Denial Makes the World Go Round?

A friend of mine sent me this article over Thanksgiving break about denial and its necessity in our daily lives. While the article focuses on personal relationships, it's principles can be applied to reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other genocides. Using self-deception as a model, it points to the effective use of denial in maintaining relationships, and suggests that this is an evolved tendency.

The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

While forgiveness is certainly a worthy goal, it's not always merited. It makes sense that one would then have to deny the problem in the first place to "forgive," but then forgiveness become suppression instead of a springboard for rebuilding trust.

Then there's the problem of trust based on this denial, instead of the actual integrity of the person: “'We concluded there is this skewed incentive system,' Dr. Kim said. 'If you are guilty of an integrity-based violation and you apologize, that hurts you more than if you are dishonest and deny it.'” It's no wonder Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

In society, taboos propagate this helpful denial.

This active recasting of events, built on the same smaller-bore psychological tools of inattention and passive acknowledgment, is the point at which relationship repair can begin to shade into willful self-deception of the kind that takes on a life of its own. Everyone knows what this looks like: You can’t talk about the affair, and you can’t talk about not talking about it. Soon, you can’t talk about any subject that’s remotely related to it.

This happens with issues of human rights all the time. Stories of human rights violations are marginalized into talking points or anecdotes, as it is not tactful in polite society to remind everyone of the injustices of the world. We wouldn't want to deny everyone their right to denial, would we?