working together on the same side all along.

Focus on the Truth

My point is, the devil loves to play games with us. You have to ignore him, because he is cleverer than you. The only way to win a game with the devil is not to play. So be aware of his tactics, and keep your eyes on the truth – not on the lie that is demanding your attention. If you spend more time thinking about the falsehood you hate than on the truth you love, you are halfway to being deceived already.

As Paul said: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil 4:8).

If you keep your eyes on the light, the darkness cannot deceive you. If you keep your hand on the treasure in your pocket, the prancing of a dozen pickpockets will not be enough to rob you.

This world is not a boxing ring. It is an Athenian metro car. So be on your guard, and do not be made a fool.