Are You Blind to Your Own Blindness?
It’s a real medical syndrome. Don’t underestimate it.
One of the first documentation of Anton’s syndrome is actually by a philosopher: Seneca.
In one of this letters, in his book Moral Letters to Lucilius, Seneca speaks of their help at home, at that time being their slave, noting how she is losing her sight yet refuses to acknowledge it or believe it.
Today, in medicine, this is referred to as Anton’s syndrome.
Anton’s syndrome is a situation when the person is going blind, and is living in denial of this fact; they do not recognize they are going blind. If they bump into walls, they might say it was dark, or they were distracted. If they could not read, they might blame their forgetting their glasses. And so on. It is a mental block, stopping the individual from seeing the truth — they are, in effect, blind to their blindness.
Today, this is a very rare disease. It take medical therapy and re-training the muscles to, hopefully, be able to see again.
But what if we all suffer from a version of Anton’s syndrome?
What if we are all blind to our own blindness? What if we cannot recognize our own blind spots, biases, and act without knowledge we are doing so?
