Inertia of evil in good faith

I am a “systemic thinking” kind of guy. Always on the lookout for patterns behind seemingly unique and random events. I rejoice every time I recognize one of the systemic forces driving the course of society.

This time, my intellectual joy was spoiled by the fact that it was about one of the destructive forces. I was reading an article about shaken baby syndrome.

In this article, Cyrille Rossant describes the ordeal that began when his baby boy ended up in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage. What caused it? The doctors at that hospital were 100% sure it was shaken baby syndrome. Of course, shaken baby syndrome equals child abuse. The prime suspect was the nanny. The investigation began.

Rossant, a PhD in neuroscience, wanted to understand what happened to his son. So, he delved into scientific literature. This is how he describes the result of his study:

I disturbingly realized that what I had been told at the hospital, namely that subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants are almost always caused by violent shaking even in the absence of external evidence of trauma, was an assertion based on very weak scientific foundations.

The problem is that based on this assertion standing on ‘weak scientific foundations’, thousands of children are taken from their parents each year. Many are brought to court, convicted, and imprisoned.

Shaken baby syndrome undoubtedly exists and deserves severe punishment. But when we punish someone, we should be sure that we are punishing them based on good evidence. According to Rossant, this is not the case.

Subdural bleeding and retinal hemorrhage may actually be the result of various causes, not just abuse. In practice, however, alternative explanations are often not thoroughly investigated. Abuse is diagnosed by default. And innocent people may end up in prison.

Systemic Force

Rossant wants a revision of the established understanding of shaken baby syndrome. But this is a controversial topic and there is strong resistance, he says.

Why the pushback? I like the idea I encountered in the discussion about the article.

There’s another factor in this, which makes it hard to change:

For the people in child welfare organizations, for social workers, for doctors, for police, for judges to change their mind about current and future decisions requires them to change their mind about past decisions. The necessary implication is that many of the people they have persecuted in the past were, in fact, innocent. It requires them to admit that they personally have likely caused untold suffering to parents, caretakers, and children.

This is hard for anyone; but if you’ve lived your life trying to be the hero, feeling good about swooping in and rescuing children from the clutches of evil villains, how can you face the fact that you are the evil villain in so many children’s stories?

When I try to put myself in that situation… admitting a mistake is difficult even in ordinary relationship trifles. How hard it must be to admit (even to myself) that in my zeal for fighting for a good cause, I might have put an innocent person in jail.

And this is that systemic force I was talking about. This is not just about shaken baby syndrome. This is about the motivation of those fighting for something they consider just and sacred, something they identify with deeply.

When people like that make a collective mistake, they might have an extremely strong incentive to convince themselves and the rest of society that there was no mistake.

The more heroic the cause, the more resistance is to be expected when an error is discovered and there is a need for course correction.