patrick.net

The gut wrench horror of discovering someone or some institution you trust and depend on did not deserve trust — you gave them your energy, faith, money, consent, lives … they gave you up, they gave up your family! ...

When cheating is detected, a normal human response is either anger and confrontation and/or rejection of the cheater. But things go sideways when we’re betrayed by someone or an institution we feel our lives depend on. Suddenly it seems both normal response A - confronting the betrayer, and normal response B - rejecting the betrayer directly threaten our survival. The internal cheater detection alarms go off as usual, but the normal responses are off the table.

Bad news: There’s betrayal blindness

This inner fear-based crisis often results in what researchers have termed betrayal blindness. People block from their awareness the reality of the betrayal. The betrayed often forget the experience, or retell it as if the betrayal was something they wanted when they really had no control and no choice. Impaired memory can be provoked by explicit threats from the betrayer demanding silence. ...

When a betrayal is discovered or finally faced, a person’s sense of who they think they are often shatters. The betrayed may suddenly see all the early warning signs — which were ignored — and that realization can lead to a cascade of debilitating self doubt and self blame.

“How could I have been so stupid? Why did I allow this to happen?” ...

The desire to preserve one’s sense of self is likely a strong contributing motivator for betrayal blindness. To stay blind preserves relationships, institutions, and social systems — and a sense of self — upon which the betrayed believes they depend, even though these very relationships, institutions, and social systems have caused enormous harm.

The natural human instinctive desire to be free from the harm of betrayers is blocked from guiding the betrayed toward an appropriate healthy course of action. Our brains, in attempting to protect us from expected traumas, make us reject obvious betrayals.

The powers-that-be cultivate and count on betrayal blindness

We can track now how the cabal uses this knowledge of human behavior models to manipulate and control the masses. If you can predict how humans respond to betrayal and why they choose to be blind to it, the formula writes itself. ...

Psychologists point out this betrayal blindness human behavior pattern also shows us the path to seeing clearly again: reduce fear, reduce dependence.

“If dependence on those authorities can be reduced, the ability to separate lies from truth should spring back to life.”

It’s our emotional and perhaps perceived financial dependence on the heroes and their promises that leads to our blindness to their deceptions. If we keep trusting them we are in trouble. ...

There are many walking wounded. I don’t know one family who wasn’t torn apart by the life-threatening emotional coercion process the cabal deployed in the “covid” operation. The fact that I’ve yet to hear via friends or online of any outpourings of apologies for the cruelty inflicted and that no one wants to talk about it tells me there’s a LOT of unprocessed betrayal blindness that hasn’t been dealt with.

So what gives? Why have academics proved to be so remarkably immune to seeing what's happening in the world, despite the fact that the evidence is beating them over the head on a daily basis?

Here's my theory:

The truth hurts.

I don't just mean that in the way that your emotionally abusive ex-girlfriend meant it when she told you her new boyfriend had a bigger dick. Frankly she's a bitch, and probably nothing she says is true, king, so just put whatever she said out of your mind. You're better off without her.

I mean it quite literally: the truth, when it contradicts what you think is true, is interpreted by your brain as more or less the same thing as physical pain. To be more specific, that's probably your left brain talking, since it's your left brain that falls in love with simplified models of reality and readily rejects facts that contradict those models. That just a bit of nuance that doesn't affect the central point, which is that it hurts to accept something that violates a previously held belief.

Learning takes effort at a biological level. The brain has to grow new connections, which means it has to invest time and energy in that rather than in just using the existing pathways. That's hard enough when it's learning something that doesn't contradict previously assimilated information. It's much worse when it contradicts something that is already believed. In that case, the brain has to go back and undo connections that were already made, as well as make the new connections. All that work - for nothing! And the deeper and more fundamental the assumption, the more concepts it connects to, the more beliefs that are built on it which must now be re-examined, the more reluctant the brain is to modify it ... the more painful undoing that assumption is. ...

If you went through it, you know just how wrenching it is, as the awful realization sets in that you were lied to, that you were gullible enough to be deceived, and that you now have to re-examine everything you once believed about the world. To say nothing of the isolation that comes with the knowledge that, with most people, you simply cannot speak of these things.

If you did this, congratulations - you felt the pain of truth, and rather than shying away from it, you moved forward, into the pain. Something inside you understood that the pain was a small price to pay for the truth.