Some of the best thinkers are self-justifiers.
A smart person who struggles with self-honesty can come up with some of the most elaborate and interesting theories of how things work in effort to create a world that eliminates the truth they’re running from.
A good thinker will be tortured by incongruence in what they logically deduce and the thing they want to be true to avoid a still small voice. They must either yield to the inner truth and accept the inconvenient aspects of the world it brings, decide everything is a cruel joke and become nihilists, or spend a lifetime concocting as-true-as-possible ideas that manage to maneuver around and protect the little self-deception they cling to.
The final category produces some really good ideas. People with profound understanding of the way the world works, and innovative language for communicating it. They produce a more robust almost true but fatally flawed picture of the world than those who have a true picture because their relentless run from full self-honesty forces them to get really detailed and thorough.
It’s a lot harder to maintain a healthy-looking and functioning body while refusing to remove a splinter that’s slowly causing infection. If you try, you’ll probably get a lot better than most at all the other ways to be healthy, to compensate for the constant drain the splinter puts on your body.
Some of the most interesting and useful mostly truths are created by those running from full truth.