"To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places...To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away and never, never, to forget." ~ Arundhati Roy
The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation.
The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
SW
The evolutionary mismatch hypothesis (also called evolutionary trap or mismatch theory) states that traits, behaviors, and psychological mechanisms that were highly advantageous in ancestral, hunter-gatherer environments can become maladaptive in the modern world, leading to a rise in chronic physical and mental health issues. [1, 2]
There isn't a single thinker whose signature concept is exactly "the denial of others' suffering" in the way that René Girard made scapegoating his central explanatory mechanism, but several thinkers have analyzed closely related phenomena.
A few especially relevant ones:
If you're looking for the closest match, Cohen is probably the strongest candidate.
In his book States of Denial, he examines how individuals, institutions, and entire societies manage to "know and not know" about suffering, atrocities, oppression, and violence. His analysis is not simply ignorance or deception; it is about the mechanisms by which people evade the moral implications of what they already know.
This is perhaps the most systematic study of the phenomenon you're describing.
Arendt's work on totalitarianism and the "banality of evil" explores how ordinary people can participate in systems that inflict suffering while failing to truly apprehend the reality of what they are doing.
She is less interested in explicit denial than in forms of moral disengagement and the collapse of genuine judgment.
Levinas builds his ethics around the claim that the face of another person makes an ethical demand on us.
Much of his work can be read as an account of what happens when we reduce others to concepts, categories, or objects. Denying another's suffering becomes possible when we cease to encounter them as a concrete "Other."
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag investigates how people relate to images of war, suffering, and atrocity.
She asks why repeated exposure to suffering can produce indifference, distance, or voyeurism rather than compassion.
Her book The Body in Pain contains a striking argument: pain is difficult to communicate because it resists language. One consequence is that others often fail to recognize or adequately acknowledge another person's suffering.
This is less about active denial and more about the epistemological difficulty of making suffering visible.
Weil's notion of affliction (malheur) concerns forms of suffering that are so profound that society often refuses to see them. She repeatedly describes how the powerful become incapable of truly perceiving the reality of the afflicted.
Fanon analyzes colonial societies as systems that normalize and conceal the suffering of colonized people. His work shows how ideological frameworks make some suffering appear insignificant, natural, or even invisible.
If you're interested in a thinker who provides a general mechanism analogous to Girard's scapegoating theory, I'd especially recommend:
Cohen is probably the closest to what your question literally asks: a theorist of how people and societies systematically deny, minimize, reinterpret, or bracket the suffering of others while remaining dimly aware of it.
Yes. If Stanley Cohen is known for one book above all others, it is:
This is generally regarded as his major late work and the one most directly relevant to your question. In it, Cohen develops a taxonomy of denial and examines how people, governments, institutions, and societies respond to knowledge of suffering, torture, political repression, genocide, poverty, and other forms of human misery.
One of his key insights is that denial is often not a simple matter of believing something false. People frequently know about suffering in some sense while simultaneously acting as though they do not. He distinguishes, among other things:
That last category is especially influential because it captures a common moral phenomenon: acknowledging facts while denying their significance.
However, among sociologists and criminologists, Cohen's most famous book may actually be:
This book introduced and popularized the concept of moral panic—the process by which societies identify "folk devils" and exaggerate perceived threats. Its influence extends far beyond sociology into media studies, politics, and cultural criticism.
If Girard's signature concept is scapegoating, Cohen's might arguably be moral panic, even though States of Denial is the book that most directly addresses the denial of others' suffering.
An interesting connection to Girard is that the two thinkers illuminate opposite sides of a social process:
They are not making the same argument, but they are often describing adjacent phenomena. A Girardian scapegoat frequently survives socially because a Cohen-style structure of denial prevents others from fully acknowledging what is happening.
Certainly. States of Denial is one of those books whose central idea is simple but whose implications become deeper the more you follow them. Cohen is trying to answer a question that had become unavoidable after the twentieth century's genocides, dictatorships, and mass atrocities:
How is it possible for people to know about terrible suffering and yet continue as if they do not know?
