After she became the de facto ruler of Myanmar, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi—previously known as “The Dame of Rangoon” for being a champion of justice and human rights—stunned the global community by publicly whitewashing the genocide of Rohingya Muslims during her high-profile fall from collective grace. Because opinion of her was so high in Western countries, when reports of anti-Muslim genocide emerged, many Westerners felt that they could not be true. Most liberal Westerners assumed they must have misunderstood a nuance of the situation, or that some aspect was being “lost in translation.” But nothing was being lost. The reports were accurate. Considering what most in the West believed she stood for, the disgraced dame Aung San Suu Kyi had done a complete 180.

XREF: Echoes the halo effect and confirmation bias in social psychology, plus echo patterns from other fall-from-grace figures like Lance Armstrong.

SEED: Angle: how hero worship of public figures creates epistemic vulnerability and suppresses truth. The Suu Kyi case is a vivid example of reputation-driven motivated reasoning.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 144