No time to play possum in America

Pity the opossum. It is such a timid creature that confrontation literally stresses it into a comatose state, such that the opossum seems to be dead. It even takes on a stink that leads many a predator to move along, believing the opossum body to be a rotting carcass.

This act of "playing possum" isn't cleverness on the part of the opossum; it's just biological, an evolutionary development that arguably enabled it to avoid the fate of, for example, the eastern hare-wallaby, a fellow marsupial that is now extinct. You could consider playing possum to be the animal kingdom's greatest example of deception.

Actually, it could be viewed as self-deception, a trait that scientists say evolved to even better mask the fakery that kept many a species alive. Which could also help explain our own survival, for we humans are increasingly revealing ourselves to be the living beings most adroit at self-deception on God's green earth.

How else might we explain the millions of Americans who seem to truly believe that we are not, in fact, mainly to blame for the disruption of the natural patterns of Earth's climate, no matter what science says? And if it's not self-deception, what would cause many normally rational people to claim that our nation's intelligence and law enforcement communities have aligned in a conspiracy against the current president?

It must be self-deception, too, that allows some Midwestern farmers to believe the president is acting in their interest when he blows up trade deals that have created markets for their crops and imposes tariffs that will hike their cost of production, then tries to smooth over that policy wreckage with a $12 billion taxpayer bailout that's essentially a Farm Belt welfare plan.

But before we get too far into politics, let's consider one more fact from science: Humans are pack animals, so we often struggle to stay in the good graces of others in our pack. Part of the way we qualify to keep our pack membership is not only by conforming to pack behavior, but also by what social scientists call shared denial - being so loyal to the group that we keep our doubts about the group's direction to ourselves. That may require us to practice information avoidance, and turn away from information that might challenge the pack's shared wisdom.

Information avoidance isn't always a bad thing. If you're saving for retirement, for example, you might not want to look at what the markets are doing from day to day - because a plummeting market might prompt you to sell, which isn't usually wise. (Remember: "Buy low, sell high.") You might have a better chance of a secure retirement if you just don't look at those stock market charts.

But we Americans have gotten too adept at practicing information avoidance in all the wrong places. Too many of us are quite happy to skip accurate news coverage, for example, that might challenge our political biases.

Liberals who stick to MSNBC nightly don't get a full dose of conservative thinking, and conservatives who tune in only to Fox News get so limited a presentation of what's going on that they're victims of dishonest journalism. (There's a difference of kind here, though: MSNBC is unabashedly all about commentary, while Fox pretends to be delivering "fair and balanced" newscasts - a deception that was built into its foundation.)

This affects how you think. If you avoid information that challenges your biases and join with your pack in tamping down any doubts that may surface, you'll eventually change your brain's circuitry. The electrical pathways in your brain will become so well-worn that, just as water erodes a streambed, your thinking will follow a path of least resistance. And that's where self-deception can arise.

Nowhere do we see this more clearly these days than in Congress. Most elected officials are well-intentioned, but the drive to be an accepted member of the pack seems to have led too many of them to shared denial. So they lay aside their constitutional responsibility as a co-equal branch of government that can serve as a check on the presidency.

You would think that elected officials who care about democracy would speak out when the president cozies up to Russia's murderous ruler and denigrates our own security officials' warnings about Russian interference in our election. You'd think they would stand up for trade with our allies, for protecting our environment, for improving our public schools and for reducing rather than growing our deficit, so that we're not pushing off our debts onto our grandchildren.

But that would require those in the congressional majority to confront the president. Clearly, they're too timid. We can blame self-deception, but the "why" hardly matters, because like the opossum who plays dead, they're beginning to stink.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at rsmith@timesunion.com.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at rsmith@timesunion.com.