The Trouble
with Self-Sealing Doctrines
The self-sealing doctrine
is a defensive strategy used to protect a theory. It consists of explaining
away inconvenient evidence by saying it really proves one’s case. For
example, the disgraced preacher Jim Bakker, arrested for embezzling his followers'
donations, claimed that he had been sincerely creating a devout community
of the faithful, but a diabolical enemy had destroyed it: "Something
so beautiful was being built, the devil got mad." The very holiness of
Bakker's intentions, in this light, provoked his downfall. Another example
is self-proclaimed messiah David Koresh, who, when confronted with his misdeeds,
explained that he was the perfect savior, but he had to partake of sinful
human nature in order to be on earth at all.
Another sect’s founder preached faith healing even though
he himself limped from childhood polio. This discrepancy was dismissed by
his followers: "He has been healed," said one member, "but
God has just not chosen to manifest that healing yet." Some of his followers
and their children died from lack of medical care. When the state began to
prosecute for child abuse, the leader did not deny that misfortunes were occurring;
he simply took them as further proof of his doctrine. The fault lay in the
parents, he said, whose faith was just not strong enough.
Such excuses are not limited to right-wing sects. Indian guru Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh's followers explained away the contrast between their guru's
teachings of love and the paranoid, violent atmosphere of his compound in
Oregon. They convinced themselves that the 150-member police force armed with
semi-automatic weapons were a strategy devised by Rajneesh to make them aware
of their aggressive impulses.
In short, everything is a teaching, and the master is never
wrong. In its most pernicious forms, the master/follower script includes bystanders
and is played out in an unfolding drama of conscription, ideology, and symbiosis.
A theory that can be protected from questioning makes the leader’s path that
much smoother.
As the above examples show, the self-sealing doctrine resists
disproof not by denying troublesome facts but by incorporating them.
This permits one to give the appearance of responding to facts or engaging
in debate. Here is a particularly outrageous example. Early in the twentieth
century, the idea of white superiority was threatened by the new intelligence
tests, but explanations were promptly devised by researchers to defend it.
When early studies showed black children scored higher, one researcher solemnly
declared, "The apparent mental attainments of children of inferior races
may be due to lack of inhibition and so witness precisely to a deficiency
in mental growth." Another researcher's white subjects performed more
slowly, but he praised them anyway: "Their reactions were slower because
they belonged to a more deliberative and reflective race." These researchers
were desperately trying to twist the evidence to suit their prejudices! Meanwhile,
Hilde Bruch, a pioneer in the treatment of eating disorders, recalls the days
(mid-twentieth century) when anorexia was seen as “conversion hysteria” springing
from “fear of oral impregnation” (what a ridiculous idea! but psychoanalysts
actually believed and defended it). She wrote, “I looked eagerly for such
fantasies in my patient. When I did not find them, I reassured myself that
she had not stayed long enough at the Clinic for them to be discovered. I
was sure that they were there somewhere. The literature reveals that experienced
analysts too would offer similar explanations if they failed to expose these
specific psychodynamics, so firmly established was their ‘factual’ existence.”
Fortunately, Bruch had the intellectual courage to reject this theory when
the evidence didn’t support it.
Thus, the self-sealing doctrine has been used both by deranged
or unscrupulous charismatic leaders AND by conscientious and well-meaning
scholar/practitioners. Far from being solely a lunatic delusion, it
is one of the self-deceptions or defenses by which people protect their worldviews.
The self-sealing doctrine is a cautionary tale about the
dangers of exalting certainty. In teaching graduate level psychology, I find
myself regularly deflating my graduate students' grandiosity and their naive proclamations
of certainty. I do this not to reinforce hierarchy or to induce students to
look UP to me, but rather to instill in them the same caution about knowledge
that I have acquired, to bring them DOWN to my level of educated humility.
We must always be willing to learn, even if that means questioning our favorite
ideas.
Abridged from “Self-Sealing
Doctrines, the Misuse of Power, and Recovered Memory.” Transactional Analysis Journal, 1996, 26 (1), 40-45.
Back to Publications