Our Willful Ignorance of Self

I once read that Courtney Taylor-Taylor of the Dandy Warhols approaches his day with this simple practice: he only looks in the mirror once. He gets up, prepares himself for the day, and spends the rest of the day believing he’s that guy in the mirror. Regardless of what life throws at him, that rock star he sees is who he is.

We would certainly be excused if we heard the naiveté and willful ignorance in this routine. After all, it involves avoiding what we really look like while pretending we look different than we do. From this side, it is, at best a foolish disregard for reality, and at worst, willful self-deception.

Willful self-deception is all the rage. Guns, law enforcement, education, ecological troubles, we are certainly avoiding the truth, and worse, that long, hard look in the mirror.

My feeds are filled with stories and comments and confusion. The problems seem insurmountable. Then sometimes we get clarity.

Kimberly Yonkers, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post directing our attention away  from mental illness as the cause of the United States’ propensity for gun violence.

In sum, the American mental health-care system is just about on par with other high resource nations, but the United States has a dramatically higher rate of gun violence.

This is not to say that the mental health system in the United States is without fault. The quality of care for milder psychiatric illness is slightly lower in the States than for our Western European allies. Low-income individuals have less access to mental care. One study documents that not simply resources but strategies to identify high risk youth and engage them in mental health treatment are needed. As a practicing psychiatrist, I regularly see race and economic disparities between the need for and access to psychiatric services. But these issues are universal.

But it is time to recognize that adequate treatment for people with a mental disorder is a distinct problem from gun violence. A much better indicator of whether someone will be violent is whether they come from a violent, poverty stricken environment, and whether they struggle with addiction. Eliminating poverty, domestic violence and childhood exposure to bloodshed would likely make a dent in our problem with gun violence. It may even have made a difference in the life of Ismaaiyl Brinsley.

That’s when I felt it–the moment when it all clicked like a gear locking into place. This is the price of willful ignorance. This is what happens when we don’t look at the way things really are. Not just for me and my own, but for us all. This is what happens when we walk around blissfully unaware of our problems, we get this. We get violence and we get death.

Not that these things stem directly from point A to point B in such an easy pattern. Yet it is what our ignorance and willful self-deception about poverty and our community violence does for us.

More than moral outrage

The urge to self-deception isn’t just guns. We did this, I did this with the release of the torture report. All I needed was to hear the words “rectal hydration” and I jammed my fingers in my ears and sang “la la la”.

But we need to know this because this is us. This is what we’ve become.

“Other times, the detainees…were subjected to what was described as a ‘rough takedown,’ in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.”

This isn’t the most shocking of the report’s details, but it reveals what the accumulative effect of all that is in the report. It shows us less of what torture is; as particular acts to parse and define; and more clearly what it is not: it is not ethical or effective. What we experience as we read is humiliation, abuse, and constant oppression. It is torture and it is terrorism. And it is not who we have always said we are.

And who we still pretend to be.

A Different Reflection

There is a different way we can read that original statement about looking in the mirror.

Taylor-Taylor evokes a ritual of daily examination. Of getting up and dragging his sorry body to the bathroom and getting prepared for his day. What he does: he looks at himself. And he adjusts what needs to be adjusted. He sculpts his hair or changes his clothes. He isn’t just getting ready for the day, he is taking stock in who he is and who he intends to be.

He does this every day. He doesn’t go off for weeks and weeks without looking at himself. He doesn’t take a presidential administration off and then redouble his efforts 8 years later.

Every day, he examines himself. And then declares this is who I am!

This doesn’t appear to be willful ignorance or self-deception at all, but the antidote to vanity. It is justified self-esteem because he looks in the mirror and puts in the effort. He doesn’t let the wind or spilled coffee transform how he sees himself. Because he knows who he is!

The danger of true ignorance and self-deception is that we lose track of that certainty. We stop knowing ourselves because we stop examining ourselves.

Without that examination, we get untethered and lose all sense of self. We stop being us.

And we become a people who accept gun violence as routine, rather than something to bring to an end; war as license to suspend laws; the threat of terrorism as opportunity to torture. And we see all of our problems as political divisions: intractable and totally normal.

Strangely, this self-deception is more normal to us than looking in the mirror. To examine who we are and to twist and tweak to make ourselves better.

This is my reflection of 2014: this is the year millions of people, all over the world screamed for us to look at ourselves in the mirror. To see us: from Newtown to Ferguson. From Guantanamo to Iraq. From Detroit to Washington.  To see who we are. Just take one glimpse. And we refused.

No, that’s not it.

we said

Get off my lawn Facebook feed!

Our chance in 2015 is to actually look at ourselves, to truly examine who we are. What we really look like. Who we are and what we’ve done. To see, not only the graying temples and wrinkles, but the potential. The what that is going to be. To shout

This does not define me!

and

This is not who we are supposed to be!

and

This is not the world I am building for my children!

and

This is not what my grandparents left to me!

and

This changes today!

Because tomorrow is different. It is the day after we see ourselves. It is the day we begin to make ourselves into who we are, not simply what we’re not.

That we may be a people who end gun violence and account for torture. That we build strong schools for everyone, regardless of zip code and teacher expectations, and match world efforts to reduce the ecological crisis. That make true liberty an expectation, not a privilege of wealth and status. That we do something worthy of remembering and celebrating next new year’s eve.

May tomorrow be different. May we be different. May we have all the reason in the world to see rock stars in the mirror and a new world out our windows.