The big D

I first learned about psychological defense mechanisms in college, in an Intro to Psych class. The prof told us about acting out, compartmentalization, projection, dissociation, regression, and reaction formation—all profound insights into the psyche. But the granddaddy of them all, to me, was denial. For my money, love doesn’t make the world go round—denial does.

Denial permeates every level at which people interact. It’s rife internationally and within nations. It’s the hallmark of religions and political parties. It dominates our financial world, the way we educate, law, and race relations. Need convincing? Let’s take a trip around the globe, across the American landscape, and into our institutions…

The world population is a tick under 7.2 billion at this writing. Every year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by 75 million; with medical advances we can expect this number to steadily rise. As the population juggernaut rolls on, our oceans grow steadily more polluted. Ten percent of all the plastic manufactured ends up in the sea and causes more than a million sea birds and mammals to die yearly. The runoff of pesticides and fertilizers from farms produces toxins that deplete water of oxygen and kill marine life. Chemical pollution is responsible for an estimated 400 “dead zones” around the world. Every day, cruise ships dump 250,000 gallons of wastewater and sewage into our oceans with impunity. The sea life that survives poisoning and disease has been overfished for decades. It may be gone altogether in just a few more decades—a catastrophe for the ten percent of humanity that relies on a seafood diet. At the same time, there is good reason to believe that climate change is reducing crop yields. This means starvation around the world, fewer grains in our diets, and less food for livestock, which we also eat. Clearly, the problem of an exploding population and a challenged food supply is a worldwide crisis, but where is the alarm? Many are concerned, certainly, but look at the agendas of the UN and governments around the world. The problems at the top of their lists are all geopolitical. The #1 problem facing humanity gets little more than a shrug. This is denial on a grand scale.

Tens of millions of Russians, with Vladimir Putin foremost among them, believe there is a special glory in being a Russian. They can’t conceive that this isn’t so. Similarly, tens of millions of Americans believe there is a special glory in being an American. We even have a name for it: Exceptionalism. Americans just like anyone else? Absurd, and possibly treasonous. The British, French, Japanese, and Germans have all had delusions of “exceptionalism,” but their eventual disillusionment hasn’t made the slightest impression on us.

People have a genius for inventing ways in which they are superior beings. Nationalism is just a special case of tribalism, which is still thriving today. Of course, there’s religious superiority as well, down to the sectarian level. Nowhere is there a better showcase for the varieties of I’m-better-than-you than the Middle East. The entire region is a murderous cauldron of denial. The common denominator of Middle East relationships is denial of humanity. It goes this way: “I’m virtuous, you’re not; you’re some kind of disgusting devil-dog.” Many of the combatants in the region take this to the ultimate level: “Therefore you don’t deserve to live. In fact, your death would be a kind of cleansing.” Holocaust logic. ISIS isn’t the sole example of it, but they purvey it over the largest area. They teach us what early Islam must have been like, when the religion was spread by the sword from Spain to India in just 125 years.

The Israelis and Palestinians also deny each other’s humanity, which means, in effect, they prefer brutality to empathy. Their unanimity on this point locks them in a “denial bind.” Neither can accept the idea of living harmoniously with the inhuman other, and so both offer impossible peace conditions. Hamas wants freedom of movement, including the freedom to cross the border and cut Israeli throats. Israel offers a two-state solution so long as the division is entirely on its terms, meaning, among other things, complete control of Jerusalem. Deadlock. (You have to cut Israel a little slack. After all, do chosen people trade away pieces of the safe haven that God has promised?)

In America, we like our denial more refined. Republicans and Democrats see their opposites as subhuman only in certain respects. Republicans, as seen by Democrats, are unaccountably dim-witted. They suffer from diminished capacity and have the reasoning power of fleas. Democrats, on the other hand have cultivated naiveté to the point of a mental disorder; they can’t see that their political agenda will wreck everything our forebears have built. The majority of Americans happily pin a party affiliation on themselves and learn the slogans and knee-jerk perceptions that make thinking superfluous. Party affiliations confer the gratifying conviction of “I’m always right; he’s always wrong.” It won’t get you into heaven, but it makes life on earth more pleasant.

