Willful blindness | Margaret Heffernan | TEDxDanubia

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED conferences.
Margaret Heffernan is a passionate believer in honesty, creative conflict and courage which are needed to overcome our fears and help us widen and enrich the people and ideas we were prepared to engage with.

In the northwest corner
of the United States,

right up near the Canadian border,

there's a little town
called Libby, Montana.

And it's surrounded by pine trees

and lakes, and just amazing wildlife,

and these enormous trees
that scream up into the sky.

And in there is a little town
called Libby,

which I visited,

which feels kind of lonely,
a little isolated.

And in Libby, Montana,

there's a rather unusual woman
named Gayla Benefield.

She always felt
a little bit of an outsider,

although she's been there
almost all her life

—a woman of Russian extraction.

She told me that when she went to school,

she was the only girl who ever chose
to do mechanical drawing.

Later in life, she got a job
going house to house

reading utility meters,
gas meters, electricity meters.

And she was doing the work
in the middle of the day.

And one thing particularly
caught her notice, which was,

in the middle of the day, she met
a lot of men who were at home

— middle-aged, late middle-aged —

and a lot of them seemed
to be on oxygen tanks.

Struck her as strange.

Then, a few years later,
her father died at the age of 59,

five days before he was due
to receive his pension.

"He'd been a miner," she thought,

"he must just have been worn out
by the work."

But then, a few years later,

her mother died,

and that seemed stranger still,

because her mother came
from a long line of people

who just seemed to live forever.

In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive
to this day and learning how to waltz.

It didn't make sense

that Gayla's mother
should die so young.

It was an anomaly

and she kept puzzling over those anomalies

and as she did, other ones came to mind.

She remembered, for example,
when her mother had broken a leg

and went in the hospital
and she had a lot of X-rays.

Two of them were leg X-rays,
which made sense,

but six of them were chest X-rays,
which didn't.

She puzzled and puzzled over every piece
of her life and her parent's life,

trying to understand what she was seeing.

She thought about her town.

The town had a vermiculite mine in it.

Vermiculite was used
for soil conditioners,

to make plants grow faster and better.

Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts;

huge amounts of it, put under the roof

to keep houses warm
during the long Montana winters.

Vermiculite was in the playground,

it was in the football ground,
it was in the skating rink.

What she didn't learn
until she started working this problem,

is vermiculite is
a very toxic form of asbestos.

When she figured out the puzzle,

she started telling everyone she could.

What it happened,
what had been done to her parents,

and to the people
that she saw on oxygen tanks,

at home, in the afternoons.

But she was really amazed, she thought:

"When everybody knows,
they will want to do something."

But actually, nobody wanted to know.

In fact, she became so annoying
as she kept insisting on telling the story

to her neighbours, to her friends,
to other people in the community,

that eventually, a bunch of them
got together and made a bumper sticker

which they proudly displayed
on their cars, which said:

"Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana,
and no, I don't have asbestosis."

But Gayla didn't stop.

She kept doing research.

The advent of the Internet
definitely helped her.

She talked to anybody she could.

She argued and argued
and finally she struck lucky

when a researcher came through town
studying the history of mines in the area.

And she told him her story,

and at first, of course,
like everyone, he didn't believe her,

but he went back to Seattle
and he did his own research,

and he realised that she was right.

So, now, she had an ally.

Nevertheless, people
still didn't want to know.

They said things like: "Well,
if it were really dangerous,

someone would have told us."

"If that's really why everyone was dying,

the doctors would have told us."

Some of the guys used to
very heavy jobs, said:

"I don't want to be a victim,
I can't possibly be a victim,

and anyway, every industry
has its accidents."

But still, Gayla went on,

and finally succeeded in getting
a federal agency to come to town

and to screen the inhabitants of the town,

15,000 people.

And what they discovered

was that the town had a mortality rate

80 times higher than anywhere
in the United States.

That was in 2002,

and even at that moment,

no one raised their hand to say:

"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

which means if there's information
that you could know and you should know

but you somehow manage not to know,

the law deems
that you are willfully blind,

you have chosen not to know.

There's a lot of willful blindness
around these days.

You can see willful blindness in banks,

when thousands of people sold mortgages
to people who couldn't afford them.

You could see them in banks
when interest rates were manipulated

and everyone around
knew what was going on,

but everyone studiously ignored it.

You can see willful blindness
in the Catholic Church,

where decades of child abuse went ignored.

