Chernobyl: A Great Tragedy of "Self-Deception

The day of the Chernobyl nuclear accident - 26 April 1986 - happened to be my eighth birthday, so Chernobyl left an extremely deep impression on my cerebral cortex. Regarding the play Chernobyl, I would like to suggest a key word from a philosophical point of view, namely 'self-deception'.
Roughly speaking, 'self-deception' means that deep down one does not believe in something, but at the same time one has to force oneself to believe it and deceive oneself.
Some of the recurring scenes in the play Chernobyl are in fact a manifestation of self-deception, such as the deputy chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Dyatlov.
When the explosion occurs, Diatlov insists that "it could not have been the core that exploded", despite the fact that he has seen graphite material scattered all over the place (graphite has good neutron deceleration properties and was first used as a decelerant in nuclear reactors; only the core of the plant, the core, is surrounded by graphite material), that the measuring instruments have blown up, and that the people in the plant are suffering from various degrees of skin ulcers and bleeding, coughing and vomiting, all signs strongly suggesting that the reactor exploded.
He even claimed that his subordinates were hallucinating and used a threatening tone to force the rest of the plant staff to follow his judgement and not to reveal the "impossible" to the public.
In this process, he has more or less taken on the key characteristics of 'self-deception'.
What strikes me most about this episode is that, as the deputy chief engineer of a nuclear power plant, he is an official, but he is at least professionally trained and well aware of what is going on.
Self-deception is a state of mind that distinguishes between 'wishful thinking' and 'total deception', and is one of the most mysterious interstices, as in the case of Dyatlov in Chernobyl, where he forces himself to believe the opposite when the evidence before him is sufficient to prove one conclusion, and the two beliefs are fighting in his head, a typical irrationality.
We know that there is a basic law when talking about logic, called the 'law of the row'. It means that a proposition and its negative proposition cannot both be false at the same time in the same thought process, one must be true. However, self-deception can easily lead one into this irrational state.
To analyse the causes of Dyatlov's behaviour, three different explanatory options are possible. The first option: self-deception may arise because, at some point in the time sequence of the thought process, one suddenly, because of some factor, wanders from believing the conclusion at the beginning to believing the opposite of that conclusion, moving back and forth between two contradictory conclusions.
Take the reaction of the deputy chief engineer for example, when his subordinates report the situation to him, the chief engineer's first reaction may be to believe it, but the next moment he thinks that it is not right, because he thinks that none of the design materials indicate that the core may explode, and that if something happens it will at best melt down, so he immediately dismisses the previous idea. His mind wandered again when he saw new evidence of graphite material and so on.
The second explanation suggests that one person is actually divided into several smaller selves. The engineer in the play, for example, has at the same time a scientist's ego, but is also a screw in the whole bureaucracy, an ego in the capacity of an official, which are two different sets of logic. As a scientific researcher, he should give a reasonable speculation based on scientific evidence; but as a member of the bureaucracy, he may be thinking about how to take responsibility and how to account for it upwards. These are two different sets of logic.
Thus, the assessment of the current state of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant may form two sets of assessments in Dyatlov's mind, the ego as a scientist assessing that the results were quite bad, but the smaller ego, part of the bureaucracy, believing that the results were not quite as bad. These two selves then hold two contradictory beliefs in the same thought process.
A third explanatory option, which you may find somewhat difficult to accept on hearing, is one that comes from Machiavellian thinking. One of the central ideas of Machiavellianism is that what one says does not necessarily have to match the ideas or facts one believes, that is, it is okay for one to lie in order to get what one wants, and this is one of the broad frameworks of Machiavellianism.
You might point out that lying and self-deception are not the same thing. But note that, according to the Machiavellian interpretation of self-deception, the best way for a person to deceive others is to first deceive oneself into believing it completely or to some extent.
According to such an interpretation of self-deception, self-deception essentially becomes a 'performing art'. Unlike the art of performing for the sake of beauty, the deputy chief engineer of Chernobyl's performance was more clearly intended for some utilitarian purpose, having been subjected to the Soviet bureaucracy and management system for so long that he was more afraid that admitting the results of the accident would affect his ecological position in society as a whole. From this perspective, this characteristic of human spiritual activity, as exemplified by Chernobyl, is somewhat universal.
In fact we often use this state of self-deception in our daily lives, perhaps to gain the affirmation of members of other social groups, to preserve our status, or to secure a kind of psychological stability by forcing ourselves to accept an opinion or belief in which we are not so convinced. Self-deception, even to a certain limited extent, is a way of keeping our human psyche healthy in order that this belief does not destroy your entire belief system.
It is very unfortunate that the impact of the Chernobyl accident is so vast that the negative consequences that this tendency to self-deception can expose are geometrically magnified. This is a major reason why we feel unforgiven for the perpetrators of this accident.
So how can the negative consequences of the phenomenon of self-deception be reduced to a minimum? This is where I have repeatedly stressed that the idea of checks and balances must be involved, and that parity and balance are a fundamental social condition for a healthy debate to take place. Specifically, because everyone thinks differently, everyone has different background information, and everyone may have different specific ways of generating self-deception, it is important to allow people with different interests and forces to discuss them openly in a public forum, and it is then that some of the apparent self-deceptions may slowly dissolve.
For example, after the Chernobyl accident, Gorbachev himself realised the seriousness of the matter, also from the power of a third party.
When the radioactive material drifted as far as Sweden, Sweden raised the alarm, so that the Swedish diplomatic service gave a stern warning to Moscow, and then the diplomatic services of all countries (especially in Europe) gave a warning to Moscow, Gorbachev lost face and he realised the seriousness of the matter. Under these circumstances, it became pointless to engage in 'self-deception'.
This means that the revelation of the matter by the Swedish governments, other independent scientific institutions, independent scientists, was in fact an important factor in making a small number of those in power in the Soviet Union at the time wake up to the seriousness of the problem. Without this external check and balance, the disaster would probably have continued to drag on and many more people would have lost their precious lives as a result.
So a fair, scientific argument presupposes that different people are allowed to present different opinions and viewpoints. And the parties to the argument should themselves have their own independent financial sources, economic sources and political authority, so that they can constitute a real mutual check and balance.