States of Denial Book

I wish he'd lived long enough to comment on the Trump/new alt-right movement. Its elevation of denial into a near-religion in celebrated anti-factness as morally superior would have been fascinating to see through his eyes, and I think we would have been better equipped to handle it. (If anyone knows of someone building off Cohen's ideas and applying them to those modern crises, please let me know! I'd want to read it.)

On to the review:

This book gutted me. It took me forever to read it, not because it is poor or not compelling, but because the material is so emotionally difficult that I could often read only twenty or thirty pages at a stretch. It was well worth working through, and I would recommend it without hesitation to anyone active in any field where public and official denial (whether in the form of lack of knowledge, lack of acknowledgement, lack of caring or lack of action) is a significant barrier to progress. Cohen's book was cited as a primary source and inspiration for one of my recent favourite books on climate change, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life by Kari Norgaard, which is why I hunted it down (it's not easy to find, which is a shame).

It's not perfect, of course, but its very imperfections speak to the ideas Cohen relates: he himself is in denial. For instance, he describes "domestic violence" as a problem that's been solved, in which denial was a barrier to progress but isn't any longer. Keeping in mind that this book was published in 2001 and that, in 2018, domestic violence and predatory relationships are still significant problems for women, his characterization of this seems particularly and falsely optimistic: he certainly would have known and interacted with women in abusive relationships throughout his life, and yet he somehow remained oblivious to this fact.

Also, his declaration of success on environmental issues was premature. This line in particular made me rage-laugh:

The success of the environmental movement has been striking. Its initial rise, till the end of the eighties, was partly achieved at the expense of humanitarian causes. Its message was safer, virtually non-political and easily appeals to self-interest.

Virtually non-political! Oh, Stanley.

And the book is itself somewhat dated. For example, the last section of the last chapter is titled "The Photo Never Lies." And, well. Photoshop.

(And not even photoshop. There's a meme going around on FaceBook--maybe you've seen it--with a picture of a lot of parked cars and people milling around, and a caption claiming that this is a photo of a protest in Germany when the government raised the taxes on gasoline and people revolted by staging mass park-ins on highways, which succeeded in eliminating the tax. Every word of it is a lie. There was, in 2001 or so, a raise in the price of gasoline in Germany; some truckers parked their trucks in protest, which caused local traffic problems and a couple of factories shut down for a few days; the price was not reduced, except for pensioners and others on fixed incomes. The photo itself is of a traffic jam in China, which should be obvious since every person in the photo is Chinese. Yet this fact-free narrative circulates on online spaces, encouraging people to revolt against governments raising gasoline prices, even though those price increases have the potential to save vulnerable lives and entire species through mitigating climate change. The whole thing makes me so angry I can't even tell you. What kind of cynical asshole would produce this, knowing it to be a lie and knowing that most people would care so little that they would circulate it anyway; and what kind of monster cares more for 4c/L on gasoline than the fate of island nations? This isn't the only one, either. I'm sure you have many of your own examples.)

Regardless, these flaws don't take away from the usefulness or value of the book's ideas.

Denial is a big subject, and this is a big book. He begins by describing what denial is: that peculiar mental state in which a fact or idea is simultaneously known and not-known. Known enough to know that further knowledge will be too difficult, and so must be avoided. He applies this to the micro problems of daily life (abusive relationships, alcoholism and addictions, etc.) and the macro problems of societies and large-scale atrocities, though the latter appropriately takes up the bulk of his focus and the book. It's impossible to avoid, though, seeing the ways in which even the macro discussions apply to the micro. You should expect this to make the book harder to read if you have personally experienced the ways in which denial can kill in intimate settings.

He explores the denial paradox at some length: in small doses denial allows us to have enough optimism to function in our daily lives. In large doses or about destructive enough problems, at any scale, denial kills. How to have enough denial to be in mental health while not so much denial as to contribute to mass atrocities and suffering is a conundrum he finds essentially unanswerable, suggesting that the answer is being aware of this dilemma.

After exploring what denial is and some thoughts on how the psychology of it works, he then spends the bulk of the book discussing specific mechanisms and techniques governments use to facilitate denial in their own ranks and in the population more broadly, and how advocacy and humanitarian organizations can counter this. It's very messy and wide-ranging and there are no specific or concrete solutions, largely because the techniques of denial shift to meet the latest techniques to counter it in a kind of mental arms race (see: Trump. Now we will no longer even pretend to be telling the truth. We'll call what we say "alternative facts" and act hurt when called liars in sheer manipulation.)

It's not a manual or self-help book; you can't pick it up and go through the steps in Chapter X to determine the correct anti-denial procedure to guarantee public support for program Y. But it is an extremely thorough exploration of the problem and its solutions as they stood in 2001 that should guide a reader through possible solutions and their downsides, and inspire possible approaches.

I have notes, underlines and scribbles on almost every page. This is what I call one of my Everything Books; it makes connections in hugely disparate subjects and spheres and sparks ideas in problems not in any obvious way connected to the story at hand. Following are a few of my favourite passages:

Whole societies have unmentioned and unmentionable rules about what should not be openly talked about. You are subject to a rule about obeying these rules, but bound also by a meta-rule which dictates that you deny your knowledge of the original rule.

(That one was relied on to great effect in Living in Denial wrt not talking about climate change, and also not talking about how it's not ok to talk about climate change.)

Perpetrators of gross atrocities and offenders against ordinary criminal codes invite the same set of questions: "Why did they do something like that?" Further, "How could they do it, but still believe in the rules they break?" Yet further, "How could they do such atrocious things, yet still think of themselves as good and decent people?"

...Offender and bystander denials belong to a wider category of speech acts known as 'accounts,' 'motivational accounts' or 'vocabulary of motives.' Motives, Wright Mills argued, are not mysterious internal states, but typical vocabularies with clear functions in particular social situations. They serve to realign people to groups whose norms and expectations they have confounded. There is no point in looking for deeper, 'real' motives behind these verbal accounts ... verbal statements of motives are initial guides to behaviour. An account is not just another defence mechanism to deal with guilt, shame or other psychic conflict after an offence has been committed; it must, in some sense, be present before the act. That is ... I must say to myself, "If I do this, what will I then be able to say to myself and others?" ...

...Such internal soliloquies are not private matters. On the contrary: accounts are learnt by ordinary cultural transmission, and are drawn from a well-established, collectively available pool. An account is adopted because of its public acceptability. ... The denials we see are those offered in the expectation that they will be accepted.

Everything in that section wasn't just hugely interesting and informative, but also seemed like case accounts of the denials of perpetrators exposed by the #metoo movement. If you know an abuser, you will find much of this section familiar, and it might make sense of previously unanswerable problems. Rapists, for instance, don't get themselves and their victims drunk and they mistakenly proceed on the basis of misunderstood consent; they get themselves and their victims drunk because they know it's an excuse that will get them off the hook in a court of law (and in fact there's other evidence to support this specific example). Here he applies it to societies: governments don't mistakenly perceive black people, for example, as more dangerous, and then accidentally create police forces with the arms and permission to routinely exterminate them for minor law violations; they use this as an excuse after the fact to continue racist programs against black people to keep them in a subservient societal position. Governments don't mistakenly take masses of indigenous children from their families to place them in residential schools or white families for their own good--industries don't accidentally continue environmentally and potentially biospherically destructive practices in the noble intent to maintain high quality jobs--etc. These are excuses adopted before the atrocity/crime in order to be used afterwards, effectively, to avoid consequences.

"General Videla's empty references affirming that he takes full responsibility but that nothing happened expose a primary thought process which, giving magical power to words, tries through them to make reality disappear because one wishes to deny it.

Hmm, who does that remind me of?

To be co-operative perpetrators or complicit bystanders for years requires a sense of the world in which the others' presence is hardly recognized. They get what they deserve, not because of what they do, but because of who they are.



The principle of social justice does not depend on your moral awareness of people like you--but your readiness to extend the circle of recognition to unknown (and even unlikable) people who are not at all like you.

This one needs to be blown up to 1000-point type and printed on the side of every fifth building in the world.

No one needs to be Nice, to be likeable, to placate or flatter, in order to deserve justice and human rights. You can be difficult and angry and still, on the basis of being a living human being, deserve an equal measure of justice for crimes against you. That's why they're HUMAN RIGHTS, not "Friendly Human Rights" or "Human I Like Rights."