Denial in the News

 

We are seeing currently what denial looks like. 

Sometimes it is caused by a guilty conscience, as when Adam and Eve hid from God in the bushes of the Garden of Eden. Sometimes it happens when one has been lied to for a long time. One finds it difficult to accept this; it is too disorienting. It is the “sunk costs” fallacy: if I have spent $200,000 on the car, it must be a great car. As someone once said, it is easier to fool someone than to get them to admit they have been fooled.

We are seeing this sort of denial in the general refusal to notice the high excess death rates since the Covid vaccine was rolled out, and the many younger people dying of myocarditis. 

Of course governments have a vested interest in suppressing this. Of course the drug companies do. And both government and the drug companies put a great deal of money into advertising in the media. So the media too will suppress it. 

But I think we are seeing it among ordinary people as well. Tim Poole reports others reacting violently when he raises the possibility that the deaths might be due to the vaccine. Denial normally becomes violent when challenged. Those who have been vaccinated cannot face the possibility that they made the wrong choice, that the vaccine might now be a time bomb moving through their veins. Even people who have already been diagnosed with myocarditis seem often to be in denial. They will ascribe it to a cold, for example. Rum luck. It is too hard to accept that they did it to themselves, by dutifully taking the word of the authorities. No doubt it is hardest for those who were most critical of the “anti-vaxxers.”

At times like these we discover who the honest people are, and who is delusional. The honest seem on present evidence to be an overall minority.

We see this in other things as well: the “mass graves at the residential schools” claim is now untenable. But nobody is covering it, and most people till assert it as if it is true. The “Trump was colluding with the Russians” hoax is untenable, but you still hear people insisting on it. And so forth.

It all makes life easy for con artists.