"Freedom doesn’t exist if you don’t use it"

Margaret Heffernan: The dangers of "willful blindness"

Willful blindness, “is a legal concept which means, if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind.” - Margaret Heffernan

I have been thinking about a topic for the blog, and just when I was struggling, I got distracted to listen to a Ted Talk by Margaret Heffernan. It turned out to be the best distraction for the day.

In her Ted Talk, Heffernan told a story of Gayla Benefield uncovered a terrible secret behind the unusual high mortality rate (it was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S.) in her hometown. As she was trying to reveal the truth to people, she found out people are primed to ignore the evidence that something is wrong happening in their community.  They do not want to know or believe it. Some people were aware of that problem, and knew it was wrong, but chose to ignore it and not tell anyone.

Key Highlights of Heffernan’s presentation:

• ·       “And the truth is, this is a human problem. We’re all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.”
• ·       “… some people are blind out of fear. They are afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing’s ever going to change… if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all.”
• ·       Most people often think whistleblowers are crushed; yet some whistleblowers actually took it as pride.
• ·       “Freedom doesn’t exist if you don’t use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom they have.

I found this presentation applicable not only to our society, but on a personal level as well. The tendency of willful blindness, according to Heffernan, exists from a large scale like Gayla’s case to organizations and institutions and to small scales like in families and communities. Instead of using the obvious, recent whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning, Heffernan uses a story of an “ordinary” individual and her determination to “not to be blind, and not to be silent” to pinpoint a common behavior that has been embedded in corporate organizations, in media, in politics, in communities-- willful blindness happens a lot; it develop from a young age (i.e. how kids ignore seeing other kids being bullied in school because of fear); and it happens everywhere. Take an example of Indian Rape culture, mistreatment of women has been accepted as normal and even a norm until someone persisted to voice it, challenge it, protest it and put it on the international public view. It is amazing how it just take one person to break the silence (that also led me to think about the “otherness” we have talked about in class, and how the role of media representation has an effect on this) and to make everyone feel empowered to swim against the current. Heffernan was right, because of our ignorance; because of our fears of not wanting to bear offenses and retaliation, many of us have CHOSE to keep in silent and stay blind, and because of that, we have lost our freedom—the freedom that we could have used to provide a better quality of life for all humanity.