Denial, Self-deception, the Doubting Game, and the Believing Game!

To belong to a group of any sort, the tacit price of membership is to agree not to notice one's own feelings of uneasiness and misgiving, and certainly not to question anything that challenges the group's way of doing things. The price for the group in this arrangement is that dissent, even healthy dissent, is stifled.

- Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, 1985

Called 'groupthink,' this psychological dynamic can develop within a decision-making organization in which loyalty to the group or the need to reach a consensus becomes more important than solving the problem at hand. It can be a subtle phenomenon, which participating individuals often fail to recognize, but its byproduct is the suppression, elimination, dismissal, or reinterpretation of dissenting information. Groupthink requires several forms of lying to maintain the status quo, including the ignoring or omission of facts, selective memory, and denial. The subject of electromagnetic fields has collided with organizational denial and groupthink more often than not, and continues to do so.

-B. Blake Levitt, Electromagnetic Fields, 1995


In the preface of Daniel Goleman's first book Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception he writes:

We live at a particularly perilous moment, one in which self-deception is a subject of increasing urgency. The planet itself faces a threat unknown in other times: its utter destruction. Whether that death be the quick one, from nuclear war and the catastrophic changes that would follow, or the slow ecological one, from the inexorable destruction of forests, arable land and usable water, the human capacity for self-deception will have played its part.

Consider the rapidly growing ecological deficit - soil erosion, shrinking forests, grasslands turning to desert, depletion of the atmosphere's protective ozone layer, and the poisoning and drying up of water tables.

Our habits of consumption, on a worldwide scale, are destroying the planet's resources at a rate unparalleled in history. In effect, we are destroying the planet for our own grandchildren, simply by our heedlessness of the links between how we live and the effects on the planet.

The virgin rain forests of the Amazon, for example, are being destroyed at an incredible rate, to make room for cattle to graze. Those cattle are raised, in the main, to feed the world's hunger for beef.

How many hamburgers does the destruction of an acre of virgin Amazon jungle yield? We do not know: the answer could be determined, but that bit of homework has not been done. And that is the point: we live our lives oblivious to the consequences for the planet, for our own descendants, of just how we live. We do not know the connections between the decisions we make daily - for instance to buy this item rather than that - and the toll those decisions have on the planet.

It is feasible to weigh, more or less accurately, the specific ecological damage involved in a given act of manufacturing. And having done so, to generate a standard unit that would summarize how much ecological damage has gone into the making of a car, say, or a box of aluminium foil.

Knowing that, we would be able to take more responsibility for the impact on the planet of how we choose to live on it. But there is no such information available, and even the most ecologically concerned among us do not really know the net effect on the planet of how we live. And, for most of us, being oblivious to that relationship allows us to slip into the grand deception, that the small and large decisions in our material lives are of no great consequence.

The question, then, is what can we do to break out of these self-deceptions, and the others that have us in their web. The answer this book proposes is to understand, first, how it is that we are caught at all. For self-deception, by its very nature, is the most elusive of mental facts. We do not see what it is that we do not see.

Self-deception operates both at the level of the individual mind, and in the collective awareness of the group. To belong to a group of any sort, the tacit price of membership is to agree not to notice one's own feelings of uneasiness and misgiving, and certainly not to question anything that challenges the group's way of doing things. The price for the group in this arrangement is that dissent, even healthy dissent, is stifled.

Take the case of the shuttle explosion. The night before the launch two engineers strongly objected, saying that the seals on the propulsion rocket were not designed to bear up in cold weather. Their objections were never passed along to those at higher levels, many of whom already knew of the danger, but had chosen to discount its import. There had been several delays already, and people were questioning whether NASA could ever make the shuttle work well enough to pay its own way.

In the inquiry after the disaster, when the same two engineers testified about what had happened, they were demoted. And yet what they had done was in the highest interests of the entire mission. Had they been heard, the tragedy would not have occurred. Only after public outcry were the engineers reinstated.

Therein lies the lesson for those who want to break through the cocoons of silence that keep vital truths from the collective awareness. It is the courage to seek the truth and to speak it that can save us from the narcotic of self-deception. And each of us has some access to some bit of truth that needs to be spoken.

It is a paradox of our time that those with power are too comfortable to notice the pain of those who suffer, and those who suffer have no power.

To break out of this trap requires, as Elie Wiesel has put it, the courage to speak truth to power.


In her book Electromagnetic Fields, (1995), B. Blake Levitt also talks about the psychology of denial:

The Dynamics of Denial

When we think of denial what comes to mind is someone knowing the "truth" but pretending otherwise. But in fact, the process of denial is a complex psychological dynamic in which a person is actually not experiencing his or her experience.

Denial has a useful healthy purpose for the human ego structure. When a loved one dies for instance it is a way of keeping overwhelming fear and grief at bay until one can come to terms with the loss. A less healthy example of denial is the alcoholic who rationalizes continued drinking in various delusional ways.

Those who study the process of lying have observed that whole communities, organizations, and various official bodies can manifest group denial, which seems to occur most often when the subject under discussion is complex or has important implications for the status quo. Organizational denial is closely linked to another unproductive process that leads to group paralysis. Called 'groupthink,' this psychological dynamic can develop within a decision-making organization in which loyalty to the group or the need to reach a consensus becomes more important than solving the problem at hand. It can be a subtle phenomenon, which participating individuals often fail to recognize, but its byproduct is the suppression, elimination, dismissal, or reinterpretation of dissenting information. Groupthink requires several forms of lying to maintain the status quo, including the ignoring or omission of facts, selective memory, and denial. The subject of electromagnetic fields has collided with organizational denial and groupthink more often than not, and continues to do so.

When talking about the dangers of electropollution, very oftent he reaction of many people is that of denial, skepticism, and self-deception. Some people work for the military where the use of this technology is not to be questioned and a whole paradigmatic mindset has been created to counter such questions, others work for the cell phone industry where the money to be made is astronomical, others own profitable stock in these companies, whereas others are just addicted to the convenience of owning one of these mini weapons of mass destruction. Most people have been conditioned to "play" what Peter Elbow (1973) has called the "doubting game":

Describing yet another continuum, Elbow noted that most scholarly traditions are too myopically involved in what he called the "doubting game" of truth seeking. "The doubting game seeks truth ... by seeking error ... You must assume [an assertion] is untrue.... You make special effort to extricate yourself from the assertions in question.... You must hold off to one side the self, its wishes, preconceptions, experiences, and commitments" (1973:148). Elbow felt that the doubting game has gained a monopoly on legitimacy in Western culture: "...To almost anyone in the academic or intellectual world, it seems as though when he plays the doubting game he is being rigorous, disciplined, rational, and tough-minded. And if for any reason he refrains from playing the doubting game, he feels he is being unintellectual, irrational, and sloppy" (p. 151)

Elbow proposes that we counter the mentality of the doubting game with that of the "Believing Game":

Elbow contended that we need to turn such conceptions upside-down, to look at the other end of the continuum and recognize the importance of what he called the "believing game." In the believing game you refrain from doubting the assertions.... You try to find truths, not errors; you make acts of self-insertion and self-involvement, not self-extrication.

In Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, H.D. Brown (1993).

Since people have been conditioned to accept the "dogma of doubting" everything without really actually seemingly using their brains, it is important to make people aware of and to coax them into participating in the Believing Game.

peace

paul