There are two kinds of denial. The traditional kind involves a conscious lie, as when a husband denies he slept with another woman, or the CIA denies it funded a coup. We expect this kind of denial. It is as old as the world.
The other, modern kind of denial was first popularized as a symptom of alcoholism. It manifests as a willful negation of reality motivated by an overwhelming desire for something that is true to not be true. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross borrowed this concept of denial when discussing the stages the terminally ill go through when grappling with the inevitability of death.
Denial can be a good or at least necessary thing, if it's part of a process that leads to acceptance. It can also be extremely dangerous. Hundreds of thousands may have been saved had the news of what was going on in the concentration camps not been met with the insistent disbelief of denial.
Modern denial goes hand in hand with magical thinking. Reagan catered to this expertly. A willingness to believe in supply-side economics, with its miraculous formula of cutting taxes to increase revenues, married magical thinking with a denial of Jimmy Carter's sober assessment of reality. As skillful as he was, though, Reagan and his trickle-down conspirators were rank amateurs compared to the willful ideologues of the Bush-Cheney regime.
Now we have Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck et al. Denying inconvenient truths has morphed into an upside-down world where facts are considered subjective perceptions. Dinosaurs roamed with Adam and Eve because we want to believe they did, dammit. Global warming is a hoax because we can't handle what it would mean if it were real. The environmental damage of an oil spill will be "modest" because we really, really, really want it to be modest. The desire for certain things to be true has assumed the status of truth itself.
"Facts are stubborn things," famously said Reagan. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. A huge swath of this country, fed by the right-wing noise machine, has found the solution to facts. Ignore them. Create your own alternative set. Decide to believe these neo-facts with enough vigor and they will become as good as the real thing.
Those of us in the reality-based community are confronted with a new paradigm; an opposition that has decided that what they need to believe determines what is true, not that what is true determines what they believe. In the face of this, we have to accept that reasoning with them is pointless. Rational arguments are about as effective against the new right as reading The Big Book to an alcoholic who's had 6 margaritas. Even Bill Wilson wouldn't bother.
It is tempting to throw up one's hands in despair in the face of such irrationality -- I do it on a regular basis myself. But we can also learn from it. FDR, for example, did a masterful job of harnessing popular anger to advance his political agenda. No less cerebral and far more patrician than Obama, he readily expressed contempt and even disgust at the monied interests that blocked change. He did not resist the subjectivity of emotion, he engaged it.
The same popular anger is bubbling up not just against BP, but against the raging power of multinational corporations that Americans are slowly starting to understand constitute a shadow world government of sorts. Like FDR, Obama needs to harness that anger, even if it means losing his cool. That might mean a little denial of his own, in the sense of temporarily pretending to himself that he is not the President. Whatever he needs to do so we feel the emotion of Obama the man -- and more importantly, so does he.
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Another great piece, Mark. Nicely done.
He needs to be patient, because this kind of approach takes time, as Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and, some would say, Jesus, found.
To create the atmosphere of safety and respect for the listener in which that message of hope can be most easily transmitted, it helps if we are able to persuade the listener that we understand and respect their fear, and, fundamentally, are aligned with them in both needs and desires, as indeed we are, if we look deep enough and don't get distracted by their rhetoric (after all, bluster and aggression are simply defense mechanisms).
We don't create the needed atmosphere by yelling.
You do good work.
A couple comments. Your introduction of the issue of denial in relation to current attitudes is an important contribution to the discussion, but I'm not sure it goes far enough.
You're right, of course, denial can be a healthy approach when we need time to adjust to new realities, such as suddenly losing an arm or a loved one.
Denial turns most stubbornly unhealthy when we have no hope of surviving the new circumstances. So when we encounter those who are in entrenched denial, it becomes important to ask them why.
A colleague introduced me a while back to the concept that Motivation = Pain X hope (I don't know where he got it).
Absent pain we have no advantage in change.
Absent hope we dare not change.
Conservatives believe this is a dangerous world with evil lurking around every corner, and everything which disturbs their concept of reality is a manifestation of that evil. To ask them to give up denial is to ask them to expose themselves to certain annihilation.