You could see willful blindness

in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Willful blindness exists
on epic scales like those,

and it also exists on very small scales,

in people's families,
in people's homes and communities,

and particularly,
in organizations and institutions.

Companies that had been studied
for willful blindness,

can be asked questions like:

"Are there issues at work

that people are afraid to raise?"

And when academics
have done studies like these

--of corporations in the United States--

what they find is 85% of people say yes.

85% of people know there's a problem,

but they won't say anything.

And when I duplicated
the research in Europe,

asking all the same questions,

I found exactly the same number,

85%.

That's a lot of silence.

It'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 uniquely Swiss problem."

And when I go to Germany they say,

"Oh yes, this is the German disease."

And when I go to companies
in England, they say:

"Oh yeah, the British
are really bad at this."

And the truth is

this is a human problem.

We're all,

under certain circumstances,

willfully blind.

What the research shows is
that some people are blind out of fear,

they're afraid of retaliation,

and some people are blind
because they think:

"Well, seeing anything is just futile,
nothing's ever going to change.

If we make a protest,
if we protest against the Iraq war,

nothing changes, so why bother?

Better not to see this stuff at all."

And the recurrent theme that I encounter
all the time is people say:

"Well you know, the people
who do see, they're whistleblowers,

and we all know what happens to them."

So there's this profound mythology
around whistleblowers

which says, first of all,
they're all crazy.

But what I've found going around the world
and talking to whistleblowers

is, actually, they're very loyal

and quite often, very conservative people.

They're hugely dedicated
to the institutions that they work for

and the reason that they speak up,
the reason they insist on seeing,

is because they care so much
about the institution

and want to keep it healthy.

And the other thing that people
often say about whistleblowers

is: "Well, there's no point

because you see what happens to them,

they're crushed, they're destroyed.

Nobody would want
to go through something like that."

And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers,

the recurrent tone that I hear, is pride.

I think of Joe Darby.

We all remember
the photographs of Abu Ghraib,

which so shocked the world

and showed the kind of war
that was being fought in Iraq.

But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby,

the very obedient, good soldier

who found those photographs

and handed them in.

And he said:

"You know, I'm not the kind
of guy to rat people out,

but some things just crossed the line.

Ignorance is bliss, they say,

but you can't put up
with things like this."

I talked to Steve Bolsin,
a British doctor,

who fought for five years

to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon

who was killing babies.

And I asked him
why he did it, and he said:

"Well, it was really my daughter
who prompted me to do it.

She came up to me one night
and she just said:

Dad, you can't let the kids die."

Or I think of Cynthia Thomas,

a really loyal army daughter
and army wife,

who, as she saw her friends and relations
coming back from the Iraq war,

was so shocked by their mental condition,

and the refusal of the military
to recognise and acknowledge

Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,

that she set up a café

in the middle of a military town

to give them legal, psychological,
and medical assistance.

And she said to me:

"You know Margaret, I always used to say

I didn't know what I wanted
to be when I grow up,

but I found myself in this cause

and I'll never be the same."

We all enjoy so many freedoms today,

hard-won freedoms:

the freedom to write and publish
without fear of censorship,

a freedom that wasn't here
the last time I came to Hungary.

A freedom to vote,

which women in particular
had to fight so hard for.

The freedom for people
of different ethnicities,

and cultures, and sexual orientation,

to live the way that they want.

But freedom doesn't exist,

if you don't use it.

And what whistleblowers do,

and what people like Gayla Benefield do,

is they use the freedom that they have.

And what they're very prepared to do

is recognise that "yes,
this is going to be an argument,

and yes, I'm going to have a lot of rouse

with my neighbours
and my colleagues and my friends.

But I'm going to become
very good at this conflict.

I'm going to take on the naysayers

because they'll 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

and not to be silent.

When I went to Libby, Montana,

I visited the asbestosis clinic

that Gayla Benefield brought into being.

A place where, at first,

some of the people, who wanted help
and needed medical attention,

went in the back door,

because they didn't want
to acknowledge that she'd been right.

I sat in a diner and I watched

as trucks drove up and down the highway

carting away the earth out of gardens,

and replacing it

with fresh uncontaminated soil.

I took my 12-year-old daughter with me

because I really wanted her to meet Gayla.

And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?"

I said: "She's not a movie star,
and she's not a celebrity,

and she's not an expert,

and Gayla's the first person
who'd say she's not a saint.

The really important thing about Gayla

is 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.

(Applause)