Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [114]
If you don’t have any direct experience with this kind of trauma-induced denial, it’s easy to assume that it is less a deep psychological reaction and more a surface rhetorical reflex: this can’t be happening to me, you must have the wrong person, there’s got to be some kind of mistake here. In reality, though, the denial reaction to trauma is profound and potent. To take a particularly mind-boggling example: at least 20 percent of seriously ill people who are told that they are near death actually forget the news within a few days—a form of denial so extreme that it involves not simply rejecting but entirely obliterating unwanted information.
As Kübler-Ross found, this denial reaction is healthy. (At least at first; eventually, of course, the sick must move beyond denial if they want to cope with their illness, and the bereaved must move beyond it to cope with their loss.) It is a natural reaction to fear and grief, and it serves to soften a blow that would otherwise be too sudden and severe to tolerate. When it comes to the kind of denial people express in the face of devastating news, we generally recognize this protective function, and, accordingly, we respond with compassion. But what about the other kind of denial—the intransigent, infuriating, ostrichlike refusal to acknowledge one’s mistakes?
Here’s the thing: that other kind of denial is not another kind of denial. With error as with disaster, we screen out unwelcome information to protect ourselves from discomfort, anxiety, and trauma. Denial is still a defense mechanism, but in this case, it defends us against the experience of being wrong. We’ve already seen that that experience can provoke intense and often painful emotions. And we’ve seen, too, that our beliefs are inextricable from our identities, our communities, and our overall sense of security and happiness. No wonder, then, that any major assault on our beliefs represents a trauma in its own right—one that can arouse denial just as swiftly as any other upsetting event.
I should clarify that I’m talking here about the kind of denial of error that is sincere and subconscious, not the kind that is conscious and cynical. We all engage in the conscious version from time to time—for example, when we keep pressing a point in an argument even after we’ve realized that we are wrong. This is a mild example of conscious denial; we know that we’re wrong, but we can’t quite summon the wherewithal to face it. But stronger examples abound, most notoriously in the arena of politics, which is to denial what a greenhouse is to an orchid: it grows uncommonly big and colorful there.* When FDR was campaigning for his first term, he made a speech in Pittsburgh in which he promised, like so many candidates before and after, that under no circumstances would he raise taxes. A few years later, securely ensconced in the White House and facing a wildly out-of-balance budget, he realized he would have to bite the bullet and renege on his earlier pledge. When he asked his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman, how he should handle the reversal, Rosenman reportedly replied, “Deny you have ever been in Pittsburgh.”
Rosenman’s advice was given in jest, if it was given at all. Still, it captures the imperative of denial perfectly: remove yourself as far as possible from any association with error. It also suggests a basic truth about conscious denial, which is that it involves conscious deceit. Likewise, unconscious denial involves unconscious deceit—but in this case,