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OPINION AND ANALYSIS | 20-08-2024 16:11

Irrationalism, fantastic pseudology and denial

Politicians and demagogic extremists of any kind are often responsible for feeding corrosive material to our neurons – but we are usually the ones guilty for ignoring reliable information and using extremely narrow analytical patterns.

“The time of plural truths has ended... In the same way that there was a Bronze Age, now we live in the Age of Universal Lies, there has never been so much lying. The media twist, according to their interests, the information of an already difficult reality until it becomes something else – José Saramago.

Cognitive biases

Amos Tversky, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely, among others, defined in the context of “Behavioral Economics,” the psychological effects or “cognitive biases” that produce deviations or distortions in our thoughts and decisions. Genuine information available is generally misinterpreted or ignored, thereby generating analytical contradictions and illogical or irrational behaviour.  

As presented in a previous column, politicians and demagogic extremists of any kind are often responsible for feeding corrosive material to our neurons; But we are usually the ones guilty for ignoring reliable information and using extremely narrow analytical patterns, adopting hasty, rigid and inappropriate visions and discourses.

 

The age of lies

It is not clear when this “age of lies,” as defined by Saramago will have begun; Adolf Hitler (1925) already describes the “big lie” (“große Lüge”), as the imposition of a colossal falsehood that no-one will dare to refute; however, Hitler had a very poor education and was rejected from art school (which is why it is inexplicable that a culturally advanced nation like the Germany of 1910-1930s accepted him as a leader).  

On the other hand, Joseph Goebbels, his lieutenant, received his doctorate in 1921 in Heidelberg with Jewish thesis advisors. However, using the ridiculous title of “Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” and the technique of the big lie, he managed to transform ignorant cultural prejudices into genocides and mass murders. Among those close to him, he repeated the phrase: “Lie, lie, something will remain, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.”

Vladimir Putin's current justification for the invasion of Ukraine (similar to Hitler's) is: “the only possible decision for a strong and independent country.” Even worse is his psychological projection or actor/observer bias: “We cannot even talk to people who indiscriminately attack civilians, civilian infrastructure or try to create threats to nuclear energy facilities”; these actions are actually carried out by Russia and not by the Ukrainians.

All current terrorist groups and governments, intentional murderers of women and children, continue trying to impose religious or territorial justifying truths, disguising behind them the psychopathy, sociopathy, misogyny and, of course, the anti-Semitism or racism that effectively mobilises them.

 

Fantastic pseudology

Fantastic pseudology or mythomania, is defined as the behaviour of lying with the desire to create a character and a “story,” in order to enhance one's own image. This leads them to boast about achieved or supposed achievements, and impose manipulative skills without any scruples.

Mythomaniacs usually know their own lies, although they may end up assuming them as if they were truths, in order to integrate them into their imagined and fictitious reality.

Some authors attribute these behaviours to adaptive disorders and emotionally painful circumstances; It is evident that they seem to be present in all the most sinister characters in history.

 

The denial

Denial is a defence mechanism against conflicts; the existence of facts or any link between them and the person themselves is rejected.  When faced with exogenous, endogenous or emotional challenges, some individuals simply prefer to deny their existence. 

In general terms it seems to be a more or less volitional action, that is, a preference adopted for “comfort” rather than a totally involuntary circumstance. 

The action of hiding or censoring all negative information in the event of a possible risk, thus believing that by ignoring it there will be no danger, is sometimes called “ostrich syndrome.”

However, this last name applies better to “normality bias or analysis paralysis”; that is, the distorted tendency to believe that things will work the way they have always worked and therefore, any probability of disaster is underestimated as a possible expected effect.

 

Psychotic denial or anosognosia

In psychiatry, the term “psychotic denial” is used to define an impairment of abilities to perceive reality. For this last case, it would perhaps be more appropriate to use the term "anosognosia", that is, "unawareness of the disease" as the state of people unable to perceive their functional neurological deficit. 

Anosognosia is then not only the denial of reality, but also of the neurological condition itself, such as those caused by vascular or organic injuries or dysfunctions that alter perception mechanisms (FTD, Alzheimer's, etc.).

 

With the apologies

Requesting apologies in advance to all those who selflessly dedicate themselves to these professions, a very old joke defined a “conceptual trilogy” in the following way: "We are all neurotics... we live building castles in the air... psychotics are those who move to inhabit the castle, and psychologists and psychiatrists are the ones who must collect the rent for the castle.”

Let us strive to distinguish whether the long path that has brought us to such an aberrant contemporaneity is anosognosia or simply, a very stupid denial of so many insufferable stupidities that have been done in the last 110 years.

Admitting the conflicting emotional repercussions that this implies... let us then try to better understand what has actually happened to all of us.

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Martín A. Morgenstern

Martín A. Morgenstern

Dr. UBA, MBA y Bsc. Profesor e Investigador en Economía de la Salud.

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