Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known. It´s refusal to admit that the knocking sound menas someone at the door. It´s refusal to acknowledge the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, the elephant under the carpet, the skeleton in the closet. It´s refusal to admit to error while pursuing the plan. Every game has rules. Some of the most important rules are implicit. You accept them merely by deciding to play the game. The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn´t important, you wouldn´t be playing it. Playing a game defines it as important. The second is that moves undertaken during the game are valid if they help you win. If you make a move and it isnt´t helping you win, then by definition it´s a bad move. You need to try something different. You remember the old joke: insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
If you are lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn´t work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small change, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed. That´s a revolution, with all the chaos and terror of a revolution. It´s not something to be engaged in lightly, but it´s sometimes neccessary. Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice - and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you´ve run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt. Forest fires burn out deadwood and return trapped elements to the soil. Sometimes, however, fires are suppreessed, artificially. that does not stop the deadwood from acumulating. Sooner or later, a fire will start. When it does, it will burn so hot that everything will be destroyed - even the soil in which the forest grows.
The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamoured of its own briliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug. Literary, existential philosophers, beginning with Soren Kierkegaard, conceived of this mode of Being as "inauthentic". An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice
(Jordan Paterson)