His answer is that denial is not primarily ignorance. It is a complex social, psychological, cultural, and political process through which knowledge is managed, neutralized, or rendered morally inert.
Cohen begins from a familiar experience. Information about suffering is often available:
Yet people simultaneously behave as though these facts are not really known.
He is interested in this strange state between knowledge and ignorance.
The classic phrase he returns to is not "we didn't know" but something closer to:
We knew, but we didn't fully acknowledge what we knew.
This becomes the book's central theme.
A crucial point is that denial is not primarily a private psychological defence mechanism.
Traditional psychology might explain denial as an individual's refusal to face painful reality.
Cohen thinks this is inadequate.
Entire societies can participate in denial. Governments, media organizations, professions, families, churches, and communities can all sustain patterns of non-recognition.
The question becomes:
How do groups create conditions in which uncomfortable truths become unsayable, invisible, or morally inconsequential?
This moves denial from psychology into sociology and political theory.
Cohen's most famous contribution is his typology.
This is the simplest form.
The facts themselves are denied.
Examples:
This is what most people think denial means.
But Cohen argues it is actually only one variety.
Here the facts are accepted but their meaning is altered.
Examples:
The event is acknowledged.
The interpretation changes.
Language becomes crucial here.
Political euphemisms often function as mechanisms of interpretive denial.
Reality is not rejected outright; it is redescribed.
This is Cohen's most original category.
The facts are accepted.
The meaning is accepted.
But the implications are denied.
For example:
Yet no action follows.
No moral claim is allowed to arise from the knowledge.
One knows but does not respond.
This is especially important because modern societies often excel at this form.
People may be well-informed while remaining passive.
The problem is no longer lack of information.
It is the neutralization of obligation.
One of Cohen's recurring themes is that denial often works through control of attention rather than outright falsification.
People learn:
This resembles what later theorists call "strategic ignorance."
A society need not lie constantly.
It may simply organize perception.
Certain facts remain perpetually in the background.
The book repeatedly returns to the figure of the bystander.
Not perpetrators.
Not victims.
Observers.
Cohen is fascinated by those who are close enough to know but distant enough not to act.
This includes:
He asks how bystanders maintain their self-image despite awareness of suffering.
This leads him into moral psychology.
People employ rationalizations:
The issue is not simply whether these claims are true.
The issue is how they function socially.
One of the book's strongest themes is continuity.
Cohen does not want denial to be treated as something unique to Nazi Germany or military dictatorships.
The same mechanisms appear in ordinary life.
He examines:
The scale differs.
The structure is often similar.
A family may sustain silence around abuse in much the same way a state sustains silence around torture.
This continuity is one of the book's most unsettling arguments.
Governments develop sophisticated forms of denial.
Cohen analyzes techniques such as:
Concealing evidence.
Changing the meaning of events.
Fragmenting responsibility.
Presenting abnormal practices as routine.
Restricting access to information.
But Cohen is particularly interested in situations where the facts are already public.
In modern democracies, outright secrecy is often impossible.
The challenge becomes making known facts politically harmless.
Many people assume:
If only the truth were revealed, action would follow.
Cohen is skeptical.
History shows that atrocities are frequently exposed without producing adequate responses.
Photographs, reports, testimony, documentaries, and journalism may all fail.
Why?
Because knowledge alone does not generate moral engagement.
The gap between awareness and response is one of the book's central concerns.
This is where his notion of implicatory denial becomes especially important.
For Cohen, the opposite of denial is not simply knowledge.
It is acknowledgement.
This distinction is subtle but crucial.
You can know something without acknowledging it.
Acknowledgement means allowing knowledge to affect one's moral and practical orientation.
A person truly acknowledges suffering when they accept:
The demand may be limited.
One cannot solve every injustice.
But acknowledgement means refusing to treat suffering as morally irrelevant.
The book sits at the intersection of several traditions.
You can hear echoes of:
But Cohen's achievement is to transform these concerns into a systematic sociology of denial.
The book has become increasingly relevant in the age of mass media and the internet.
Earlier generations could plausibly claim ignorance about distant suffering.
Today we are flooded with information.
Cohen anticipated a paradox that has only intensified:
The problem is no longer how to make suffering visible. The problem is how visibility fails to produce acknowledgement.
Modern citizens may know more than any previous generation about wars, famines, exploitation, environmental destruction, and displacement.
Yet this knowledge often coexists with extraordinary passivity.
Cohen helps explain why.
If you're approaching States of Denial from an interest in Girard, one way to frame it is that Girard analyzes the production of victims, while Cohen analyzes the social management of knowledge about victims. Girard asks why communities converge against a scapegoat; Cohen asks how communities, observers, and institutions sustain themselves once the suffering of victims becomes visible. The two analyses are different, but they fit together remarkably well.
Yes, and I think the combination is genuinely fruitful because Girard and Cohen seem to illuminate different stages of the same social process.
A rough synthesis might look like this:
For Girard, communities accumulate rivalries, resentments, anxieties, and mimetic conflicts. The social order becomes unstable. A victim or minority is then identified as the cause of the disorder.
The scapegoat is not merely punished; the community comes to believe the victim is responsible.
This is the productive side of the mechanism: it creates consensus.
The scapegoat is expelled, humiliated, persecuted, imprisoned, marginalized, or otherwise sacrificed.
At this point a problem arises.
If the victim's innocence or suffering becomes too visible, the mechanism is threatened.
This is where Cohen enters.
Once suffering is apparent, the community needs ways of preventing that suffering from undermining the consensus.
The repertoire is remarkably close to Cohen's three forms of denial:
In other words, denial stabilizes scapegoating after the fact.
Girard explains why a victim is selected; Cohen explains how knowledge of the victim's suffering is socially neutralized.
What's especially interesting is that Girard's own later work increasingly moves in this direction.
One of Girard's major claims is that the biblical tradition progressively reveals the innocence of victims. The Gospels differ from myth because they tell the story from the victim's side.
For Girard, once the victim's innocence is revealed, the scapegoat mechanism becomes harder to sustain.
But empirically we know that even when innocence is revealed, persecution often continues.
That is exactly the phenomenon Cohen studies.
A Girardian might ask:
Why doesn't revelation end persecution?
A Cohenian answer would be:
Because societies possess sophisticated mechanisms for acknowledging facts while denying their implications.
There's another fascinating convergence around the concept of innocence.
Girard often focuses on the question:
Is the victim really guilty?
Cohen shifts attention to a different question:
Even if we know the victim is innocent, why don't we respond?
The first is an epistemological problem; the second is a moral and social problem.
Modern societies are often surprisingly good at the first. We frequently know who is being mistreated.
The difficulty lies in the second.
You can even imagine a stronger synthesis:
Scapegoating requires denial.
Not necessarily at the beginning, but eventually.
As evidence accumulates that the victim is human, innocent, or disproportionately harmed, the community must increasingly rely on denial to maintain the persecution.
The more visible the victim becomes, the more elaborate the denial mechanisms become.
Historically, this seems plausible. Many modern forms of exclusion are not maintained through complete ignorance. They are maintained through rationalization, bureaucratic language, procedural justifications, appeals to necessity, claims of complexity, and diffusion of responsibility—all themes Cohen analyzes in detail.
In that sense, Cohen may describe what happens to scapegoating in societies that can no longer fully believe their own myths.
Girard's archaic community says:
"The victim caused our troubles."
The modern community is more likely to say:
"The victim probably didn't deserve all this, but the situation is complicated."
That shift—from mythic certainty to managed acknowledgement—feels very Cohenian. It suggests that denial may be the form scapegoating takes once a culture has become partially conscious of victimhood but is not willing to reorganize itself around that knowledge.
