Margaret Heffernan speaking at a TedX in March 2013 put her finger on a fundamental problem which found all over the world. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there’s
information that you could know and you should know but you somehow
manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have
chosen not to know. There’s a lot of willful blindness around these
days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. You could see them in banks when interest
rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but
everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the
Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored.
