Dealing with reality can be a beautiful thing, if one is not afraid to grasp it. Conversely, not dealing with reality wrecks and destroys lives. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
We’d rather risk societal collapse than face the sacrifices and challenges of revolutionizing our unsustainably neofeudal economy and broken gears of governance.
Denial is scale-invariant and universal–we’ve all experienced in some way or another. By scale-invariant, we mean the individual, household, enterprise, city, state and empire all experience denial.
Denial has several signature characteristics:
1. The more profound and consequential the issue, the more stubborn our denial. When a minor cut reddens, we don’t go into denial that it’s infected, we simply treat it with greater care. But when the unmistakable signs of heart disease appear, we find ways to deny the reality because it’s too upsetting and frightening. We want very desperately to think it will go away on its own and we’ll be fine, and nothing in our life will change.
2. The strength of our denial flows from the tacit understanding that if we let even a tiny bit of doubt break through our dam of denial, the whole foundation will give way. The power of denial originates in the impermeability of the barrier blocking warning signs that all is not well. If the enterprise, relationship, policy, investment, etc. is no longer sustainable or viable, we must shut out all doubt and evidence because even a rivulet of doubt and evidence will quickly erode the dam of our denial and collapse our sense of security, control and predictability.
Continue reading