It's a surprisingly contemporary picture: not ignorance of suffering, but sophisticated coexistence with it.
Both Girard and Cohen would say there is no permanent escape from the tendency itself. The drive to create victims and the tendency to evade responsibility are deeply rooted in human social life. But they would not say resistance is impossible.
A plausible "way out" is not a final solution. It is a set of practices and institutions that interrupt the mechanism before it hardens into persecution and denial.
Girard's central insight is that scapegoating depends on misrecognition: the community falsely believes the victim is the cause of its disorder. The biblical revelation matters because it exposes that illusion.
So the first step out is recognition of the mechanism itself.
Recognize the temptation to unify against a victim
When anxiety rises, groups instinctively look for someone to blame. The crucial question becomes: What social tension is being displaced onto this person or group?
Refuse unanimous certainty
Girard repeatedly emphasizes the danger of unanimity. The moment everyone seems to agree that a particular person is the problem, suspicion is warranted. A healthy community preserves dissent, due process, and the possibility that the accused may be innocent.
Attend to the victim's perspective
Myths tell the story from the crowd's point of view; the Gospels tell it from the victim's. Ethically, this means cultivating habits of listening to those who bear the cost of social order rather than assuming the majority's narrative is self-evident.
Cohen's point is that exposure alone is not enough. People can know about suffering and still do nothing. So the way out requires more than information; it requires disrupting the social organization of denial.
Convert knowledge into acknowledgement
Cohen distinguishes knowing from acknowledging. Acknowledgement means allowing knowledge to make a moral claim on us. The practical question becomes: What would I have to change if I took this suffering seriously?
Resist euphemism and abstraction
Denial often works through language: "collateral damage," "enhanced interrogation," "necessary measures." Naming suffering plainly is not mere rhetoric; it is a moral discipline.
Create institutions that make denial harder
Independent journalism, transparent courts, whistleblower protections, human rights monitoring, and democratic accountability all matter because they prevent suffering from being sealed off behind bureaucracy and secrecy.
Accept implicatedness
Modern denial often says, "Yes, this is bad, but it has nothing to do with me." Cohen's antidote is not universal guilt but recognition of partial responsibility and interdependence. We are often connected to harms through institutions, economies, and political systems.
Putting Girard and Cohen together suggests a two-part ethic:
Be suspicious of narratives that concentrate blame on a convenient victim.
Ask whether the accusation is simplifying a more diffuse social conflict.
When suffering is visible, refuse the move from “I know” to “it changes nothing.”
That is the crucial pivot where denial takes hold.
Probably not. Human beings remain imitative, competitive, fearful, and socially dependent. New crises generate new temptations to scapegoat, and new forms of denial evolve with media and institutions.
But there can be progress.
A society can become less dependent on sacrificial victims and less willing to avert its gaze from suffering. The abolition of public torture, the expansion of legal rights, protections for minorities, investigative journalism, and humanitarian norms are all imperfect but real examples of such progress.
Girard would say the revelation of the innocent victim has changed history. Cohen would say that change is fragile because acknowledgement can always slide back into denial.
So the "way out" is less a destination than a continual practice of vigilance:
against scapegoating,
against euphemism,
against moral numbness,
and against the comfort of collective innocence.
It is demanding because it asks us to do two things at once: question the crowd's certainty and allow the suffering of others to place real claims upon us.
Achille Mbembe approaches the question somewhat differently from Cohen.
Cohen asks:
How do people know about suffering and yet fail to acknowledge it?
Mbembe asks a more radical question:
How are some populations produced as beings whose suffering does not count in the first place?
In other words, Cohen is often concerned with the denial of suffering that is visible; Mbembe is concerned with the political and historical processes that make certain lives appear less real, less grievable, or less worthy of concern.
Mbembe's most influential concept comes from Necropolitics.
The argument begins with a critique of Michel Foucault.
Foucault had argued that modern power increasingly operates by managing life—health, populations, reproduction, welfare, and so on.
