Next Stop: Cognitive Dissonance Station

Rivka at Respectful of Otters wrote in the wake of Katrina:

Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable collision of two or more contradictory beliefs. It usually results in (unconscious) efforts to reduce the discomfort by modifying one's appraisal of the situation. The classic example is a smoker resolving the dissonance between "I want to live" and "I smoke cigarettes" by downplaying the health risks of smoking or deciding that old age isn't worth living through anyway.

Cognitive dissonance gets particularly ugly when reality collides with the just world hypothesis, the belief that "the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve." Faced with tragedy, victimization, or injustice, just world believers have four options to reduce the cognitive dissonance: they can act quickly to help relieve the victim's suffering (restoring the justice of the situation), minimize the harm done (making the tragedy a less severe blow to their beliefs), justify the suffering as somehow deserved (redefining the situation as just), or focus on a larger, more encompassing just outcome of the "poor people will receive their rewards in heaven" variety. The first response - the only actually helpful one - isn't always possible. Unfortunately, the latter three pretty much always are.

We saw a lot of those latter three in response to the tragedy in NOLA, and we are seeing more of the same today.

Whether it's the Bush administration outing Valerie Plame, the NSA spying on our own people without warrants, or our allies in the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism torturing kids, we're greeted by the apologists with a shrug, minimization of the harm and/or "they deserved it".  I supposed one could argue that the "rewards in heaven" response could be a variation of the "it's all for a good cause" idea--so long as we claim these atrocious actions are done in the interest of national security, the perpetrators get a divine pass.

Disappointing, if not completely unsurprising.  And as disheartening as this is, it's possible that we can use the cognitive dissonance to reach and educate people, and maybe we can get our nation back on track.

ntodd