Overcoming Willful Ignorance (Essential Excerpts)

Teens begging us to wake up, and lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. and Arthur Koestler.

Sep 08, 2023

Hello Bar-setters!

On Monday, I shared a couple of powerful articles that were written by current teenagers. Both sought to open our eyes to the terrifying effect that modern technology has had on themselves and most of their peers. I’ll link both at the bottom of this article, but first an excerpt that you must read:

I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age.
Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends.

Source: I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway., Isabel Hogben

I’ve often wondered:

How is it that we adults are allowing such self-destructive norms to proliferate?

A large part of the issue may be that too many people have not acknowledged what’s happening. As economist and mathematician Eric Weinstein recently explained when he was asked why people are so disengaged with reality.

They’re not watching what is happening to them. They’re being de-natured by their phones. Your phone is not a phone. It’s an environment.

The phone is an environment that today’s kids (and many adults) aren’t prepared to handle.

But, other than actual ignorance, another part of this issue is that we don’t want to see what is happening.

Willful Ignorance as a Coping Mechanism

A large reason that self-destructive norms have persisted is because so many good parents are tired, scared, and confused. They deal with the overwhelm of parenting today, by willfully ignoring reality. They’d rather just not think about what their kids are doing on their phones than acknowledge their intuitions. Intuitions that tell them…

Getting my kid a smartphone might change them irrevocably and for the worst
If my kid’s friends all have this stuff, that means they’re seeing it too
School might be becoming a toxic environment
I can’t do this alone

Willful blindness is a fairly typical coping mechanism. Arthur Koestler wrote about this in his powerful January 1944 article in The New York Times where he described his dismay that people wouldn’t believe a holocaust was going on in Europe. As he wrote:

So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.
I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it.
As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

Source: The Nightmare That is a Reality, by Arthur Koestler

Months later, Germany fell and the world finally accepted the full magnitude of these atrocities.

This reminds me of another excerpt—this from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail:

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

Source: Letter From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr.

Clearly the problems with tech and youth are not a holocaust and they aren’t widespread racism. My purpose in referencing these quotes is to acknowledge the underlying principles expressed in them:

Humanity is prone to willful blindness
Progress only comes when good people are willing to fight for their beliefs

It might be difficult, but we need more parents and educators to honestly investigate their intuitions.

You can put your head in the sand, but reality is reality. Denial may be more comfortable than acknowledging how scary many modern norms are, but by pretending these problems don’t exist, we ensure they persist. By ignoring the full scale of these issues, we fail to adequately prepare our kids and that our communities do not adapt well.