How much do our desires affect what we believe?

Aldous Huxley:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption… The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself… the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation… sexual… [and] political…

“…Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence… No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, conciously or unconciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers”.From Huxley, Ends and Means, 270-272. Quoted in Randy Newman’s Questioning Evangelism.