TEDtalks (and Willful Blindness)

I LOVE watching TEDtalks. I have learned a great many things from these (relatively) short videos. I was introduced to Sir Ken Robinson back in '07 through TEDtalks when my English Curriculum teacher showed it to us. It's one of my favourite TEDtalks videos to this day (It's called Do Schools Kill Creativity? if you want to look it up). It's so impressive how many people have such great knowledge and insight into human behaviour or abilities or whatever. Some of these people can be academics, like Ken Robinson and Margaret Heffernan, and others are just lecturers with great experiences we can all learn from, like Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman. There is SO much knowledge that can be shared in this world and it is wonderful that we now have the means to share it so easily. This also reminds me how much I can learn from other people who are not specifically TRYING to teach me things. Everyone around you has different abilities and knowledge that you can learn from if you just listen. It's impossible to know everything, but everyone knows something...

The book I am going to review today is one that I discovered through TEDtalks. A friend posted the video on facebook (It is posted AFTER my review for a perfectly good reason;)) I was SO blown away by the concept that I searched Margaret Heffernan on McNally Robinson's website and found that she had written this book. So Ta-da!

I LOVE watching these videos so if you have a good one, please let me know! I'd love to watch more, but am too lazy to try and search through them all to find good ones. :)

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Margaret Heffernan argues that the biggest threats and dangers we face are the ones we don't see--not because they're secret or invisible, but because we're willfully blind. A distinguished businesswoman and writer, she examines the phenomenon and traces its imprint in our private and working lives, and within governments and organizations, and asks: What makes us prefer ignorance? What are we so afraid of? Why do some people see more than others? And how can we change?
Covering everything from our choice of mates to the SEC, Bernard Madoff's investors, the embers of BP's refinery, the military in Afghanistan, and the dog-eat-dog world of subprime mortgage lenders, this provocative book demonstrates how failing to see--or admit to ourselves or our colleagues--the issues and problems in plain sight can ruin private lives and bring down corporations. Heffernan explains how willful blindness develops before exploring ways that institutions and individuals can combat it. In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness is a tour de force on human behavior that will open your eyes.

This book is an amazing observation about one of the many aspects of human social behaviour. I believe it was intended to expose something within ourselves to make changes to, and help others to observe these traits in themselves and also make changes, in order to make a better adapted world.

It was extremely interesting and overwhelmingly supported by evidence that takes many different forms from many different areas of the world, but mostly western cultures. She talks about the willful blindness of people who believe in apocalyptic situations that turn out to not happen, to the mindset of white collar criminals that justify their behaviours. One of the most moving examples is actually one she discusses in her TEDtalks video Dare to Disagree. Alice Stewart discovered that xray machines were causing many childhood cancers back in the 1950s. In the TEDtalks video she talks about how conflict ensured that Stewart knew she was right because she had people trying to disprove her, that couldn't. In Willful Blindness, it talks more about how other doctors refused to see the truth because it would mean that they would have to change their practices, and no one likes change. They convinced themselves that her research was wrong, chose to be willfully blind, so that they wouldn't have to admit that what they were doing was wrong. It is absolutely staggering to read these accounts, something that seems to blatantly obvious to the reader (who also happens to be living 60 years after the research was proven, and 30+ years since the practice has been removed). This book was extremely informative and, in my opinion, important that everyone reads...

Now... that being said... I am not an avid non-fiction reader. As wonderfully informative as this book is, and as important as the subject matter is, I was DYING for this book to be over. I felt that I got the point after about 3 chapters, but there was so much evidence in so many different situations that this book seemed to go on forever, but I couldn't just stop reading it. Every single chapter made important points, and it wasn't like the last chapters were less interesting than the first. It was just so much of the same throughout the whole book. I made myself finish this one before I let myself reread Harry Potter... that was the only way I finished this one. Plus it was a library ebook... so it was going to disappear tomorrow and I didn't want to borrow it for a third time.

I think this whole book could have been a 15-minute TEDtalks video and I would have gotten the same out of it, it's too bad the one she did took a different perspective on an example she used in the book, but I guess she wouldn't sell as many books if she gave all the info away in a video that could be found on YouTube. 

If you are interested in Cultural Studies, or generally prefer reading non-fiction to fiction, this book is excellent. But for us fiction fans, it was a little tough go. 

But watch this video no matter who you are...