The overwhelming majority of French people believe that retirees don’t cost the public too much, that France can still spend much more on its public services, that it can raise taxes on business owners and shareholders, that Putin’s Russia isn’t our enemy, and that the European Union costs us far more than it brings us. In any case, they are about to send two candidates—Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon—to the second round of the presidential election, both of whom believe exactly that.
For many, myself included, this is “denial of reality.”
People engage in it every day when faced with illness or failure; entire nations do so as well when confronted with mounting debt, an enemy they refuse to acknowledge, a climate in turmoil, or a collapsing population.
At the individual level, psychiatry distinguishes at least five forms of this mental illness: first, denial, which Freud defines as a defense mechanism whereby the subject refuses to acknowledge what threatens them, while inwardly admitting it. Anosognosia (in which a patient with paralysis on one side of the body sincerely claims that they can move their arm), which is found in a large proportion of patients with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s disease. Minimization, so common in addiction (“It’s nothing; I can quit whenever I want”); paranoid delusion, when reality is experienced as a hostile fabrication and anything disturbing is seen as proof of a conspiracy. Finally, taken to the extreme, there is cognitive dissonance, as exemplified by the members of that small American cult that expected the end of the world on December 21, 1954, and who, when the prophecy failed, far from abandoning their belief, continued to proselytize.
On a societal level, this denial also exists: the American sociologist and LSE professor Stanley Cohen, in States of Denial (2001), distinguishes three forms of it, which overlap with individual attitudes: literal denial (“it didn’t happen”), interpretive denial (“it happened, but it’s not what you think”), and implicatory denial (“it happened, but it doesn’t concern us”). To these he added, a little later, paranoid denial, which sees the hand of a hidden enemy behind every inconvenient fact. And to these we must also add prospective denial: “it won’t happen.” And people prefer to vote for those who tell them the country isn’t at risk of bankruptcy, just as they prefer to trust someone who tells them they aren’t sick.
All of this would certainly still be a sign of mental disturbance if we did not have to take seriously a formidable objection: who can claim that reality is reality? Very often, those who proclaim that they hold the truth are simply those who hold power. Descartes imagined a malicious genius capable of deceiving us about everything. Galileo was condemned in the name of an official reality. The colonizer imposed his own version of the world on the colonized, just as dictators of all kinds do. Orwell, in 1984, showed just how far a power that demands we believe that two plus two equals five could go. And the “insurmountable constraints” imposed on nations in the name of markets, budgetary balance, geography, power dynamics, or tradition often fall into this category.
We must therefore carefully distinguish between facts and inevitabilities: the rise in the planet’s average temperature, the growth of debt, and the presence of tanks at a border are facts; denying them is pathological. On the other hand, their consequences are not necessarily inevitable, and it is up to humans to recognize the risks and not resign themselves to them.
So, what can be done? We do not help a sick person who denies their illness by trying to prove them wrong, but by working with them toward a common goal: recovery. If facing reality leads only to despair, we prefer to lie. The same is true for nations: a nation will renounce its denial of reality only if the truth opens up a future for it.
This requires, for both individuals and nations, the fulfillment of three conditions: a trusted third party, the ability to face the truth without being overwhelmed, and the prospect of a desirable future. This is what Emperor Meiji achieved; unlike the Chinese emperor, after the arrival of American ships in 1853, he faced the reality of his country’s backwardness head-on and transformed it within a generation. And in 1940, Churchill promised his people nothing but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
When we fail to do this, we crash into a wall while honking our horns, paralyzed by fear and placing our trust in charlatans. That is what France did in the interwar period. And that is what France is doing today: the insolvency of the pension systems, European demands, and Russian hostility are facts—not inevitabilities. We will not get through this if we trust the two parties—the far left and the far right—that deny them.
To overcome these inevitabilities, we must be as wary of those who swear that everything will be just fine no matter what we do as of those who claim that everything is predetermined. We will need trusted third parties—that is, a free press, independent science, and a respected judiciary—without which no one will be able to distinguish a fact from propaganda or an inevitability. We will also need a narrative that makes the truth bearable, by showing that reality—if viewed in time—still leaves ample room for freedom. Finally, we must offer the country a vision: everything for the youth, in a Europe that takes responsibility for its own defense.
Image: The Charlatan by Jan Steen, circa 1651.