Denial Makes the World Go Round (NYT)

Varieties of denial include inattention, passive acknowledgment, reframing and willful blindness.

For years she hid the credit card bills from her husband: The $2,500 embroidered coat from Neiman Marcus. The $900 beaded scarf from Blake in Chicago. A $600 pair of Dries van Noten boots. All beautiful items, and all perfectly affordable if she had been a hedge fund manager or a Google executive.

Friends at first dropped hints to go easy or rechannel her creative instincts. Her mother grew concerned enough to ask pointed questions. But sales clerks kept calling with early tips on the coming season’s fashions, and the seasons kept changing.

“It got so bad I would sit up suddenly at night and wonder if I was going to slip up and this whole thing would explode,” said the secretive shopper, Katharine Farrington, 46, a freelance film writer living in Washington, who is now free of debt. “I don’t know how I could have been in denial about it for so long. I guess I was optimistic I could pay, and that I wasn’t hurting anyone.
“Well, of course that wasn’t true.”

Everyone is in denial about something; just try denying it and watch friends make a list. For Freud, denial was a defense against external realities that threaten the ego, and many psychologists today would argue that it can be a protective defense in the face of unbearable news, like a cancer diagnosis.

In the modern vernacular, to say someone is “in denial” is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it’s not a problem.

Denial Good For Relationships

Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people.

“The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and the author of the coming book “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct.” “We really do want to be moral people, but the fact is that we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggle out of speeding tickets, and to forgive others for doing the same.”

The capacity for denial appears to have evolved in part to offset early humans’ hypersensitivity to violations of trust. In small kin groups, identifying liars and two-faced cheats was a matter of survival. A few bad rumors could mean a loss of status or even expulsion from the group, a death sentence.

In a series of recent studies, a team of researchers led by Peter H. Kim of the University of Southern California and Donald L. Ferrin of the University of Buffalo, now at Singapore Management University, had groups of business students rate the trustworthiness of a job applicant after learning that the person had committed an infraction at a previous job. Participants watched a film of a job interview in which the applicant was confronted with the problem and either denied or apologized for it.

If the infraction was described as a mistake and the applicant apologized, viewers gave him the benefit of the doubt and said they would trust him with job responsibilities. But if the infraction was described as fraud and the person apologized, viewers’ trust evaporated — and even having evidence that he had been cleared of misconduct did not entirely restore that trust.

“We concluded there is this skewed incentive system,” Dr. Kim said. “If you are guilty of an integrity-based violation and you apologize, that hurts you more than if you are dishonest and deny it.”

The system is skewed precisely because the people we rely on and value are imperfect, like everyone else, and not nearly as moral or trustworthy as they expect others to be. If evidence of this weren’t abundant enough in everyday life, it came through sharply in a recent study led by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Ariely and two colleagues, Nina Mazar and On Amir, had 326 students take a multiple-choice general knowledge test, promising them payment for every correct answer. The students were instructed to transfer their answers, for the official tally, onto a form with color-in bubbles for each numbered question. But some of the students had the opportunity to cheat: they received bubble sheets with the correct answers seemingly inadvertently shaded in gray. Compared with the others, they changed about 20 percent of their answers, and a follow-up study demonstrated that they were unaware of the magnitude of their dishonesty.

By BENEDICT CAREY
For the next page of this New York Times article, go here.

NVDL: This why our chronic denial of the Peak Oil issue is in essence related to our ego's. Think of automobile advertising. Your car says a lot about you. Your car is an extension of your image, and by far the most powerful. Our car's give us an identity, they enable us to get ahead, they place us in or out of a particular status quo. And we do tend to deny whatever deflates our ego's. Sometimes that denial is also called lying. But your mother probably told you: lying is bad, but lying to yourself is just plain frickin' dumb! Human beings are in denial about a fuckload of things. South Africans and Americans probably lead the pack.

