Pointing a finger at the other is a curious and persistent defense mechanism for the guilty. We try to teach our kids not to tattle, but also to be true to themselves. But sometimes the tattling is a method for hiding the truth about your wrongful action. This is known in the psychological literature as deflection. BetterHelp, self-described as the “world’s largest e-counseling platform,” defines deflection as “passing something over to someone else in an attempt to draw the attention away from yourself. It is a psychological defense in which you deflect blame to others.” In Freudian terms, deflection can be understood as a form of regression, “a defense mechanism in which you revert back to earlier developmental stages.”
A good, if somewhat embarrassing, example of deflection can be observed in groups of young boys who discover the wonders of a fart joke. A fart elicits disgust but provides a glorious opportunity for fart deflection, when the primary suspect quickly passes the guilt for the sulfuric stench to a nearby innocent, with the mirthful appreciation of those spared—a scene that keeps the man-child giggling into adulthood. And so it has been for millennia.
Of course, it’s no laughing matter when deflection shifts blame for one person’s crimes and misdemeanors on to others. A residual infantile drive might be at work, but that becomes irrelevant when the lives of millions of people could have been spared if the perpetrators had owned up to their failings—as we learned when politicians’ fabrications accelerated the spread of COVID-19 across the planet.
But what of those to whom the blame has shifted? They are often victims of organized deflection campaigns. Consider these relatively well-known examples: the tobacco industry’s decades-long efforts to avoid responsibility for smokers’ deaths by arguing that individual choice is responsible for lung disease, and similarly framed campaigns by the alcohol and gambling sectors and bottlers of sweet drinks. All have made a virtue of telling consumers how much they care about their well-being—everything in moderation, folks, it’s up to you to change.
To the list, we would add the global agriculture and livestock industry, poisoners of land and groundwater, grand emitters of CO2, and spreaders of viruses from animals to humans across the planet. They sell us a rotten bargain by providing cheap protein and grains, while covering up their misanthropic ecocide through philanthropic deflection campaigns. And let’s not forget right-wing political enablers who denounced the Green New Deal as an evil plot to deny Americans their hamburgers.
Some deflection campaigns are somewhat easy to detect while others are more insidious, as climate scientist Michael E. Mann tells us in his latest book, The New Climate War. A textbook example is the National Rifle Association’s campaign to befuddle common sense with the slogan that “Guns Don’t Kill People; People Kill People,” which was designed to shift attention away from “easy access to assault weapons to other purported contributors to mass shootings, such as mental illness or media depictions of violence.” Mann describes other examples, perhaps more egregious for being sub rosa efforts—the tobacco industry’s passing the blame for “cigarette-initiated” house fires over to the flammability of furniture, then lobbying for regulation that directed policy attention to the need for flame retardants in everything from furniture to infant clothing and car seats. The chemicals in flame retardants would eventually be found to hinder brain development and hormone health in children. The indecency of corporate subterfuge at its worst.
Mann also relates the story of the 1971 “Crying Indian” campaign, a part of a wider “Keep America Beautiful” campaign. The television spot (a so-called public service announcement) depicted a man in traditional native costume rowing a canoe through waterways despoiled by plastic waste and billowing smokestacks (the “Indian” was portrayed by Italian American actor, Espera Oscar de Corti, who often played a version of Iron Eyes Cody in Hollywood movies). The narrator says that “people start pollution. People can stop it.” As Mann points out, the campaign was a powerful call for Americans to do their part. But what lay behind the message was a deflection campaign mounted by supermarkets, grocery and package stores, and the bottling and beverage industry. Their aim was to derail the “bottle bill” legislation that sought to put a deposit on bottles and cans to promote reusable bottles and consumer recycling. Mann’s account of this corporate mendacity is startling, involving alcohol interests, bottlers, and tobacco giant Philip Morris.
Corporate deflection campaigns not only set out to “sabotage systemic solutions,” says Mann; they also hope to engender a generation of “inactivists.” We are familiar with inactivism—climate change denialists, media propagandists promoting fake “controversies” within climate science, and the banal whataboutism and false equivalencies that mesmerize the denizens of the American Right. A mind-bending example of the latter comes from the NRA, which promotes the idea that the champions of deflection are actually “left-leaning media” who blame the right-wing political world. “Yup. Deflection is the tool of choice for leftists—what else have they got?” says the NRA.
What can we do to deflate this deceitful flatulence? As a start, we need to understand and be vigilant about how deflection and other campaigns aim to instill guilt in consumers, silence victims of corporate abuse, and divide us in our endeavors to fight the climate and health crises that plague humanity and the planet. If we don’t, hundreds of corporations will continue to pollute, poison, and propagate false ideas about who is responsible for the mess they created.
