Wilful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan
Many moons ago, I’ve read a quote somewhere that goes:
“There are three shapes you should avoid: Ambitionless Circles, Love Triangles, and Square Minds.”
Personally, I think pizza stands as the sole entity that encompasses these three forms and turned out positive. Baked round, sliced triangular, boxed squared.
The book I’m about to review also forewarned us about these three shapes: Comfort bubble, authoritative pyramids, and boxed thinking.
“You can’t blame someone who doesn’t know,” (不知者無罪) a Chinese proverb asserted.
Except in fact, you can…
Even legally.
Wilful blindness first emerged as a legal concept in the nineteenth century. The English judicial authorities referred to the state of mind that accompanied one who “wilfully shut his eyes” as “connivance’ or “constructive knowledge”. Since then, lots of other phrases came into play – deliberate or wilful ignorance, conscious avoidance and deliberate indifference. What they all had in common is the idea that there is an opportunity for knowledge, and a responsibility to be informed, but it is shirked.
The law doesn’t care why we remain ignorant, only that we do.
But why do we ignore the obvious at our peril?
How is it possible that we sometimes overlook so many red flags?
Applied to great swathes of human existence, some ignorance is assuredly bliss. Many of us wander around in the warm fug of distortion, it is a mental escape hatch.
We kind of already know that our brains mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering out whatever unsettles our fragile egos and vital beliefs. It is also no news that with modern day technology aiming to make our lives easier by reducing overwhelming choice, what we read and hear narrows even more drastically. This tendency of our brains made our day-to-day life focused, pleasant, comfortable.
Yet, when our unconscious impulse to conform shields us from questioning prevalent beliefs in our community, we ended up with people ensconced in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals amplifying biases; with ideologies prizing confirmation over curiosity and complexity; with communities rewarding blind obedience and conformity; and with metrics supporting overwhelming preference for the simple over the nuanced. Ideology and orthodoxies powerfully mask what, to the uncaptivated mind, is obvious, dangerous, or absurd, and there’s much about what we choose to ignore leave us in the dark.
In the book Wilful Blindness, author Margaret Heffernan scrutinizes the phenomenon of wilful blindness across its diverse manifestations, all potentially ruinous to individuals, corporations, and even nations. The author posits that we often turn a blind eye to evident truths for the sake of love, ideological convictions, our egos, sheer fatigue, or an abundance of affluence. Often, those donning blinders exhibits a willingness to conform, reluctance to leave their comfort zones, hesitation to challenge authority or a state of blissful unawareness induced by the comfort of the familiar.
Drawing upon a diverse array of sources ranging from psychological studies and social statistics to interviews with pertinent figures, the book carefully examined the aspects in our brains and human nature that render us susceptible to such intentional blindness. From early childhood indoctrination to submit to authority the assimilation of selective vision as a vital social skill, individuals amplify their proclivity for institutionalization by affiliating with like-minded communities.
Some of the examples were drawn from news headlines, for example the author highlights figures such as the culpably oblivious Kenneth Lay of Enron, the incurious investors ensnared by Bernie Madoff, and the negligently aloof executives at BP as quintessential exemplars of her thesis. As the narrative unfolds, the author cations that the consequences of neglecting glaring realities have already precipitated the near collapse of the global economy, politically divided nations, and the impending havoc arising from our collective disregard for climate change. While much of the insights and examples presented may be familiar to a reader with liberal education, the author offers a more nuanced retelling and issues a rallying cry to potential whistleblowers endowed with the courage to confront the looming challenges. Navigating seamlessly through historical narratives and traversing realms from business to science, government to the family, the book elucidates the peril of wilful blindness in our globalized, interconnected milieu. Ultimately, it proposes some strategies for institutions and individuals to counteract this hazardous phenomenon.
I appreciated how the book is filled with examples. The author draws examples ranging from Albert Speer, the architect whose devotion to Hitler led him to ignore the Final Solution, the senior executives at Enron who deliberately ignored the fraud cooked up to conceal its true financial position, to the former chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States, Alan Greenspan’s neoliberalism faith in the light regulation of the markets, right up to their collapse. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek once said that “without a theory, the facts are silent”, but for Greenspan, with his theory, the facts became invisible.
A long-time cheerleader for deregulation, Greenspan admitted to a congressional committee during the financial crisis in October 2008 that he was wrong in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry and that the credit crunch had left him in a state of shocked disbelief. "I have found a flaw," said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." It was the first time the man hailed for masterminding the world's longest postwar boom has accepted any culpability for the crisis that has engulfed the global banking system. he told the House oversight committee that he regretted his opposition to regulatory curbs on certain types of financial derivatives which have left banks on Wall Street and in the Square Mile facing billions of dollars worth of liabilities. After the Cold War, the world is immersed in this joy of market triumphalism and in a sense, people who had lived through that history and witnessed the miracle of market power have that glorious image so ingrained in their minds that their neoliberalism ideology became unwavering even when being confronted by opposing evidence. This example illustrates that even the most experienced, or ironically, it is often the most experienced people who are more susceptible to wilful blindness.
In the final chapter, the author proffers strategies for circumventing the pitfall of ignoring the obvious. It becomes imperative for us to discern the uniformity prevalent in our lives and actively strive to introduce diversity. Confronting and rectifying our inherent biases is essential, as is resisting the inclination to toil relentlessly, as it is during such exhaustive periods that we are most prone to resort to cognitive shortcuts. Chief executives might want to consider the former practice in the Vatican of employing a devil’s advocate to challenge candidates for canonisation. Or the medieval fool, who reminds monarchs of their fundamental absurdity. At Guidant, the American medical device maker, executives used to have to sit on a stool while colleagues stood up to complain about them. They were not allowed to respond but were forced to absorb and meditate on the criticism. Reading this book can feel like a similar mental hazing. I have to say that there are no new concepts in this book that readers don’t already know, but it can act as a fresh reminder given how so many of us of wander around in the warm fug of distortion, it is good to be beaten to attention every now and again.