South Africans are in denial about the following:
- being the world leader for those suffering from a terminal disease called AIDS (people should be walking around with certificates stating whether they are HIV positive or not, to hand out to prospective lovers, but more importantly, for their own perusal. Over 5 million people are presently infected. Meanwhile South Africa is no different from any other sex-crazed, apparently sex starved country.
- being the world leader with regard to crime, and in particular, violent crime. But do our communities get involved, hold Town Hall meetings? Do neighbours even talk to each other about what to do, who to call, how to help if one of them gets attacked?
- being la di dah, blah di blah about environmental issues. South Africa is one of the world's worst polluters per capita. This is thanks to our mining activities, and also our golden saviour: SASOL
- we're in denail about the electricity problem (which will get worse over at least a 7 year period)
- we're in denial about the rest of Africa, particularly Zimbabwe
- we're in denial about our political leaders
- we're in denial about our own inner corruption
- we're in denial about our diets, about exercise, about who we are.
Fundamentally, we're fucked.

World's Worst Serial Killer: Richard Kuklinski

Richard Kuklinski was one of the most diabolical self-confessed contract killers in American history, who took credit for over 200 murders, including the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

From About.com:

Profile of Richard Kuklinski
by Charles Montaldo,
The Iceman

Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born in the projects in Jersey City, New Jersey to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski. Stanley was a severely abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children. Anna was also abusive to her children, sometimes beating them with broom handles.

In 1940, Stanley's beatings resulted in the death of Kuklinski's old brother, Florian. Stanley and Anna hid the cause of the child's death from the authorities, saying he had fallen down a flight of steps.
By the age of 10, Richard Kuklinski was filled with rage and began acting out. For fun he would torture animals and by the age of 14, he had committed his first murder.

Taking a steel clothing rod from his closet, he ambushed Charlie Lane, a local bully and leader of a small gang who had picked on him. Unintentionally he beat Lane to death. Kuklinski felt remorse for Lane's death for a brief period, but then saw it as a way to feel powerful and in control. He then went on and nearly beat to death the remaining six gang members.

Early Adulthood

By his early twenties Kuklinski had earned the reputation as being an explosive tough street hustler who would beat or kill those who he didn't like or who offended him. According to Kuklinski it was during this time that his association with Roy DeMeo, a member of the Gambino Crime Family, was established.

From Street Punk to Paid Hitman

As his work with DeMeo advanced his ability to be an effective killing machine was recognized. According to Kuklinski, he became a favorite hitman for the mob, resulting in the deaths of at least 200 people. The use of cyanide poison became one of his favorite weapons as well as guns, knives and chainsaws.

Brutality and torture would often precede death for many of his victims. This included his own description of causing his victims to bleed, then tying them up in rat infested areas. The rats, attracted to the smell of blood would eventually eat the men alive.

The Family Man

Barbara Pedrici saw Kuklinski as a sweet giving man and the two married and had three children. Much like his father, Kuklinski, who was 6' 4" and weighing over 300 pounds, began to beat and terrorize Barbara and the children. On the outside, however, the Kuklinski family was admired by neighbors and friends as being a happy and well adjusted.

The Beginning of the End

Eventually Kuklinski started making mistakes and the New Jersey State Police were watching him. When three associates of Kuklinskis turned up dead, a task force was organized with the New Jersey authorities and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Special Agent Dominick Polifrone went undercover and spent a year and a half disguised as a hitman and eventually met and gained Kuklinski's trust. Kuklinski bragged to the agent about his proficiency with cyanide and boasted about freezing a corpse in order to mask his time of death. Afraid Polifrone would soon become another of Kuklinski's victims, the task force moved quickly after taping some of his confessions and getting him to agree to do a hit with Polifrone.

The End of the Iceman

On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski was arrested and charged with five counts of murder which involved two trials. He was found guilty in the first trial and reached an agreement in the second trial and was sentenced to two life sentences. He was sent to Trenton State Prison, where his brother was serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl.

Enjoying the Fame

While in prison he was interviewed by HBO for a documentary called "The Iceman Confesses," then later by author Anthony Bruno, who wrote the book "The Iceman," as a follow-up to the documentary. In 2001, he was interviewed again by HBO for another documentary called, "The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer."

It was during these interviews that Kuklinski confessed to several cold-blooded murders and spoke of his ability to detach himself emotionally from his own brutality. When on the subject of his family he uncharacteristically showed emotions when describing the love he felt towards them.

Kuklinski Blames Childhood Abuse

When asked why he had become one of the most diabolical mass murderers in history, he cast blame on his father's abuse and admitted the one thing he was sorry for was for not killing him.

