Breaking Cinema: Triumph of the Willful Blindness - Pete episode brief

Episode I want to do: "Triumph of the Willful Blindness"

This is going to be a good episode:

- the over-riding concept is willful blindness

- the focus is on 'Triumph of the Will' because it is a great big advertisement to buy into the Nazi's willful blindness.

- the exploration is through the beginning of the 20th Century, World War One's role in the formation of Nazi Germany, a brief consideration of german cinema's consideration (and warning) of the growing unease and the eventual Nazi willful blindness throughout the 1920s and 30s.

- the conclusion is the role films play in propagating willful blindness, BUT how they can also be used to nurture critical thinking to counter it AND, ultimately, why intelligent, open- minded and critical cinema is still hugely important in today's digital world of distractions and absorptions and consumerism willful blindess left, right and center. I would argue that cinema is even more so important today because of our reliance on quick fixes to take the pain away, until the problem comes back...

"Willful Blindness: you are responsible if you could have known, and should have known, something which instead you strove not to see." - Heffernan, 2012:1, 'Wilful Blindness'

So you guys might have caught onto the fact that I am not a huge fan of bullshit or of using excuses to avoid doing things that frighten you or which would greatly benefit your well-being and the well-being of those around you.

Basically, watch the Margaret Heffernan video below - ESSENTIAL VIEWING, no excuses.

"Embedded within our self-definition, we build relationships, institutions, cities, systems and cultures that, in reaffirming our values, blind us to alternatives [otherwise known as cognitive biases]. This is where our willful blindness originates: in the innate human desire for familiarity, for likeness, that is fundamental to the ways our minds work." - Heffernan, 2012:8

There are a lot of problems in the world at the moment: poverty, economic inequality, Disney, climate change, animal suffering, obesity related diseases, war, domestic abuse, cancer and Michael Bay.

However, as far as I am concerned all of the solutions being implemented to solve these problems are only temporary fixes. They are temporary fixes because human beings have an inherently good habit of relapsing, telling themselves everything is all fine and then not actually doing anything in the long-term to ensure that everything does actually turn out to be fine, outside of their comfy willfull blindness.

"The truth is - this is a human problem." Heffernan - see the video.

As far as I am concerned willful blindness is the single biggest threat facing the human race and until it is completely stamped out, the human race will keep relapsing, keep ignoring the ills of the world and keep deluding itself into an early grave.

The REALLY annoying thing is that willful blindness is actually a hugely simple problem to solve - it's a little thing called Critical Thinking.

You ensure that every education system on the planet teaches critical thinking to children from day 1 and that every education system has it set as the number 1 priority to produce world citizens who have an intuitive ability to constantly question big and small judgements... there will not be a single problem the human race will not be able to solve.

Why?

Because the human race will not ignore the problem or invent a 'solution' to 'temporarily' (let's not kid ourselves) cover it up, while the problem grows and poisons like a cancer.

Whether acted out in big or small decisions willful blindness is a hugely worrying state of being.

And no where was incompetence more apparent than in the perversely distorted will of Nazism - Hitler connived an entire nation to follow in his willful blindness.

"This is how wilful blindness begins, not in concious, deliberate choices to be blind, but in a skein of decisions that slowly but surely restrict our view. We don't sense our perspective closing in and most would prefer that it stay broad and rich. But our blindness grows out of the small, daily decisions that we make, which embed us more snugly inside our affirming thoughts and values. And what's more frightening about this process is that, as we see less and less, we feel more comfort and greater certainty. We think we see more - even as the landscape shrinks." Heffernan, 2012: 27

One of my reasons for starting this podcast is that I have had enough of all the bone-idled bullshit complacency in the world (and in cinema and the education of film)... and I think you might start to see how this topic is carries over and continues in 'Interstellar'.

"We used to look up at the stars and wonder. Now all we do is stare down at our place in the dirt and worry."

Or not worry enough...

It might also be worth having a watch of this...
The creative lead behind 'Triumph of the Will' and various other Nazi propoganda films - she was full of willful blindness!

This article may also be of interest: 

The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational