When tragedies occur, the first thing people do is deny they happened.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, the first thing most people did was deny anything was wrong. After all, it was the largest ship in the world and what could happen hitting some chunk of ice? And when a steward said there was nothing to worry about, this validated their lack of concern. Have another glass of champagne! Thinking about a freezing death in the icy Atlantic certainly was not fun, right?
Others, seeing the danger, took action. And if more people did the same, perhaps more passengers and crew could have been saved. Myself, I would be trying to cook up some sort of raft made of deck chairs, life preservers, and whatever wood I could find (doors, bed frames, furniture). Beats standing around denying it is happening!
What got me started about this was the tragic story of Christine Maggiore, who was diagnosed with HIV back in the 1990s. She was seeking treatment when she ran into some hokum holistic "doctor" who claimed that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus and the whole thing was a hoax or conspiracy.
She went on to found an AIDS-denial organization which actually convinced the President of South Africa of this nonsense - causing untold thousands to die needlessly.
And Ms. Maggiore? Yea, she died, too - of AIDS, but not before her daughter did - who went untreated.
Why did she go down this horrific road? Denial, plain and simple. When people are confronted with horrific things, it is comforting to live in denial and pretend they are not happening. If you had HIV back in the 1990's, it was largely a death sentence. So to avoid confronting the horror, why not say it doesn't exist? Problem was, before she died, treatments did become available - working treatments - that would have saved her life and that of her child.
We saw the same thing with school shootings. The horror of grade-school children being blasted by some armed nut-job is too much to bear. So isn't it comforting to pretend it didn't happen? And while you are at it, go and mock those who insist on the truth - as Ms. Maggiore did with AIDS activists. By shouting down the truth, you can live in a comfortable insulated igloo cooler of denial. "I can't hear you! La! La! La!"
Or take anti-vaxxers. Please. The prospect of a pandemic killing millions of Americans (and millions more worldwide) was too grim to bear. So people reached out to the life-ring of anti-vaxxer denialism. CoVid didn't exist! Or if it did, it was no worse than the flu. I know I felt the latter - at first. And if you want to stay in your denial comfort zone, then attack those who are telling you the truth! The vaccines are the problem, not the solution!
Right? Wrong.
The list goes on and on. Trumpism is a major form of denialism. Trump famously said he could shoot someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue and get away with it. And over the years, he has done one horrific thing after another and yet his simps refuse to see it. They retreat into denial - latching on to far-right news outlets that tell them that anything bad Trump did never happened or if it did, it was part of some conspiracy to get him.
Denial is a powerful and dangerous emotion. There is a lot of sunk cost fallacy involved. If you engage in denial early on ("The Titanic isn't sinking!") it gets harder and harder as time goes by to change your mind ("Get in a lifeboat! Now!"). You have to admit you were wrong and that is hard for most of us - perhaps all of us - to do.
So people double-down on conspiracy theories, alternate facts, and fake news. They long ago forgot what the point was, other than to "own the libs!" whatever that means. I don't think they even know, anymore.
And since people attach such personal feelings to denial, it is hard to convince them otherwise. In fact, a head-on approach often backfires, as the person you are confronting will say you are just an alarmist and that your attempts to convince them otherwise are evidence that they are correct and you are wrong. "But I was just down in the orlop deck and it was knee-deep in water!" you say. "But of course!" they counter, "The orlop deck is below the waterline. They were probably just washing the floors and you misunderstood the situation! Don't you think the Captain would say something if we were sinking?" (The old appeal-to-authority gag).
You can't convince them of anything so don't try. Your trying to convince them otherwise only serves to push them into a corner. They feel they are being personally attacked and will lash out and entrench their denial even further. Just do your own thing and hope they come around eventually. When they come to the truth by themselves, they don't feel they are "wrong" just changing their mind. And of course, it pays to lead by example - they see you getting in the lifeboat and they might start to wonder.
But confronting denial is pointless - like trying to deprogram a cult member (which is, in fact, the same exact thing - a cult member denies they are in a cult until the Kool-Aid comes out). The harder you try, the more they cling to it. After all, the cult leader told them you would try to convince them to leave the cult! And here you are, making the very arguments the cult leader said you would make. You are doing more harm that good by trying to convince them to leave.
I felt sad reading about Ms. Maggiore and her child. I had never heard of her or her organization. Apparently the "Foo-Fighers" were big promoters of her organization and AIDS-deniers themselves. They quietly took down their postings when it became clear they were an embarrassment to the band. Quite frankly, I cannot name a single one of their songs and I doubt I missed much from that brain trust!
But that is probably another good reason celebrities should keep their political views to themselves. No profit in alienating a portion of you fan base!
