Accountability Blues

Earlier this year, Bernard Madoff, the deposed King of Ponzi, claimed to an interviewer that the banks and hedge funds with which he did business “had to know” something was wrong with the numbers emerging from the Lipstick Building. In another published report, a group of American uniformed service personnel, both female and male, filed a lawsuit charging that sexual abuse ran rampant in the armed forces. They described a culture where violators faced little, if any, punishment for their crimes and even less damage to their careers, while Pentagon officials continually refused to acknowledge the problem.

When we determine accountability, of ourselves as well as others, we must start with who knew what and when. That’s a difficult line to measure when one considers that what we “know” isn’t necessarily known. First, there are the things we think we know. Then, there are the things we’re sure we know, until facts come to light proving otherwise. Finally, there are the things we don’t want to know, occupying every element of our lives. The mental gymnastics required in ignoring whole portions of reality constitute it as a minor miracle to find that we actually know anything.

The French psychologist Jacques Lacan described the three orders of reality as Imaginary, Symbolic & Real and in doing so set the pattern for post-structuralism among present-day philosophers. If the product of the imaginary order is self-delusion, while that of the symbolic order constitutes our inability to shape our inner impressions into outward expression, then what is real? According to Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek (If you haven’t seen him in the film documentary “The Reality of the Virtual,” you’re missing a mind-blowing experience.) reality centers on what we think we believe, even when we unconsciously know those beliefs to be based on false information.

So, why do we not want to know certain things? Is it that by knowing we must act? Are certain facts too embarrassingly evil to comprehend … or simply too contradictory to our universal model of justice to allow for any peace of mind? All of the above is probably the best answer. History is full of examples, enough to fill great libraries. We can’t stop with Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia; at nearly each step through the entire roll call of the United Nations, we can point to a time when misdeeds, some exceedingly atrocious, occurred in a particular country, in open view, which nobody willingly claimed to have witnessed. It is the unwritten Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Know – because what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Such a premise becomes a self-sustaining known, a fact unto itself.

Admiral John Poindexter brought the term plausible deniability to the dinner tables of Americans with his testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings. His boss, CIA Director William Casey, was busy dying of brain cancer at the time, so Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North were the only persons left who could shield President Reagan from blame in the arms-for-hostages scheme. The end result, for many of us who witnessed the charade, was a proper dose of plausible gullibility. We didn’t want to debate the propriety of funding Nicaraguan rebels with money procured from an illegal Iranian arms deal. We focused on the release of the hostages, the only clean element poured from that half-empty glass. It was unthinkable that facts should intrude on our happy memory of the welcome home party.

We know what we know, and then expend a great deal of energy in denying a large portion of such knowledge. We know that when most people are facing criminal charges, their first instinct is to lie about their involvement. Their legal counsel encourages such behavior from the start, in order to acquire some leverage over the situation. We also know that people can be wrongfully charged, either through honest error or sinister malice. Still, more often than not, outside observers will presume to render an instantaneous verdict in their minds before many facts appear. When it happens, the deciding criteria usually fall under the heading of, “What feels most acceptable to my personal definition of right and wrong?” In doing this, all parties to our system of justice, including those casual observers who comprise the jury pool and (God forbid) the jurists who may preside over the trials, have thrown personal accountability to the wind in exchange for a comfortable place to rest their heads.

As adults, we may be too jaded, or too purposefully ignorant, to change our unconscious desire to ignore real truth in an effort to maintain some impression of personal control. We can’t even cope with the inevitability of our own deaths until that moment when we’re breathing in the close scent of it.  So, we compound the false acts by pointing to our children as our one hope for the better, while knowing, even as we deny it, that what we refuse to admit presently will return to haunt them someday.