Denying...Reality

WE RESIST THE TRUTH, said Goethe, only because we fear that we would perish if we accepted it. We all, or certainly nearly all of us do this at point or other in our heavily fear based lives. Rare indeeed is the noble soul who accepts reality without reluctance. Modern psychology, a rather new science, has improved little upon Goethe's basic understanding of this human tendency and the reason for it, other than to confirm and verify it. I can recall the events of my early life that I might rather have pretended hadn't happened. The outcome of the 1964 World Series. My father's drinking, his womanizing, and his regular departures from home, as he returned to the mental hospital in which he was confined, but given frequent home visits from. My mother's emotional pain,my older sister's bullying. We suffer,and deny our suffering. I once had a lady friend who, at nineteen, was obviously pregnant, but who seemed unwilling to acknowledge the fact, at least to anyone else. All turned out well, however. She gave birth, and raised a wonderful daughter. All in all, I have done well, I think, at accepting and adjusting to reality. But the temptation to deny those unpleasant things has always lurked within me, as it lurks within...everyone. Conversely, whether entrenched deeply in denial or reality, humans derive confort from their beliefs, whether real or not. As Goethe said: "Habit is our sole comfort. We dislike doing without even those unpleasant things to which we have become accustomed". Psychologically, sociologically, mass denial, denial by large numbers of people, even whole socieities, presents an equally interesting phenomenon. Countires in the throes of catastrophic military defeat sometimes seem to deny the reality of their desperate situation. Even as foreign armies and navies surrounded and ammassed near their borders, preparing to invade, the civilian populations of Germany and Japan in World War Two remained persuaded by their delusional leaders that victory was within their grasp. Hitler, supposedly, late in the war, issued commands to military units and armies which no longer existed. The cult - and it is a cult - of Trump has obvious denial "issues" as we like to call difficulties these days. Despite Trump's return to power, its members still have difficulty grasping the reality of his election defeat in twenty twenty, so painful was it for them, seeing their great leader going down to defeat. Now they continue to deny his blatant, pervasive criminality and immorality. The forms of denial they manifest and display for us to see as the second Trump administration proceeds chaotically along will be a fascinating study in human psychology, if it doesn't get us all killed. The most popular, and perhaps destructive manifestation of denial today - and, be asssured, all denial of reality has consequences, often harmful - is denial of human made climate change. There are three basic stages of climate change denial. First, the denier insists that climate change is a hoax. A fabrication, perpetrated by the left leaning media, the "deep state", the Chinese, whomever. Whomever it takes. Anybody will do. Then, grudgingly,as reality is forced upon them and they dimly, slowly begin to accept it, the deniers admit that, yes, indeed the climate is changing, but deny that human activity is the cause. In this false paradigm, stage two, the climate is always changing, without human intervention, and humans are too weak and puny to have any impact on it, case closed. Climate change is being caused by changes in solar activity, in the Earth's orbit, or..something...again, anything will do. In stage three thirty billion tons of carbon injected into the atmosphere each year may be, may... be... partly responsible, but since India and China, the main culprits, are not cooperating with initiatives to mitigate the problem, there is little or nothing that we in the industrialized west can do for now. The religious add: and, in any event, the imminent return of the lord makes it all irrelevant and all the concern needless. We twist and contort ourselves intointellectual pretzels in our ceaseless resistance to uncomfortable, inconvenient realities. We protect and defend our ideologies of choice unto death. Ourhope, however,rests in the observaboe process, ongoing now, in which people, confronted with overwhelming, irresistable reality,begin to slowly accept it,as their minds gradually adopt and heal an begin to deal with the truth. We resist the truth only because we fear that we would perish if we accepted it.