In the movie “Concussion”, a moving and disturbing and infuriating film, Roger Goodell says during a press conference ” I’m not a doctor, but this is an evolving science”. Sound familiar? This is a talking point from the ones for whom the science is threatening their bread and butter, and by extension, for the millions who want to continue to enjoy their product. Who and what is science to tell US what we are enjoying is somehow harmful? How dare they!

Something else: The lawyers who worked with the NFL and their “defense” or response to the inquiries into the CTE epidemic (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), also were recruited by Tobacco Companies to help them in their battle against the Cancer studies that showed links to cancer from smoking. Imagine that. Seems to be a lot of “anti-science” that is big to big business.

The tragedy that is CTE (repeated concussive injuries to the brain found to be disturbingly widespread in NFL and other football players) is but one tragic consequence of a root evil: that of our propensity to defend, at great lengths and with great cognitive dissonance, destructive behaviors that get overlooked because of some benefit to ourselves, emotional, psychological, social, or economic. Slavery comes to mind. Tobacco comes to mind. And , more recently, the science of Climate Change and the unprecedented CRISIS it identifies. We will go to great lengths to dismiss how something so energizing, relieving, or contributory to our own comfort, can be considered harmful. It builds up massive structures of “Structural Evil” (again, reference to the book I have been reading, by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structual Evil: Love As Ecological-Economic Vocation”