Surviving Our Secrets

Media Club

We’re on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.

Valery Legasov, Chernobyl

If the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that one exists, then the culture of silence regarding particular topics at the family dinner table or at work or in the world¹ is one of the ways that white supremacist, male supremacist, and capitalist systems are able to maintain themselves. As we see in George Orwell’s 1984 and Michel Foucault’s thoughts on “panopticism” in Discipline & Punish, one of the most effective ways to keep a population in line is to have them police themselves and each other, and one of the most effective methods is a culture of silence that will prevent “polite” people from discussing topics that might invite conflict. But who benefits from this conflict avoidance?

Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop known for his anti-apartheid work, famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Silence and neutrality benefits those who do harm, because it is seen as either tacit approval or at the very least, indifference. Allowing racist relatives to use their seat at the dinner table as a bully pulpit without interjecting to “avoid conflict”, knowing that there is a missing stair and trying to organize around it rather than addressing it, and witnessing abuses of power but keeping your head down and “following orders” rather than calling out or questioning the perpetrator are all examples of cultures of silence which allow injustice and harm to occur.

Recently, I watched the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which dramatizes the Chernobyl disaster and the political situation that both led to the event and which exacerbated the effects in the aftermath. Over the course of the miniseries we witness multiple instances of “doublethink” in which there is a very clear and observable reality which is dismissed in favor of what will indicate that one is a “good” Party member. This is a discourse community in which “the truth” is whatever the State decides it is, rather than a reflection of reality. We witness a disaster unfold in part because of human error but more so because of the failures of a Discourse community in which self-preservation, secret-keeping, extreme hierarchy, scapegoating, doublethink, fear, nationalism, cult like patriotism, and a bureaucracy that rewards loyalty over merit, took precedence over life (human and otherwise) and the truth.

In the first episode “1:23:45”, we witness a meeting occur in which the Party is referred to with an almost religious reverence. The men are told to have “faith in the Soviet Socialist State” and they will be “rewarded”. Lenin’s picture is revered in a God-like way and the men are told that “He would be so proud of you”. The men around the table listen with devotion and thump the table with their fists as the speaker concludes in a show of patriotic fervor. After all of this, the men begin to discuss Chernobyl, deciding that nothing all that bad has occurred despite multiple men dying and experiencing signs of radiation poisoning and despite the core having exploded (this they refused to believe, even after eyewitness accounts from workers who were essentially sent to their death to investigate). Rather than warn residents of the dangers, their primary concern is managing public reaction and fear. The populace should “keep their minds on their labor and leave the state to the state . . . that is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor”, and so in addition to lying and secret-keeping, they forbid the residents to evacuate and block communication to the outside world.

Again and again we witness as experts and scientists are not believed about or told to lie about the severity of the catastrophe. Those who tell the truth are punished, humiliated, and threatened. Orders are followed even when they are illogical or immoral, and questioning orders puts one’s loyalty to the Party into question. We watch the outcome of the Party asking its members to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” (Orwell, 1984), creates a disaster that continues to have repercussions nearly four decades later.

I happened to finish Robert Jay Lifton’s book Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic around the same time that I watched Chernobyl, and I kept seeing connections between the two of them, as well as between them and our current political situation. Lifton writes

Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Trump and the radical right embraced a political stance of downplaying it as a catastrophe. This has contributed to the extraordinary number of American Covid deaths. Dr. Deborah Birx, the former Trump administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, has estimated that more than 130,000 American lives could have been saved during the early stages of the pandemic if the Trump administration had followed epidemiological principles and implemented proper mitigation measures.

Downplaying these catastrophes to avoid public scrutiny, even though it costs human lives, is a choice that our political leaders seem comfortable making again and again, which can only lead to one conclusion: the ruling class sees the rest of us as expendable resources and as collateral damage in their quest for power. Worse still, they have desensitized many of us to the violence they do, they have convinced us that it is necessary to “protect our interests abroad”, they have created propaganda to convince us that some people deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and others (who they deem as less than human) deserve slavery, and cages, and death, simply because of who they are or where they were born.

In both Chernobyl and Surviving Our Catastrophes, we witness the cost of lies and misinformation, as well as prioritizing political ideology to such an extent that the the truth is suppressed, ignored, denied, or outright rejected. In discussing what is perhaps the ultimate catastrophe of our time, with the potential to annihilate us all, Lifton writes

No longer is it possible for anyone to avoid knowing in some part of his or her mind that the climate threat exists. Many suppress and resist these truths because they contradict their worldview, their identity, their party politics, their own vested interests, and their donors’ and supporters’ demands. It is more a matter of climate rejection than denial.

Ignoring the truths that are right in front of our eyes because they are inconvenient or terrifying will not make them go away. Staying silent when others are being harmed makes us complicit in their harm. Allowing situations of injustice to continue because we want to cling to the status quo and avoid change is a pathetic excuse when people’s lives are at stake. And the truth is, ignorance, silence, and attempting to preserve things as you knew them won’t save you. Change is happening, and if you don’t act to shape that change now, you leave yourself at the mercy of those who will.

You know what is happening to women.

You know what is happening to immigrants.

You know what is happening in Gaza.

Mr. Rogers told us to “look for the helpers” when the news was overwhelming; now that we’ve grown up, it’s time that we became them.

To be a scientist is to be naïve. We are so focused on our search for the truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants, it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?

Valery Legasov, Chernobyl

1. In January 1998 an article entitled “A Few Topics to Avoid in Social Conversation” was published in the Chicago Tribune. The author, Judith Martin, suggests that “sex, religion, politics, money, illness, the food before them at the moment, which foods they customarily eat or reject and why, anything else having to do with bodily functions, occupations, including their own and inquiries into anyone else’s . . .” were topics that “polite people do not bring into social conversation”. Every year around the holidays a myriad of articles is published debating whether these topics should be banned entirely from family gatherings to avoid conflict or whether there is in fact a moral imperative to have them (there is). ↩︎