That's why a commitment to change is such a dangerous concept to them.
What they need, is what we on the left see so clearly. Opportunity and hope, albeit with the possibility of some bumps along the way. What we need to do is offer them hope which is so real to them that it overrides their natural defensiveness.
However, I think that you are right on target about our ability to fashion an imitation of truth out of lies simply because we choose to believe in the lies.
The one thing he need never do is modulate anything for fear of the rightwing reaction. It's not as if being bipartisan and Presidential has garnered him an inch. They call him an angry black man, now. He needs to tend to the people who voted for him and ignore the people who are going to say ridiculous things about him no matter what he does.
I know he gets pissed behind closed doors and I bet he doesn't come off a being inauthentic then. I think he needs to let some of that show when the cameras are running. Screw what the right says-they can say nothing worse than they already say now.
The perception of global warming can be viewed through four main perceptions:
The hard-core believers who deny any facts contrary to their position.
The scientifically minded who are convinced by the overwhelming amount of plausible media coverage.
The hard-science skeptics who find the data suspect and the conclusions based on them meaningless.
The big-business deniers who refuse to entertain the idea because business scientists tell them not to.
I think you’d agree that the middle two are the place you want to be. The extreme positions of the outside views are perfect examples of your breakdown. The middle positions have strengths and weaknesses. There should be room for discussion between these groups but it rarely takes place. Those of us in the skeptic box would like to see a less dogmatic attachment to GW by the second group so that some reliable, verifiable work can be done on the subject. But as long as people in the media keep declaring the subject closed, that’s never going to happen. You don’t strike me as the type of person who believes any subject should be closed.
It's not remotely a closed-subject--even though, yes, I think it should be.Here's why. Even if the artic ice weren't prodigiously receding and drought and desertification proceeding apace, even if the science was slanted, isn't it a self evident good to reduce the amount of pollution in the atmosphere? Shouldn't "going green" be motivation enough, even if it didn't cause warming?
The denialists are driven not by an objective skepticism of the science, but a defensiveness about our "way of life." Anything that challenges their value system--based on consumption,dominionism, and American exceptionalism, is objected to on that basis. They dislike anything that might mean they can't have big cars and overheated houses, because they link property ownership and a high standard of living to their definition of happiness.
America has 6% of the worlds population but consumes 28% of the world resources. Anything that threatens this status quo is going to be questioned by those who benefit from it.
Btw, the artic ice "declined rapidly in May" http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
And yet, we still find that most of the science that people use to support their stance on global warming (which very few can actually interpret or explain) is cherry-picked, inflated and/or used out of context. These are the very same tactics your article attacks. People marginalize the East Anglia emails the same way that BP tries to marginalize the amount of oil gushing into the gulf.
I’m not sure if you were lumping me in with the denialists, but that’s what most people do with anyone who dares to ask if what we are told about GW is true. Which is exactly what you just wrote is an obstacle to truth.
It could be that he's SO angry about this (talk about a frustrating sense of powerless) that he's afraid if he lets go he'll turn into Keith Olbermann. (Who I love but recognize many find alienatingly abrasive.) I suggest he takes a page from Rachel Maddow. She combines charm, anger and sarcasm quite well.
Don't blame Matt Lauer for words the President utters.
What did it accomplish in real results? It was a political remark that was stupid.
"These people are idiots" #fact
In a way this is a bit comforting to me. Like you, my first instinct is just to think of them as idiots. What is more true is that they are scared to death. They know the world is complex, they know how many gray areas there are--so they flee into the simplicity and certainty of their fact-free world. At least that the most charitable explanation I can come up with.
I hadn't heard of "faith-based governance" Wouldn't be so bad if it came with humility. You need to have faith your doubts, as the Mother Superior said in The Sound of Music.
but a permanent state of denial is crippling. I have often thought that talking with people
about facts when they are in a state of denial is a great way to drive yourself crazy.
I think that people will eventually come around but by then it maybe too late, there will always be a small percentage of people who will deny to the bitter end.