They can't see the truth because it is simply too frightening for them, thus they take refuge in implicatory denial.
Decided to check on the word implicatory and found it goes with denial. Although your use of it could be considered technically correct, it really indicates a specific phenomenon in opposition to your overall gist OSIT. This is what appeared first when I googled implicatory denial definition and clicked on the link:
Implicatory Denial: The Sociology of Climate Inaction
Exploring how and why people who believe in climate change choose to ignore it, and how people can be empowered to take climate action.
Despite the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally if we are to lower the risks of catastrophic climate change, wealthy industrialised nations persist with a widespread public silence on the issue and fail to address climate change. This is despite there being ever more conclusive evidence of its severity. Why is there an undercurrent of inaction, despite the challenge of climate change being ever more daunting? One element is denial.
The most recognisable form of climate change denial is the phenomenon of “literal denial” through the rejection of scientific facts on climate change by ‘climate sceptics’. However, while climate change denial in the literal sense has become increasingly accepted in political discourse, media coverage, public opinion and government inaction over the past ten years, it is necessary to address the more pervasive problem of what British sociologist Stanley Cohen calls “implicatory denial”. In terms of climate change, the phenomenon of “implicatory denial” can be understood as a failure to integrate one’s knowledge of climate change into their everyday life or transform it into social action.
As it currently stands, the majority of us understand the threat that climate change places on our very survival, and yet this has not resulted in widespread action on individual and collective levels to address climate change. As such, if we are to address climate change, we need to understand how and why the phenomenon of “implicatory denial” exists, and to discover solutions to empower people to engage in climate action.
So its connection to climate change seems to be the overriding meaning. But if the words
climate change are substituted with say,
COVID lies, then the meaning fits as you intended. [As an aside, when I opened the article, the screen went dark and a very PC message appeared regarding a specific indigenous people and how it was recognized that they never voluntarily ceded their sovereignty.
]
As Stanley Cohen was referenced in the article, I also found this:
Three possibilities are "literal
denial" ("it did not happen"); "interpretive
denial" ("it happened, but its
meaning is different than it appears"); or "
implicatory denial" (it happened but those concerned
deny any responsibility and do not feel to intervene).
This, too, from Karie Marie Norgaard's book,
Living in Denial:
- Literal denial. This happens when people don’t trust the facts, even when overwhelmingly supported by objective and thorough scientific data. We often see this from “Climate Skeptics”.
- Interpretive denial. This one gets slippery. It accepts the facts (climate change is real), but reinterprets the meaning so it doesn’t sound like a real threat. That removes their responsibility to make proactive changes, since it’s not a real problem.
- Implicatory denial. In this case, the facts and the interpretations are generally accepted. But then, “the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow” are discounted and ignored. Climate change is already too advanced for anyone to do anything about it, so I’m off the hook and don’t have to make hard choices.
There was also this article relating to coronavirus:
How to Talk to Coronavirus Skeptics
By
Isaac Chotiner
March 23, 2020
In cases of serious scientific occurrences, such as the coronavirus pandemic, people may suffer what the science historian Naomi Oreskes calls implicatory denial. Photograph by Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe / Getty
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the United States. In 2010, she and the historian Erik M. Conway published “
Merchants of Doubt,” which examined the ways in which politics and big business have helped sow doubt about the scientific consensus. Her most recent book, “
Why Trust Science?,” examines how our idea of the scientific method has changed over time, and how different societies went about verifying its accuracy. Her work often addresses climate change and why Americans have rejected climate-change science more than people in other countries have.
I recently spoke with Oreskes by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the
Trump Administration’s slow response to the pandemic, the Republican Party’s antiscientific propaganda, and strategies for convincing Americans that the threat of
the coronavirus is real.
When you see the way people have responded to the new coronavirus, both in government and average people, do you think the response reflects what you’ve studied regarding the distrust of science?
There’s been a lot of loose talk about distrust in science. The reality is that, if we look at careful public-opinion polls, what we see is that most people do trust science on most things, and most people trust experts on most things. People trust their dentists. People trust their car mechanics. In general, people use experts all the time, and most of us don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing experts on most issues. There are some definite exceptions to that. If we have reason to believe that people are dishonest or incompetent, then we may be skeptical. But, when it comes to science, the big exception has to do with what I’ve written about, which is
implicatory denial. That is to say,
we reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications.
All of the major areas where we see resistance to scientific findings in contemporary life fall into this category. So if you ask yourself, Why do people reject the evidence of evolution? It’s not because evolutionary theory is a bad theory, or a weak theory scientifically, or that we don’t have good evidence for it. It’s because some people think that it implies that there’s no God, or that it implies that life is meaningless and has no purpose, or that it’s all just random and nihilistic. If we think about vaccinations, it’s a similar sort of thing. It’s not that the science of immunology is a bad science or a weak science. It’s not that the people who reject immunization really understand immunology and have an intellectual critique. It’s a matter of, if their children are autistic, they feel upset that their children have a quite devastating disease and modern medical science doesn’t have an explanation for it. So they feel upset and they want an explanation, and so they turn to something like vaccinations, and they say, “Well, that’s the cause.” And so on and so forth with climate change, et cetera.
<snip>
A science historian discusses the Trump Administration’s slow response to the pandemic and strategies for convincing doubters that the threat of the coronavirus is real.
www.newyorker.com
Feel free to read more of this drivel i.e. propaganda, if you think you can stomach it. BTW, an ad appeared for Trump's niece's book,
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.
So there you have it. Your usage of the term runs counter to how the agents of the PTB are using it. What your line of thought brings to mind, though, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ,
The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Nuff said.
The German public, who allowed this Evil to manifest has to take some of the blame - maybe even most of it? Most specifically it was all those 'good people who did nothing' who are to blame.