Mbembe asks:
What about forms of power organized around the administration of death?
His answer is that many modern political orders create zones where certain people are exposed to injury, abandonment, premature death, and permanent vulnerability.
The question is not merely who is killed.
It is:
Whose death matters?
Whose suffering is recognized?
Whose pain is politically legible?
Although Mbembe develops this differently from Judith Butler, there is a related concern.
Some populations are represented as:
Once this occurs, their suffering becomes difficult to perceive as suffering.
The issue is not always that people deny the facts.
The facts may be entirely visible.
Rather, the victims have already been placed outside the circle of full moral recognition.
This is perhaps where Mbembe comes closest to your original question.
The pain of others is not denied because it is hidden.
It is denied because the sufferers themselves have been constituted as less-than-fully-human subjects.
A recurring theme in Mbembe's work is colonialism.
Colonial power required more than military domination.
It required a transformation of perception.
The colonized person had to appear as:
Only then could enormous suffering be inflicted without producing unbearable moral contradictions.
In this sense, denial is built into the structure itself.
One does not first see the suffering and then deny it.
One learns not to see it as morally significant from the outset.
One of Mbembe's deepest claims is that modern political orders often distribute humanity unevenly.
Formally, everyone may be called human.
Practically, some lives receive far greater recognition than others.
Certain deaths provoke mourning, outrage, investigation, and remembrance.
Others disappear into statistics.
This creates a hierarchy of visibility.
The suffering exists.
The issue is whether it enters the moral field as suffering that matters.
The two thinkers can actually be read together.
Cohen often studies situations where:
"We know these people are suffering."
The problem is failure of acknowledgement.
Mbembe asks an earlier question:
"How did these people become the kind of people whose suffering does not automatically demand acknowledgement?"
Cohen analyzes denial.
Mbembe analyzes the production of deniable lives.
The comparison with Girard is perhaps even more intriguing.
Girard's victim is a scapegoat: someone burdened with collective anxieties and blamed for a crisis.
Mbembe's figures are often populations rather than individuals:
Girard explains how a community unifies against a victim.
Mbembe explains how political systems create categories of people who can be exposed to suffering without that suffering fully registering as an ethical scandal.
One could say:
That last step is what makes Mbembe particularly powerful. He shifts attention away from the psychology of denial and toward the historical and political conditions that determine whose pain is visible, credible, and consequential in the first place.
In fact, if you're pursuing the line of thought we've been discussing, Mbembe raises a disturbing possibility: the deepest form of denial is not saying "they are not suffering." It is creating a world in which the question of their suffering scarcely arises because they have already been placed outside the community of those whose suffering counts.
Yes.
Because you're circling a genuinely deep question that sits at the intersection of ethics, politics, psychology, and social theory:
How is it possible to live alongside the suffering of others without fully recognizing it as suffering?
That question reappears in remarkably different thinkers:
Those are not identical questions, but they seem to be orbiting the same phenomenon from different angles.
What I find particularly interesting about the direction you've pushed the discussion is that you didn't stop at "denial." You immediately noticed that there may be a sequence:
That fourth step is often undertheorized. Many thinkers assume that revelation is enough—that once the truth is exposed, justice follows. But much of modern history suggests otherwise. People can know a great deal and remain largely unchanged.
That's why the connection between Girard and Cohen struck me as more than a superficial comparison. Girard is often read as a theorist of accusation; Cohen is a theorist of what happens after the accusation has become questionable.
And then Mbembe pushes the question even further back:
What if the decisive event occurs before denial, at the level of who is recognized as fully real?
Those are substantial questions. They don't have final answers, but they are the sort of questions that can reorganize how one sees politics, media, institutions, and even ordinary interpersonal life.
So, yes, I think this is exactly the sort of conversation that justifies a few tokens. The more interesting question is whether it justifies a few years of reading. Many philosophers have built entire careers around narrower problems than the one you're probing here.
The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this pa...
