I never cease to be intrigued at how human beings can deny facts, and I don't necessarily mean that as a criticism: the inclination to deny facts outright, or at least to see what we want to see rather than what's really there, is just part of being a human being. About all one can do is to be aware that nobody's immune from the phenomenon, and try hard to avoid slipping into its trap.
With this in mind, I strongly recommend that you read this post on Respectful Insolence. Here's the money quote:
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Denial isn't just for patients, you know. Doctors can feel its power as well. I'm not sure if that's what was going on in this case, but in retrospect there probably was an element of denial in my initial reaction. I just didn't want to consider, at least not as the first explanation, that my patient's cancer had recurred, and that I was powerless to do anything about it. The surgery had gone so well; she had had an early stage cancer. She had tolerated the adjuvant chemotherapy quite well. By all expectations, she should have had a very high chance of living to a ripe old age. Also, the most likely explanation was that this was a reactive node, given her upper respiratory infection, and treating it as though that's what it probably was was not wrong. Waiting was not the wrong thing to do, and, in reality, even if we had waited two weeks to make the diagnosis, it would not have made any difference in her medical prognosis. In fact, part of me almost thinks that it might have been better for her if she had let us persuade her to wait.
[ . . . ]
In this case, though, the patient knew better. Now I know better as well. The patient may not always be right about her disease, but she often is. In the future, I will try to listen better.
You should read the entire post, and check out the links.
I think what I'm most impressed by is the author's recognition of his own fallibility, his acceptance of it and his personal vow to try not to succumb to a universal human imperfection, after an event where I think I'm more sure that he didn't deny reality than he may be. What a wonderful way for a person to be wrong!
Orac's openness to the possibility of his own imperfection is what separates an honest, objective person from an ideologue: for people like Orac, personal responsibility and the avoidance of avoidable error are primary concerns, things to be constantly on guard for, things to be recognized and shunned. It is not in such people to willfully deny facts or reality, or to easily forgive themselves when they think they might have. Fantasies are not a lifestyle option. (I've been fortunate enough to known a number of such people.)
But for the ideologue, there is no appreciation that they themselves are capable of denying facts and reality. There is deep within them the unshakeable conviction that they are right, and with that conviction comes the motivation to adopt extreme tactics — or at least, any check against adopting extreme tactics becomes vanishingly small.
So in the fantasy world of the Animal Rights ideologue, there is no contradiction between falsely asserting, on the one hand, that humans and animals are too different for animals to be appropriate models for understanding the mechanisms of human health and disease, and on the other hand confidently asserting that the (unmeasurable) capacity of animals to suffer like humans should afford animals the right not to live under human influence, all the while calling incoherently on humans deprive dogs and cats of their reproductive rights by spaying and neutering. The contradictions are impossible for all but an AR ideologue to ignore.
For the AR ideologue, there is here a denial of reality, and the substitution of a utopian vision for it, and the accompanying certainty that because the fantasy is pure and the motives are good, the cause is just.
And so it is that some AR extremists can so easily advocate illegal "direct actions", championing vandalism, arson, intimidation and thuggery as legitimate tactics, and at least one AR luminary can openly advocate the assassination of scientists.
(For more on the techniques of persuasion and self-persuasion, see my post entitled Weird Beliefs and Persuasion.)
Brian