Questionable Confessions

Authorities do not buy everything Kuklinski claimed during the interviews. Witnesses for the government who were part of DeMeo's group said Kuklinski was not involved in any murders for DeMeo. They also question the number of murders he claimed to have committed.

His Suspicious Death

On March 5, 2006, Kuklinski, age 70, died of unknown causes. His death came suspiciously around the same time he was scheduled to testify against Sammy Gravano. Kuklinski was going to testify that Gravano hired him to kill a police officer in the 1980s. Charges against Gravano were dropped after Kuklinski's death because of insufficient evidence.

Kuklinski and the Hoffa Confession

In April 2006, it was reported that Kuklinski had confessed to author Philip Carlo that he and four men had kidnapped and murdered union boss Jimmy Hoffa. In an interview aired on CNN's "Larry King Live," Carlo discussed the confession in detail, explaining the Kuklinski was part of a five-member team, who under the direction of Tony Provenzano, a captain in the Genovese crime family, kidnapped and murdered Hoffa in a restaurant parking lot in Detroit.

A Family Consumed by Fear

Also on the program was Barbara Kuklinski and her daughters, who spoke about the abuse and fear they suffered at the hands of Kuklinski.

One telling moment which described the true depth of Kuklinski's sociopathic brutality was when one of the daughters, described as Kuklinski's "favorite" child, told of her father's attempt to get her to understand, when she was 14, why if he killed Barbara during a fit of rage, he would also have to kill her and her brother and sister.

NVDL: This oke is full of kak.

The Porn Myth

NVDL: Someone once said to me: "Life is a porn movie." Porn is about the feel-good-factor, it's the most INSTANT of instant gratifications out there, Porn is seeing-is-beliving (even though we should know it's a con), and at heart (although it really doesn't have one), porn is mean and shallow and dumb. The article below is thankfully written by a woman, and is incredibly astute. You've been warned.

In the end, porn doesn’t whet men’s appetites—it turns them off the real thing.
By Naomi Wolf

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

More on this topic:

Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On.: Internet porn is everywhere; even "nice" guys are hooked. So where does that leave their girlfriends? By David Amsden (October 20, 2003)
The New Position on Casual Sex: The rise of Internet dating has brought a sexual openness (not to mention one-night stands) to the younger generation not seen since the seventies heyday of Maxwell's Plum. But can there be too much of a good thing? By Vanessa Grigoriadis (January 13, 2003)

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.
But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market.

No Show

If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene.

What's Enough?

Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.

For page 2 visit nymag.com

Creatures that swarm

and multiply...

Advanced Life Forms

When I was a pikkie at school, I remember seeing some x-ray footage of someone eating. You know, the lower jaw like a mandible, chomping off something, grinding it into small mush with our small monkey teeth, and then swallowing it. You see the white pulp, globs of it, dripping like snot down towards our sewer like digestive system (reeking with vaporised meat gas). At the time this simple depiction of the see-thru human jaw was like watching Star War special effects, but the impression it made on me was this: when you step away from being a human being, we're not a very graceful animal. For the most part, we're a vulgar species.

In the movie Venus Peter o' Toole's character interestingly points out that the most beautiful thing a man will see in his whole life is the naked body of a woman. Jessie asks him what the most beautiful thing is that a woman will see. He says: "Her first child." I wonder if that is true, and if it is, should it be true.

What about the beauty of an entire planet, of a mountain standing tall in an icy gale. Or the ocean.

While having lunch I reflected on this thing we do. When we humans eat, it involves finding something that was alive (dead now on our behalf), and we use pieces of metal to first cut it and then we break the dead tissue into smaller fragments and swallow it. That's essentially how we function. We get our energy from biting the bodies of other creatures and digesting them. Spiders do that too.

I suppose nothing is wrong with it, except that I think I prefer the elegance of say, a sunflower that simply absorbes the energy of the sun in its face, and in its fingers. Or moss on a log or tree limb, or a mushroom poking its white head out of chocolate cake soil, sucking nutrients out of bare soil, or even the beauty and power of entire forests. I suppose I admire the beauty and elegance of a form of life that opens its arms and fingers to the sun and absorbes its energy. By pure chemical reaction. Not by some primitive chewing process, where your teeth break the body of some other delicate life form, and in so doing, you're able to live. Imagine the elegance of living where simply breathing and standing in the sun gives life to oneself and energy to the world.

And we think we are advanced life forms.