Comments | showingup: The Dangers of Willful Blindness

showingup

The Dangers of Willful Blindness

Aug 27, 2013 12:01

"Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn't want to know. In a talk that's part history lesson, part call-to-action ( Read more... )

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Comments 9

pagandelight August 27 2013, 12:31:34 UTC

Fantastic video - thanks for sharing!

showingup August 27 2013, 18:54:06 UTC

My pleasure, my lovely :)

anonymous August 28 2013, 12:28:12 UTC

I think that the news was so overwhelming to the people of the town that they could not attend to it without being frightened out of their wits. Our lives are dependent on vermiculite, they said. Our parents and grandparents have always worked with it. What will we do, if we don't have vermiculite to bring income to the town ( ... )

showingup August 29 2013, 08:20:02 UTC

You're absolutely right. It's like climate change denial, or the people who know that the government stripping away the social safety net is wrong but shrug and say there's nothing they can do... It's a learned helplessness that is maintained by refusing to accept that anything's really wrong, or by refusing to accept there's anything to be done about it ( ... )

lost reply tracyandrook August 28 2013, 12:30:02 UTC

I posted a decent reply to this, but the computer ate it because it said I wasn't logged in. If you find it somewhere, it's mine.

lost reply,2 tracyandrook August 28 2013, 12:51:55 UTC

I guess the gist of my thoughts was that ignorance of a problem is a coping strategy, albeit a maladaptive one. I think acknowledgement of the problem was too overwhelming for the Libby residents. They had seen the lurid stories of Love Canal and Times Beach ( ... )

Re: lost reply,2 showingup August 29 2013, 08:47:05 UTC

I think you're right. Fear of the unknown + dependency on a person/institution/substance = prison. A sort of Stockholm syndrome is built over generations.

In this town, there was historically an incredible hostility to trades unions. Partly because of the extremely uncertain nature of the silk trade, partly because the mills were so small that unionising activity couldn't get a tow-hold, and partly because of the ever-shifting population as people moved in during the boom seasons and out during the lean, the mill masters had the power of life and death over ordinary people. And the ordinary people swallowed it. My great-grandfather was shunned by his brothers for joining the railway workers' trades union and for voting Labour at the turn of the century. I don't believe they liked low wages, poor education, lack of a safety net, or the threat of the workhouse and the Poor Board. But they'd be damned if they were going to do anything about it - and worse, they'd actively agitate against anyone who did. Attempts to reason with them made ( ... )

Re: lost reply,2 tracyandrook August 30 2013, 22:47:42 UTC

Well, sorry I was repetitive, but I thought the first reply got eaten.

I am not so sure that willful blindness is culture-specific.
I can start by assuming your uncle is rational. For him there are real reasons to, and real reasons not to, honor the Windsors in their position, and the reasons to are more valuable to him than the reasons not to. Based on the facts that he believes are true. You may introduce new facts to him but if he has already dismissed you as a bloody republican then the facts may have to come from somewhere else (this happens to me frequently).

Americans, however, in their love of the royal family, are not rational, and they know it. They don't have to be rational. It's just fun, because they are not personally affected by them. That's why they can get so extremely silly about it. It's like doing the macarena or watching sports when you have no money on the game.

Re: lost reply,2 showingup September 2 2013, 12:05:41 UTC

I am not so sure that willful blindness is culture-specific. >/i>

I believe its manifestations to be culture-specific.

As to my uncle and royalty, I'd say he's less rational than Americans who know they're indulging in silliness. We'll have to agree to disagree, as I don't want to go too far down the road of explaining his intense dislike of anything that doesn't conform to an idealised Britain that never was :)