Denial in America is by no means confined to the political arena. It pervades our entire society:

• The leaders of business and finance, with few exceptions, believe that regulations are anathema, even though history repeatedly demonstrates that a lack of regulation lets greed run amok, which in turn collapses the economy. When we get a dead economy, these same titans believe that government must severely curtail spending to curtail debt, which will in turn inspire confidence and stimulate consumer demand. It happens that the last six years have served as a real-life laboratory for testing this thinking. After approving a modest stimulus in 2009, Congress thwarted every proposal to stimulate demand that the White House put forward. The result has been a slow, puny recovery that has left a trail of impoverishment and wrecked lives. In fact, if it weren’t for the stimulative policies of the Federal Reserve Board, we would have millions more unemployed than we do now. And what has the 1% learned from years of irrefutable data? That the government spent too much on unemployment benefits, food stamps, and medical insurance! The House even threatened not to pay the nation’s bills unless more counterproductive cuts were made!
• Speaking of the need to regulate, what about gun ownership? And how long will Americans deny that unregulated ownership leads to a high homicide rate? Those who oppose regulation will give you two reasons why nothing should stand between them and all the guns they want. First, safety. They feel more secure with guns around. But they have no explanation for data that shows the vast majority of shooting homicides occurs between intimates, not between a householder and a stranger. Second, freedom. When our tyrannical government eventually sends its agents to arrest them, they will stand tall in defense of their freedom. This notion is too ridiculous for comment. What gun owners are ultimately denying is the ego rush conferred by a tool that makes explosions and fires deadly projectiles. To command such power is a thrilling thing. You can see this clearly by recalling news clips showing the primal joy of Muslim fighters as they fire their weapons into the air. Power is bliss.
• Our educators have put grim data before us for decades. Our children compare poorly with the children of other countries in math ability, reading comprehension, verbal skills, and knowledge of science. In a world where educational outcomes and prosperity go hand in hand, this data is a frightening signal. So how has the education establishment responded? Basically, by denying that the other countries are doing something that we ought to adopt. Are they paying their teachers more to attract better prospects to the profession? Are they training their teachers more rigorously? Do the teachers relate to their students differently? Do they match curriculum to age groups differently? How do they confirm that learning has occurred? How are foreign teachers evaluated? None of our educators seem to care about the answers. They deny that they can be taught anything. I’m inclined to give them a no-confidence vote until I see a lot more humility about what they don’t understand.
• Our law enforcement establishment must do its job with fairness, firmness, compassion, and a regard for life. Its members would no doubt howl at any suggestion that they do less. Yet we repeatedly see evidence that they perform their jobs otherwise. In Los Angeles we see a highway patrolman pummel the face of a helpless woman as she lies on the ground. Obviously confused, she hadn’t obeyed his commands not to walk beside the freeway. On Staten Island we see four policemen grab a man who loudly insists he’s done nothing wrong. One of the officers applies a choke hold and doesn’t relax his grip, even when the beleaguered man calls out that he can’t breathe. He dies of a heart attack. In Ferguson, Missouri, we hear about a policeman who shoots an unarmed man for unclear reasons. We know, though, that the officer fired a volley of six shots, paused, and fired a volley of four more shots. Killed and rekilled. In nearby St. Louis, some days later, we see several policemen fire a volley of eight bullets, killing a man brandishing a knife but not attacking any of them. What do all these incidents have in common? Unquestionably, excessive force was used in all cases—killing force in three and life-threatening force in one. In all cases, the officers were not facing life-threatening danger, although there was a small chance of harm in two of the cases. It’s not a reach to conclude that in all cases the officers were prepared to kill rather than receive any harm. Is it an acceptable policy for a police officer—a professional keeper of the peace—to take a life rather than risk injury? That’s far from my law enforcement ideal. One point more. All four of the victims in these cases were black. Who among us has seen a comparable video where the victim was white? I can’t recall any. Yet I expect that every last law enforcement agency in the country would vehemently deny that they were poisoned by racial prejudice.

I’ve amused myself by imagining how transformed the world would be if I could snap my fingers and thereby banish denial from the repertoire of human defenses. What a shock would run through the world! The idea reminds me of an old, entertaining movie, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. In it, the protagonist, a mere draper’s assistant, is given supernatural powers by a demigod. He becomes so enamored of his power that he tries to stop time by commanding the Earth to stop rotating. Of course, buildings crumble and anything not anchored to the ground is thrown into space. Something equally horrendous would no doubt happen if denial could be banished everywhere at once. Instead, we can only hope that it will disappear in stages. Perhaps the definition of progress is the peeling away of denial very gradually, layer by layer, while taking care to spare the human psyche as much as possible.