How we know what we know: utter denial in human beings

[Undertoad]

Utter denial: once in a while you get a clear example of this sort of thing, and I think it is fasinating to see.

Billy posted the web site for a project by two Brits who reenacted Mao's "Long March". Mao himself said that the length of this march was 25,000 li, or about 7800 miles. That "fact" became a truth for the Chinese people.

But when they actually studied it and walked it, it turned out to be shorter:

The best I can reckon is between 13,000 and 18,000 li, or 4,060 to 5,625 miles. To my mind, this arithmetical revisionism doesn’t belittle the Long March at all. Whichever way you cut it, 4,000 miles is still a bloody long way. But to Chinese people reared on the "25,000-li Long March", my conclusion on the distance is the worst possible heresy. I could tell a dozen tales about Red atrocities or hypocrisy, or say Mao was a buffoon who knew nothing about military strategy, and still get nothing like the horrified, disbelieving response I get when I say, "You know, the Long March wasn’t really 25,000 li."

'You must have gone the wrong way," they say, as if by turning left instead of right I somehow took a 3,000-mile shortcut.

OK, that's the setup. Here's the detail. Confronted with the actual fact right before his eyes, the fact simply can't change for one gentleman:

Ever since my marching partner, Andrew McEwen, and I published our results, we’ve been patronized and insulted by everyone from taxi drivers to Communist Party historians. The latter are the most entertaining, because of the contortions they perform to "prove" Chairman Mao’s calculation was scientifically correct.

In spring 2005, Chinese National Geography [sic] surprised me by asking if I could write an article outlining why I believed the Long March was shorter than Mao said. They also commissioned a Party expert to rebut my conclusions. This gentleman marshaled all the available evidence [not a particularly onerous task, as verifying Mao’s statements by empirical research has not been a popular activity in China since the Revolution] and demonstrated that the Long March was, er, between 16,000 and 18,000 li. He concluded his article with these immortal words: "Although we are unable to identify exactly which part of the Red Army marched 25,000 li, the above facts clearly demonstrate that the 25,000 li are an unchallengeable historical fact."

Chinese National Geography cancelled the feature.

This kind of partisan denial happens in all societies, in ourselves too, and we just can't see it. It's "the truth hole" and I hope to try to understand it.