Cognitive Dissonance and the Principles of Non Violence.

My second post in a still-young blog and I am already mentioning cognitive dissonance again. But it's such a fascinating concept to me because I think it shapes so much of human behavior. Two recent events have caused me to look at it in a different light and they both deal with non violence. First, the Elms College commencement speaker will be Dr. John Paul Lederach, professor of international peacebuilding at Notre Dame. He developed a theory known as conflict transformation to find peaceful solutions in conflicted areas such as Northern Ireland, Nepal, and Colombia. I look forward to reading more about this theory. Second, I've been reading Viktor Frenkl's book Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.

Frenkl's book reflects on his time as a concentration camp prisoner. It made me think about what causes people to treat others so horribly. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, the case is often made that they are simply "uneducated" and that is why they go to such extremes in committing their hateful acts. When information was leaked that the 911 pilots were college graduates, this theory lost a lot of steam. This is where I propose that, once again, cognitive dissonance plays a major role in human behavior. The terrorists are convinced that western influence poses a major threat to their way of life. Just like any creature, when humans feel threatened they will go to extremes to defend themselves and their culture. To justify blowing themselves up, as well as taking the lives of innocent Muslim women and children, they have to really hate Americans -- and they do.

So what caused the Auschwitz prison guards to treat the Jews so inhumanely? I believe there are two natural reactions that the prisoners took that allowed for the guards to continue their brutish behavior. One is hostility. It makes it easier to beat and send a prisoner to his death if they are openly violent and insulting. It justifies the behavior, at least in the Nazi's mind. This person is mean to me so it's okay to hit them. The other is inhumanity. Frenkl describes the second phase that all prisoners seem to succumb to that made them feel like nothing more than moving masses of flesh clinging to a thin skeletal frame. They became devoid of hope and happiness, and their expressions revealed this black hole of emotion. This only reinforced to the Nazis that it was okay to treat them the way they did because they didn't even seem to be real people.

So back to Dr. Lederach. In reading about him I was reminded about one of the most profound courses I took in college, World Views taught by Dr. Barry Gan. As a pacifist, Gan used the class to talk about global non-violent social movements. Gandhi believed that there was a human spirit that could be reached in everyone and that spirit did not want to harm other humans. Gan used to say "It's not 'do what I say or I'm going to hurt you.' It's 'do what I say or I'm going to make you hurt me.'" But this human spirit can be guarded by cognitive dissonance. If a prisoner displays hostility or lifelessness, a person can rationalize their inhumane treatment of said prisoner. The prisoner's best bet to reach that human spirit was to show natural loving kindness in the face of hatred, holding a mirror to its ugly mug (World Views did briefly discuss several isolated instances of non-violent movements effectively working on Nazi prison guards who then allowed them to escape).

Even though we are all prone to cognitive dissonance, recognizing it can help dissolve its nasty effects. And maybe the principles of nonviolence are they key to cutting through dissonance and finding the human soul. The true self is no self.