When I talk with my friends we often circle back to the question of finding the right balance: When is it ok to stick our head in the sand against world news in order to cope, and when does that reaction become self defeating in the long run? We are obviously not alone with that worry: just last week two eminent researchers, a sociologist and a psychologist, raised a warning flag in the Scientific American about “peak denial,” and the ways it manipulates our take on reality. Newspapers of record also start voicing concerns about the consequences of societal denial.

Independently, dictionary in hand, I stumbled my way through a brilliant essay on self-deception by a philosopher. I thought maybe you might be interested in a condensed version of these assessments of public and personal approaches to psychological (self)control. I hope that I caught some, if not all, of the complexities. We start with public denial. The next blog will focus on self-deception. And for balancing out the heavy topics, today’s photographs will tackle Big Foot denial, since I can provide proof of existence from my hikes in the Cascades….

Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and Maxim Voronof, a professor of sustainability and organization at the Schulich School of Business at York University, are interested in what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit.

“Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.”

How did we get here? What do we know about denial and the processes that lead to our “reality-adjacent” lives where serious problems are made to seem normal? The researchers focus on how threatening information is neutralized or evaded (Bonus: they link to two accessible books that look at these techniques in detail: Living in Denial – Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life by Kari Marie Norgaard, and Never Saw It Coming – Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst by Karen A. Cerulo.)

Using COVID as an example, the authors explain how these strategies work. (Given that I am convinced that we will be thrown into another pandemic, variants of the even more deadly avian flu, sooner rather than later, I find this case study particularly worthwhile to think about. But we could also look at climate change, nuclear warfare, or the rise of authoritarian regimes across the world.)

One way of neutralizing a problem is by making it hard to hear or learn about it. You can restrict efforts to look into it, keeping information inaccessible or not collecting it in the first place. The CDC scaled back Covid tracking for example, requiring increasingly less reporting from hospitals or other institution, until they stopped all together. The government also refuses to alert the public about danger levels (the second highest surge happened only 6 months ago, last winter, knowledge not distributed by the White House.) Tracking and warning are replaced by no monitoring or mentioning – allowing things to seem back to normal.

Minimizing the problem is a successful strategy as well, when you want a public ensconced in denial. This can be done by neutralizing language: “endemic,” or “during COVID,” “lower hospitalization rates than last year,” all suggest the main danger is behind us. Establishing laws that prohibit mask wearing make it seem like the danger of getting infected is tiny compared to the cost of having purported criminals be unidentifiable. I wrote about my disgust with the North Carolina bill to ban masks, now adding my disbelief that New York’s Governor Hochul wants to ban masks in the Subway.

One particular consequence of COVID infections was met with early institutional silence: long Covid. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced the definition for long COVID only now June 11,2024. Early on, sufferers of this disabling condition were accused to be hysteric or generally anxiety-driven, making it hard for them to access care. Never mind that long Covid can be acquired by even the mildest Covid infection, is associated with autoimmune diseases, triggering Type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular risk as well as cognitive dysfunction for the individuals, and a societal economic cost that rivals the Great Recession, and has no easy treatment options. People’s behavior would surely be affected if they knew about this threat in all of its complexity. Both neutralization and minimizing are obviously at work here.

Cooper and Voronof point out that in addition to revising the present, we also tend to rewrite the past when that helps with public denial of a problem. The cultural amnesia about the extent of the pandemic is striking. “In burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.“

And woe to the voice that pipes up, calling us to acknowledge or remember the actual facts. Threats against truth tellers loom large, as do actual retaliations against whistleblowers. We are so used to conspiracies of silence, and so in need of positive illusions, that we don’t want to break the patterns that sustain them on all levels of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics.

How do we escape this cycle? How do we prepare ourselves for what’s on the horizon by breaking through our patterns of denial? The authors summarize:

“We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.”

This seems easier said than done, but Stanley Cohen’s 2001 seminal book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, delivers the goods. Cohen was a sociologist and criminologist, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His research focussed on “emotional management”, including the mismanagement of emotions in the form of sentimentality, overreaction, and emotional denial, spelling out in great detail what we have to do to be effective witnesses. Strongly recommended.

I know I am coming back to that term, over and over. It probably allows me to combat the general feeling of helplessness in the face of world affairs, as if witnessing is a significant contribution. But I think if there are enough of us who continue to look rather than look away, perhaps it will make a difference.

Denial, however, does provide some serious succor, when it comes to politics and economics – science denial is for many an expression of identity, used to shore up polarization within the electorate. And a humming economy needs workers as well as consumers. If either stay home for fear of infection, the system will crash. Self-deception provides similarly important protections for individuals. More on that next time.

Music today echoes foreboding and rebirth, both possibilities when thinking about denial, which can, after all, be abandoned. Beautifully captured by Shostakovich after verses by Pushkin.