Reality no longer seems to matter to dysfunctional culture in denial

By David McElroy · March 17, 2022

“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
— Ayn Rand

I rolled my eyes when my friend told me what had happened in her family. About six months ago, a man related to her had moved in with his own brother’s family. It was just for a couple of weeks, until he got back his feet after a divorce. He had promised to find a job and quickly get a place of his own.

Six months later, the man still has no job. He watches television and plays video games while his brother and sister-in-law go to work. Has he applied for any jobs? Who knows? Nobody with sense believes a word he says. My friend said the brother who’s supporting the man called her this week.

“I don’t know why he’s not working,” the brother said. “He promised he would. I don’t know how to get him to leave.”

My friend and I both felt amazed. The deadbeat has always been a deadbeat. He’s never been responsible enough to keep a job. He married a woman who was willing to believe his lies about changing, but she quickly threw him out when he was lazy and then became verbally abusive, especially when he was drinking.

But for some reason, the deadbeat’s brother is surprised at all this. Why? It’s because we keep expecting people to be something different from what they’ve shown us they really are. As a society and as individuals, we all seem to be deeply in denial when it comes to objective reality.

I don’t know whether psychological illness starts in individuals and then slowly takes over the culture or if it starts in groups and then infects individuals. I can make an argument for each path of development.

But I’m absolutely certain that one of the primary dysfunctions in modern culture is that we are collectively in deep denial. In more ways than I can count, we have become committed to pretending that objective reality doesn’t exist.

It’s popular today to talk about “my truth” and “my reality,” but those phrases are sheer idiocy. If you want to say “my point of view” or “my experience” or even “my subjective reality,” that’s reasonable. You can rationally interpret the reality you experience. You can come to an opinion about what “the truth” is.

But if two things are contradictory, they cannot both be true. And if two things are both true, they are not truly contradictory when properly understood.

Objective reality — which we used to proudly call truth — does exist. It might be impossible for anyone to say with complete certain what the truth is, but there is one actual reality which is true. Most of us can agree on the criteria by which we are going to label certain things as true. We’re going to agree that certain things seem certain enough to us that we are willing to accept them as objective truth. That’s useful for people who want to live with one another.

I can’t prove with absolute certainty that exploding a stick of dynamite will kill me (and those around me). I can come up with scenarios in which that belief has been implanted in my belief system by lies or some sort of inaccurate observation on my part.

But I’m certain enough about my belief that dynamite is dangerous that I would run if you tried to light a stick of it. If you say it’s safe because “that’s my truth,” I’m not going to risk my life on your belief.

More and more, we are acting — as individuals and as a culture — like people who don’t believe objective reality exists. We’re acting as though we can ignore evidence. We’re acting as though we can choose to believe whatever we want to believe. And then we can ignore the results when we don’t like them.

People who support Donald Trump can pretend he was unjustly denied a presidential win in 2020 because of massive vote fraud which stole the election. That’s simply not true. There’s no rational evidence that this took place. But a lot of people believe this — because they have been trained to ignore reality.

People who support various forms of socialism and other top-down economic schemes can pretend that their idiotic system will finally work the next time it’s tried. There is no rational evidence that such a system can ever work. Anybody who pays attention to history and economics — and who isn’t in denial — knows this. But because such people want their system to work, they assert that things will be different this time — because they have been trained to ignore reality.

Certain people who are confused about their gender roles believe they can pretend to be something other than the sex they were born. (They can claim they were “assigned” a gender at birth.) They’ve invented a gender ideology which redefines words and completely ignores reality. So a woman might get her breasts cut off and have a fake penis implanted — while taking male hormones to artificially change her body’s looks — and then insist that you pretend she’s a man. And a man can do the same dysfunction in reverse. All of these people have been trained to ignore reality.

You can paint a picture of groups of people in delusion and denial, but it’s just as powerful in our individual lives.

A woman who’s married to a man who’s been mean and verbally abusive for many years can pretend he’s going to change — and be a good husband and father — simply because the truth is inconvenient. She’s ignoring reality.

The man who allowed his deadbeat brother to move in — and then claimed to be surprised when the deadbeat acted as he’s always acted — is also in denial. He’s ignoring reality.

We’ve all done this to one extent or another. I know that I have. I’ve pretended that certain people in my life were going to act completely different from the ways those people had shown me they were going to act. I’ve led myself into serious hurt by pretending that someone was going to act as I chose to believe she was at her best, not as her actions had shown me she really was.

I’ve even been in denial about myself and my own actions. I know who I am and what I’m going to do, but I’ve had times when I’ve lied to myself — saying that I would do things which I knew I wasn’t really going to do. When I do all of those things — about myself or about someone else — I’m ignoring reality.

When we ignore reality — as individuals or as a culture — we are setting ourselves up to suffer serious consequences. We can usually see these consequences coming, but we ignore what’s coming. Why? Because living in denial is easier than accepting the truth we prefer not to face.

I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to get our culture to take reality and truth seriously again. I don’t know how to get individuals to quit pretending about the reality of the people in their lives. I’m not even certain that I can stop myself from living in my own self-sabotaging denial.

But I do know this. Truth does exist. You and I are responsible — to ourselves — for understanding that truth. To do this, we have to be truthful with ourselves. We have to stop the denial. We have to accept painful realities.

Until we can do that — as individuals and as a culture — we’re going to continue heading down a dangerous and self-destructive path. The consequences of ignoring reality are going to catch up with us — every time — whether we accept reality or deny it.

We need to choose to accept the truth of reality — even when it’s painful — because the long-term consequences of denial are far more dangerous for all of us.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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