The Tyranny of Cognitive Dissonance

What happens when our beliefs and values are not what we do? Could the answer be responsible for an awful lot of problems in the world?

Parents, teachers and others involved in raising children, almost all want to do their best for the children. A large part of that work is helping children to know how to be a part of their community: to understand the shared values and beliefs and to make those ideals part of who they are. Frighteningly often though, those values and beliefs are not the values and beliefs that shape what people actually do. This sets up a conflict between the self we are and the self  we beieve we should be. How we reconcile such conflicts can have significant costs to ourselves and those around us.

In Medieval Christianity, the idea of salvation of the soul through Jesus Christ was a very powerful cultural concept that enabled people to work together despite living in difficult and precarious conditions. Perhaps inevitably though, this personal aspiration exposed people to manipulation by the Church, to enrich and empower itself. At a time of great political factionalism and weak civil institutions, this was not an unmitigated curse, for the Church contributed to learning and political and cultural stability. However, the Church's control over people was much rooted in setting people up to fail. The standards and sacrifices required to enter the Kingdom of Heaven were set such that most people knew they were failing. While this gave the Church the power over people it wanted, it did so at the cost of oppressing people's sense of self worth. This in turn could result in people giving up and becoming shamed and degraded, or struggling on, but in ways that their creativity, empathy and vitality were suppressed.

The truth of this was evidenced when liberation came. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France in particular, the Cathar religion took hold. The core belief of the Cathars was that the material world was sinful and that the heavenly soul was locked into a sinful body, destined to be reincarnated until life was lived perfectly. While not sounding like a promising belief system for a healthy state of being, it was in effect liberating. Men and women were nearly as sinful as each other, so mysogyny was much reduced. People could accept both the inevitability of being sinful and aspire to express their better selves. The result was a well ordered, creative and dynamic society.

Certainly in terms of creativity, learning and personal development, the reformation of the sixteenth century was another similar psychological release, out of which came the age of science and the industrial era. However the release of the spirit is best seen as a release from the tyranny of contradiction between belief and how life is lived. Today it is unexceptional for women to excel in all aspects of work, life and culture, but even now many western women constrain their ability to express themselves in their lives in avoidance of the residual conflict between themselves and cultural beliefs about women.

Class and cast systems are yet another belief system that facilitates structural social oppression. Working class white settlers in southern Africa needed racism as a belief system to enable them to take on the same powers  aristocrats had used to oppress their ancestors. Only by believing in some inherent difference can the oppressor justify to himself his brutish and exploitative behaviour to another human.

Conversely, the oppressed is then caught in a bind. To accept the oppressors belief of his inferiority is to become complicit, not just in his own enslavement, but also in the suppression of the creative and empowered self. To resist though is to live in a state of conflict. To inwardly resist and outwardly comply is to live in the oppressive state of contradiction.

That such states of contradiction are normal in all societies is explained by Cognitive Dissonance Theory, which holds that we will adjust our beliefs to avoid the distress of doing one thing and believing another. While this explains how people become complicit, it needs to be recognised that there is a high personal and societal cost in putting large proportions of the population into a state of psychological oppression as a means of gaining social compliance. Conversely, a society becomes much more creative and dynamic when this oppression is not strongly in action and it is therefore a key function of the modern state to understand and work to remove dysfunctional contradictions in society.

This tends to be a slow process, requiring the courage and conciousness of the oppressed. Here organised labour, feminism, gay rights, BME rights and disability rights have common cause in the face of resistance from the oppressor classes. With the emergence of the transnational super rich as the new oligarchy, with their highly rewarded servants in finance, advanced technologies and the new monopolies, whole new populations are being brought into an oppressed state in which expression is stifled. Awareness of the need to prioritise action towards a sustainable prosperity for all is in daily conflict with being powerless to be other than a disempowered worker, a debtor and a consumer. Resistance to this infantilism tends to be distorted to the blaming of some group of 'others' to avoid the consequences of true resistance, which include social ostracism, poverty and vulnerability.

The current drift towards fascism in Israel can be explained within the same paradigm. After years of being the oppressors of the Palestinians, the escape route for Israelis from the cognitive dissonance of holding the belief of themselves as progressive, democratic rationalists that live under the rule of law, has been to adopt the belief that the Palestinians are lesser beings. That non-Israelis do not also believe this is an indication of their inferiority and their opinions can be invalidated. While to some extent Israeli Arabs have had the opportunity to be complicit with their own oppression and to adopt the reconciling beliefs, Palestinians in the occupied territories have to a great extent been forced to live as excluded resisters. The organisation of such a society is extremely difficult as the main roles for compliance with the oppressor is as agents of oppression. The alternative is organised resistance, however futile. The difficulty and futility of more normal economic and social organisation constitutes the most insidious aspect of the oppression as it leaves Palestinians with no safe way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of their situation. In deliberately failing to understand the effects of this oppression, the Israelis, like the whites in southern Africa, create and enforce a difference between themselves and their victims that is then used to justify their sense of superiority and therefore their oppressive actions. What the Israelis fail to see is the irony, as this same process was in play when the Nazis were engaged in the Holocaust.

The importance of understanding the role of belief and the practice of power in social psychology needs to be much better appreciated in our political discourse if we are to have a political economy structured to enable people to fulfil themselves and to contribute to our sustainability. The threats to the survival of modern humanity are substantial and it is only if we can move past this culture of systemic oppression that we can expect to be able address the much more serious issues.