Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [189]
Glen Woodall. Woodall’s story appears in Scheck et al., 107–114. The story of the victim in the case appears on p. 173. For the official report on Fred Zain, the fraudulent serologist, see “In the Circuit Court of Kanawha County, West Virginia, in the matter of an investigation of the West Virginia State Police Crime Laboratory, Serology Division, Civil Action No 93-MISC-402, James O. Holliday, Senior Judge, Nov. 4, 1993.
compensation for their ordeal. Only half of all states have laws permitting the wrongfully convicted to seek compensation. Most of those laws come with stringent requirements—such as not having entered a guilty plea, or having been specifically exonerated by the governor—and many of the payments are absurdly small. Suing for fairer compensation isn’t likely to get you anywhere either. As Scheck and Neufeld wrote of one of their clients, “if [he] had tripped on a cracked sidewalk and broken his leg, or if he had used a shampoo that made his hair fall out, he would have had a better chance of winning a lawsuit than he would for having been ordered at gunpoint by the state of New Jersey into a prison between the ages nineteen and thirty” for a crime he did not commit. (Scheck et al., 229–230.)
the five stages of grief. After denial, the other stages are, in order, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (Scribner, 1997).
forget the news within a few days. Bok, Secrets, 70.
“Deny you have ever been in Pittsburgh.” For two variants on this story, see Robert Shogan, The Fate of the Union: America’s Rocky Road to Political Stalemate (Westview Press, 2004), 10; and Daniel Schorr, “When Presidents Make Mistakes,” NPR Weekend Edition, Dec. 18, 2005.
“Wooden-headedness” (FN). Tuchman, 7.
From an outside perspective—yours, say. Actually, the matter of perspective with regard to self-deception is crucial. As with error more generally, we can’t recognize that we ourselves are in denial until we aren’t anymore. Thus we can never claim, in the moment, to be self-deceived; we can only impute self-deception to other people. But there are three serious problems with doing so. The first is that it is guaranteed to go badly; few things are more insufferable and insulting than being told that you are in denial. In essence, it is like being told that you are wrong twice: once about a fact (and inevitably an unpleasant one: that your partner is having an affair, that you have a drinking problem, that your finances are in serious jeopardy), and once about the events that are transpiring in your own psyche. The former is bad enough, but the latter is worse: with very few exceptions (e.g., love: see Chapter Twelve), we are deeply unwilling to concede that anyone has a better understanding of what is going on inside us than we do. The second problem with accusing someone of being self-deceived is that it involves assuming that we ourselves are incontestably right and that the putatively deceived person really is deceived. That might be the case—but then again, it might not. This leads to the third problem, which is that accusations of self-deception are all but impossible to refute. A person accused of being in denial has no effective way to counter the accusation, since his or her protestations can always be dismissed as the defense mechanism in action. You can be the straightest man on the planet, but the minute you try to dispute the suggestion that you are hiding your secret homosexual desires from yourself, you will start to seem very faggy indeed.
As Sartre wrote. Quoted in Bok, Secrets, 62.
How does the human mind manage this? My discussion of the conundrum of self-deception is heavily indebted to Sissela Bok’s work in Secrets, 60–64.
South African President Thabo Mbeki. For more on the consequences of Mbeki’s AIDS policy, see Pride Chigwedere et al., “Estimating the Lost Benefits of Antiretroviral Drug Use in South Africa,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Oct. 16, 2008): 410–415.
will simply oppose the…request for DNA testing.