In my last post I spoke of Gosnelling, which I defined as as “the concealment of horrifying happenings from the public by persons or institutions which should be reporting them”. I pointed out that although the horrific Gosnell abortion-clinic case is the most notorious instance of this in recent times, being deliberately ignored for most of its duration by the U.S. national liberal media out of tender regard for the abortion industry and those who utilise its services, Gosnelling is far more widespread than that. I highlighted the fact that although, “next to the death of a spouse, child or parent, nothing can cause more devastation to an ordinary person than a family break-up which he or she did not precipitate, especially if he (almost always) or she (rarely) is then treated with outrageous injustice by the legal system”, there is a guilty silence everywhere about such harms and injustices by bodies which should be reporting them and campaigning against them. I pointed out, moreover, that it is not simply the leftist media which conceals by silence what is happening, thus Gosnelling the public, but often conservative media, church social justice bodies, social work bodies, law societies and law reform committees.

I foreshadowed that I would subsequently address another side to the story, “an equally disturbing phenomenon ‑ the sometime desire or readiness of people to be Gosnelled.” That phenomenon is my subject now.

In consequence of a lifetime of involvement in political and social good causes, I want to state a fact which might sound like cynicism but is simply grim reality. Nearly all people are cowards all of the time, and the small minority who are not are cowards most of the time. I’ll include myself in the latter category. What is worse, most people all of the time do not merely want to be safe from tangible harm or discomfort, but they want to be safe from morally discomforting knowledge – knowledge of a kind which disturbs their consciences by making them aware that they should be thinking or acting differently, when they are determined not to do so. Anyone who imagines that the liberal media was betraying its liberal reading, listening or viewing clientelle by concealing the Gosnell case is guilty of self-deception. That clientelle didn’t want to know, and the liberal media was obliging its clients’ wishes by keeping them in the dark. They wanted to be Gosnelled.

Worse, a very large proportion of non-liberal, moral people who loathe abortion would also have wanted to be Gosnelled about the Gosnell case, not from any determination to do nothing but from despair that anything effective can be done. They know that they will be distressed by intimate knowledge of the day-to-day evils being done by the abortion industry, but many feel that it is unproductive distress ‑ the kind which cannot prompt them or those of like mind to productive action, because they all feel sure that any action will be unproductive, wasting their time, clouding their lives with unpleasantness, and making them look and feel like impotent losers.

It’s the same with regard to those laws, government bodies, and malign political and media power-groups, which are having devastating effects on family relationships and thus on the welfare of the whole community. Most people, when the evils being perpetrated hit them or those dear to them, scream for politicians, the media, the churches, the President, the Pope, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, to spring to arms to rectify what is happening, but until then they don’t want to know. It is the very fact that they realize that nobody will spring to arms that makes them not want to know until they are personally affected. Prior to then, not knowing keeps them comfortable. It can be nice to be Gosnelled – until it’s too late.

My wise fellow-Canberran John Harris, whom I have mentioned before, once remarked on a phenomenon which many will have observed. In our most famous zoo, Taronga Park, on the rocky northern foreshores of Sydney Harbour, is a snake-house where the visitor will see a large python behind glass, lying motionless except for an occasional flicker of a forked tongue. With it in its enclosure is usually a white mouse, pottering about, sniffing and scratching in the straw, preening its whiskers, all as if it didn’t have a care in the world. The python knows that it can eat the mouse whenever it wishes, but also knows that the hapless creature can’t escape, and so the snake has no reason to bother it until it feels hungry again, after fully digesting its previous mouse. The mouse knows it is going to be eaten; it knows that it can’t do a thing about it; and so it seeks existential, moment-to-moment happiness by putting its fatal danger out of mind and doing its ordinary mouse house-keeping as if nothing is amiss. Freud aptly termed this phenomenon denial; however, denial involves mentally suppressing or ignoring uncomfortable knowledge, whereas the wish to be Gosnelled is a wish to be spared from uncomfortable knowledge. The mouse would dearly love to be Gosnelled, and not know its predicament. It would then not have to bother with denial – but, of course, it would be eaten anyway!

Those are observations, but what’s the moral? The moral is that if one wants good people, even a significant minority of

good people, to rally against bad things instead of ignoring them, one must ensure that they can feel confident that doing so won’t be merely an exercise in unproductive, inevitable futility. Otherwise most of them won’t merely not do anything, they won’t want to know anything. They’ll want to be Gosnelled.