Willful Blindness

It seems quite paradoxical to me how our state of affairs can be considered such serious business, yet as a collective, we continue choosing to ignore root causes of our systemic issues. I don’t know about you but I don’t think sticking our heads in the sand is quite the best form of risk management we could be taking.

Look at us, and by "us" I mean the average regular person in today’s society. We allow trillions of dollars to be spent each year on political campaigns, designed to alter people’s perspectives on any given issue, to persuade us towards another’s line of thinking. We allow other people to dictate and control the same very resources we elected them to manage and protect for the wider collective benefit. Make no mistake, politics is and always was supposed to be a tool for the betterment of humanity. Not a tool to be used to control the masses whilst benefiting the few; this is not politics, it’s corruption.

Now, this is where it starts for most of us and I know this situation doesn’t only just happen to me; all of us go through this or have experienced the exact same thing. Do you ever find yourself in the midst of a conversation with someone, the conversation inevitably ends up in political territory and their retort to whatever point was just communicated is “Ahh well, that’s politics.” …Excuse me while I go eat a bottle of valium. How has such a baseless, illogical concept wormed itself into common vernacular and thought?

If we want to see real change happen in this world, we need to stop blaming "politics" for the global mess we find ourselves in. Politics in of itself does not exist. Like any house or corporation, politics is comprised of people. Individual people are the ones making the decisions, it's the behaviour and thinking of these individual people that create the causes and affects of our socio-cultural environment—that the rest of us either benefit from, merely survive off or peril by.

It takes a level of effort to critically think about what’s going on around you. An informed populace is the only true safeguard to democracy. Forget laws, tradition, political promises, all of it means nothing without the influence of the people. But it’s at this part where I get really angry because I understand how difficult it is for the regular person to give what they don’t have. It’s difficult to give of yourself when every second of your day is consumed with how you will provide for your family that depends on you, how you will cover next rent, how will you put food on the table, bills, insurance, taxes, shall I go on?

When you’re so focused on just surviving, all your energy and time is directed towards that—survival. We live in the most advanced, capable time period in our entire history of civilisation and yet the majority of people in the "developed” world are still forced to solely focus on surviving rather than thriving in life. Even in the developed world, we live as if our food for the day depends on whether the basket we threw into the river earlier this morning catches anything or not. Not to say those communities that continue to live in such a way are doing anything wrong, the exploitation of these people and their way of lives are a whole other issue in of itself.

What I’m trying to say is, too many of our politicians here in the West are detached from real ongoing realities of their constituents. Some are detached, but don’t be deceived, there are also some who know very well what is happening with the average person yet just really don’t care to do anything beneficial about the issues which plague them because to put it simply, to do so does nothing for the lining of their pockets or those of their friends in industry. So, the rest of us are left to obey the whims of people who are either ignorant or malicious and making choices daily on issues that affect our ability to live well. That’s. Just. Wonderful.

If this is the bare fact of the matter, then why don’t more people take action to expose this wide-scaled manipulation? Well, the answer lies in psychology, in all of our minds.

What do you do when you don’t want to deal with or think of something unpleasant? (And we all do this from time to time) We rationalise, go into denial, ignore, or compartmentalise to avoid feeling some type of negative way. The textbook definition defines compartmentalisation as an unconscious psychological defence mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance or the mental discomforts and anxieties that arise when conflicting ideologies present themselves into our space. In other words, it's a coping mechanism, as powerful as any other emotional crutch.

Serial entrepreneur and author Margaret Heffernan revives the concept of compartmentalisation to coincide with our contemporary trials and tribulations in the business and political spheres, also coining the term "willful blindness." In her most recent book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Heffernan explores the "backfire effect" of willful blindness of the individual consciousness in the context of broader institutions, by writing:

“Nations, institutions, individuals can all be blinded by love, by the need to believe themselves good and worthy and valued. We simply could not function if we believed ourselves to be otherwise. But when we are blind to the flaws and failings of what we love, we aren’t effective either… We make ourselves powerless when we pretend we don’t know. That’s the paradox of blindness: We think it will make us safe even as it puts us in danger."

This speaks to our general state of affairs nowadays. We are all so consumed with just surviving, that we willfully blind ourselves to the harsh realities of our political space because it’s too hard, or we’re just trying to protect our sanity in such a paradoxical, sometimes seemingly ruthless world. But ignoring the wrongdoings of our political system will not achieve any good for anyone. Good can only come from changing our perspectives and behaviour to not settle for anything less than the truth, not a distorted version of events sold to us by salesman.

Whether one wants to believe or not, this is just fact. Political processes are corrupt with commercial interests. Many politicians spend their professional lives swinging from seats in Government to the top of corporate ladders, of the very same institutions that financially backed their political careers and made it all possible in the first instance. Our banks continue to fund our public debt. Our multiculturalism is slowly being exterminated, to continue this societal divide and prevention of a coalition of people from forming and dismantling the system. Our environment is being exploited, mass killing sprees (insert any war here) are being promulgated and the average person is purposefully being kept stuck in a state of poverty, lack and dependency on the very system fuelling the cyclical repetition they find themselves in.

In time the collective will reach a point when the formidable majority will no longer choose to believe all the bullshit, take off the blinders and truly come to grips with the crude and barbaric reality we live in—regardless of how difficult, frightening, worrisome or frustrating as it may be. Only through acceptance, true acceptance on an individual level from enough people, will any meaningful change be possible on a global scale.