Ties That Blind

If the crowd around us says the sky is green, it’s much easier to go along with the crowd than to be the lone standout arguing for blueness. How can people who seem perfectly sane believe seemingly crazy things? Why will people shapeshift their individual morals to align with collective immoralities? In Ties That Blind, Psychologist Alan Godwin attempts to answer such questions by looking at the nature of collective deception. There’s a difference between what’s true and a story that’s false but sounds true. The propagation of a false story begins by telling people what they want to hear and then appealing to their coalitional instincts—the natural human desires to congregate with like-minded others. Their attachment needs pull them into a story where truth becomes less valued than the warm embrace of crowd inclusion. Barricaded inside what Dr. Godwin calls a “story-based fortress,” they come to accept a distorted reality which they now call “truth” and label all fortress outsiders as liars or fools. Worse still, they become propagators of the falseness themselves. Dr. Godwin tells two emotionally resonant stories. The first is that of an actual, real-life individual who was deceived in a close, personal relationship. She grew up in a train-wreck of a family that was admired by others, but life inside the family was vastly different from what those outside it perceived. While the first story is set in the context of trauma, abuse and narcissistic parenting, family dynamics are not the central focus. Rather, it’s how manipulation occurs between individuals, be they relatives, spouses, friends, co-workers, employers, teachers, or even preachers. The principles spelled out can be applied to any up-close relational situation where manipulation occurs. The second narrative is Dr. Godwin’s own story of growing up in the collectively deceptive world of Jim Crow Mississippi. There, he was gaslighted, not by a power-hungry demagogue, but by a demagogic system in which anyone refusing to accept the green-sky fiction of racial hierarchy could suffer banishment, injury or even death. He became so complicit that he normalized the abnormal, defended the indefensible, and justified that which can’t be justified. This second story exemplifies how we can become swirled up in the delusion of a crowd. Though there are certainly differences between the two narratives, the processes of being blinded by a false story and eventually unraveling the blinders are essentially the same. Understanding the first story helps explain the second. Through the exploitation of vulnerabilities, people are unwittingly sucked into dramas that look and sound like real life but leave drama participants with distorted realities and later wondering how they could’ve been so blind. Dr. Godwin contends that blinding need not be permanent. People can come to their senses, change, and eventually proclaim along with John Newton—former slave ship captain and later abolitionist—that they can now see having once been blind. There is such a thing as acquiring sight we once didn’t have. Collective deception has happened in the past, is happening now, and will keep happening in the future. How, why, and what to do about it are the questions this book attempts to answer. It is hoped that readers of Ties That Blind might acquire the courage to become lone standouts arguing for blueness.