We are all taught to avoid uncomfortable realities. Human beings - faced with unpleasant truths about themselves or their reality - react like alcoholics who refuse to admit their condition, or the cuckolded husband who is the "last to know," or the wife who does not notice that her husband is abusing her daughter.
Denial is a complex "unconscious defence mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality." Denial can be both deliberate and intentional, as well as completely subconscious. An individual who is deliberately and intentionally denying something is acting from an individual level of lying, concealment and deception. What we are dealing with - in terms of the "Evil Magician" or the Predator of Don Juan - is denial that is subconscious and therefore organized and "institutional." This implies propaganda, misinformation, whitewash, manipulation, spin, disinformation, etc.
Believing anything that comes down the pike is not the opposite of denial. "Acknowledgement" of the probability of a high level of Truth about a given matter is what should happen when people are actively aroused by certain information. This information can be 1) factual or forensic truth; that is to say, legal or scientific information which is factual, accurate and objective; it is obtained by impartial procedures; 2) personal and narrative truth including "witness testimonies."
I should add here that skepticism and solipsistic arguments - including epistemological relativism - about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction and might be considered in the terms of the hypnotized man who has been programmed to think that there "is no truth."
Denial occurs for a variety of reasons. There are truths that are "clearly known," but for many reasons - personal or political, justifiable or unjustifiable - are concealed, or it is agreed that they will not be acknowledged "out loud." There are "unpleasant truths" and there are truths that make us tired because if we acknowledge them - if we do more than give them a tacit nod - we may find it necessary to make changes in our lives.
There are different kinds of denial. First, there is literal denial which is the type that fits the dictionary definition, the assertion that something did not happen or does not exist. This most often occurs in very painful situations where there are conflicts of love: the wife would say that the husband could not have molested his daughter, therefore the child must be making it up. This also seems to apply to denial of the state of our manipulated reality. Our love for our parents, our need for their approval, is often transferred to our peers, our employers, and the State. To think about stepping outside of the belief system that makes us "belong" is just too frightening. It assaults our deepest sense of security.
The second kind of denial is "interpretative." In this kind of denial, the raw facts that something actually happened are not really denied - they are just "interpreted." If a person is reasonably intelligent, and is faced with evidence of phenomena that do not fit into the belief system of one's family, culture, or peer group, there is nothing to do but to interpret - to rationalize it away. "Swamp gas" and the Planet Venus given as an explanation for UFOs are good examples. Another is Bill Clinton's "But I didn't INHALE" interpretation of his marijuana use. And then, there was the famous "I didn't have sex with Monica" interpretation.
The third kind of denial is termed by Cohen as implicatory denial where there is no attempt to deny either the facts or their conventional interpretation; what is ultimately denied are the psychological, political and moral implications that follow from deep acknowledgement. For example, the idea that America is being run by a madman with designs on the entire planet is recognized as a fact, but it is not seen as psychologically disturbing or as carrying any moral imperative to act.
Studies have established five different contexts of psychological denial:1) perception without awareness, 2) perceptual defense 3) selective attention, 4) cognitive errors and 5) inferential failures.
In States of Denial, (Cambridge: Polity Press; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), Stanley Cohen remarks that "the scientific discourse misses the fact that the ability to deny is an amazing human phenomenon [...] a product of sheer complexity of our emotional, linguistic, moral and intellectual lives."
