Seeing Too Much Truth

I am taking an online course in Gestalt Psychology and Web Design from the Interactive Design Foundation. The course is well-designed and self-paced.

But I keep seeing these psychologists in their place and time - in Germany, early in the 20th Century - when Fascism was gaining power rapidly, and eventually produced Nazism, and the Holocaust. Why didn't they see this coming?

The answer is easy enough - because, like people everywhere - they were blinded by their circumstances. They were clever - but that is not enough. You also have to speak truth to power - and this they could not do.

This is a problem every advanced group faces. I met a woman when I was working in Silicon Valley in the Nineties who discovered she was a very sensitive person, did research on this, and wrote a book about The Highly Sensitive Person. But her publisher would not include some of her findings - that showed how insensitive most Americans were - because it would kill the sales of her book.

She became a success - but never went back and published her negative findings. This would have dimmed some of her popularity - if she moved out of the center of the road.