Ostrich Head: The Dangers of Willful Blindness

Video: TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
Translation: Francisco Dubiela. Revision: Marina Murarolli

Gayla Benefield was simply doing her job—until she uncovered a terrible secret about her town that caused the local death rate to be 80 times higher than anywhere else in the United States. But when she tried to warn people about it, she encountered an even more shocking truth: people didn't want to know. In a lecture that is part history lesson and part call to action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of "willful blindness" and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak out.

Margaret Heffernan has been president of five different companies. She enjoys investigating human thought patterns – such as the tendency to avoid conflict and so-called "selective blindness," in which a person can only see what is terrible.

In her book Willful Blindness, Heffernan shows how business organizations think. She also examines why so many executives and business leaders often choose to ignore the obvious. Speaking of the consequences of this, she cites the current global financial crisis and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Margaret Heffernan began her career as a television producer.

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Full translation of Margaret Heffernan's lecture:

"In the northwestern corner of the United States, almost on the Canadian border, there's a small town called Libby, in Montana, surrounded by pine trees and lakes and incredible wildlife with these enormous trees that reach for the sky. In the middle of all this is a small town I visited, and it seemed kind of desolate, a little isolated."

And in Libby, Montana, there's an extraordinary woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a bit like an outsider, despite having lived most of her life there, a woman of Russian descent. She told me that when she went to school, she was the only girl who decided to study industrial design.

Later, she got a job going door-to-door reading meters – for gas and electricity. She did this work in the middle of the day, and something particularly caught her attention: in the middle of the day she encountered many middle-aged and elderly men at home, many of whom seemed to be using oxygen tanks. She found it strange. A few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He had been a miner. She thought he must have become exhausted from the work.

But a few years later, her mother died, and this seemed strange to her, since her mother came from a long line of people who seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive today, and learning to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother died so young. It was an anomaly, and she continued to reflect on anomalies. And as she reflected, others came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother broke her leg and went to the hospital, and had several X-rays, and two of them were X-rays of her leg, which made sense, but six of them were X-rays of her chest, which didn't make sense.

She reflected and reflected on each episode of her life and the lives of her parents, trying to understand what she was seeing.

She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine. Vermiculite was used in soil conditioners to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate attics, in large quantities placed under the roof to keep houses warm during Montana's long winters. Vermiculite was in the parks. It was on the football field. It was on the skating rink. What she didn't know until she started working on this problem is that vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.

When she cracked the puzzle, she started telling everyone what had happened, what had happened to her parents, and the people she saw with oxygen tanks at home in the middle of the day. But she was truly haunted. She thought, when everyone knows, they'll want to do something, but in reality, nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, her friends, and other people in the community that finally some of them got together and made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, that said: "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."

But Gayla didn't stop. She continued her research. The arrival of the internet definitely helped her. She talked to everyone she could. She argued and argued, and finally she had a stroke of luck when a researcher came to town to study the history of the area's mines, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone else, he didn't believe her, but when he returned to Seattle and did his own research, he discovered that she was right.

So now she had an ally. However, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if this were really dangerous, someone would have warned us." "If this is why everyone is dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the men who did heavy labor said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents."

But Gayla persisted, and finally succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to the town and examine the town's inhabitants—15 people—and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere else in the United States. This was in 2002, and even then, nobody raised a hand and said, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite."

This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept that means if there is information you can and should know, but somehow you choose not to know, the law considers you willfully blind. You chose not to know. There is a lot of willful blindness these days. We can see willful blindness in banks, where thousands of people granted mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. We can see it in banks where interest rates were manipulated and everyone knew what was happening, but everyone diligently ignored it. We can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse were ignored.

We can see willful blindness on the eve of the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like that, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and especially in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been assessed for willful blindness can be asked questions like: "Are there problems at work that people are afraid to bring up?" And when academics have done studies like that of corporations in the United States, what they've found is that 85% of people say yes. 85% of people know there's a problem, but they don't say anything. And when I repeated that research in Europe, asking the same questions, I found exactly the same number. 85%. That's a lot of silence. That's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me: "This is a problem only in Switzerland." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is a German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh yes, the English are very bad at this." And the truth is that this is a human problem. We are all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.

What the research shows is that some people are blinded by fear. They are afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think that paying attention to everything is futile. Nothing will change. If we protest against the Iraq War, nothing will change, so why bother? It's better not to pay attention to it.

And the recurring theme I encounter all the time is people saying, "Well, you know, the people who notice, they're snitches, and we all know what happens to them." There's this deep-seated mythology about snitches that says, first of all, that they're crazy. But what I've discovered traveling the world and talking to snitches is that, in fact, they are very loyal and often conservative people. They are very dedicated to the institutions they work for, and the reason they speak up, the reason they insist on noticing, is because they care deeply about the institution and want to keep it healthy.

And the other thing people always say about snitches is: "Well, there's no way out, because you can see what happens to them. They get crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to snitches, the recurring tone I hear is pride.
I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the Abu Ghraib photographs, which shocked the world and showed us the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder if anyone remembers Joe Darby, the good, obedient soldier who found those photographs and turned them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy who snitches, but some things go too far. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but we can't tolerate things like this."

I spoke with Steve Bolsin, an English doctor, who fought for five years to warn about a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, actually it was my daughter who motivated me to do it. She came to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let children die.'"

Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a daughter and wife of military personnel, who, upon seeing her friends and relatives return from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental conditions and the military's refusal to acknowledge and admit post-traumatic stress disorder that she set up a café in the middle of a military village to provide them with legal, psychological, and medical assistance. And when she spoke to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. But I found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same again."

We all enjoy so many freedoms these days, freedoms that were hard-won: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that didn't exist here the last time I was in Hungary; the freedom to vote, which women in particular have had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientations to live the way they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what snitch-snitches do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do, is use the freedom they have. And what they are very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be a discussion, and yes, I'm going to have a lot of arguments with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to handle this conflict very well. I'm going to confront my opponents because they make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind or silent.

When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield created, a place where initially some of the people who wanted to help and needed medical assistance would enter through the back door because they didn't want to admit she was right. I went to a restaurant and watched the trucks going back and forth along the highway, hauling soil from gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil.

I took my 12-year-old daughter with me because I wanted her to meet Gayla. And she asked, "Why? What's the importance of this?"
I replied, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla is the first person who would say she's not a saint. What's really important about Gayla is that she's ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it." Thank you very much."