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Notes -
It’s this last connection where you lose me. People do not like that level of cognitive dissonance. But we do, of course, want to conclude that our work is essential. The end result is that we have to develop some contortion to work around the dissonance. A few common ones:
I think identity orgs are likely to come up with #1 or #2. The latter is why implicit racism and systemic bias are so popular—they allow people to claim that the problem already exists, and thus cannot be worsened. An ADL member who believed this would argue the ADL doesn’t make people anti-Semitic, it merely reveals anti-Semites who would otherwise have bided their time. Other examples of #1 include televangelists, jetsetting climate warriors, and Ted Kaczynski. For #2, there are shock protestors (factory farming, abortion…), vandals, and some white-collar criminals.
#3 and #4 are rather postmodern. They’re much more common in business, where the dissonance between mission statements and profit is relatively accepted. The important part is that believers get to feel one level more sophisticated than the outsiders, one step ahead on the barber-pole model of fashion. It’s not deception if our outgroup is just too dumb to get what we really meant!
I’ve seen #3 occur in Silicon Valley postmortems, but also with far-left slogans like “defund the police!” or “eat the rich!” Really anything that relies on anchoring to extreme claims. #4 is more rare and much more cynical. The best examples are counterculture warriors. Conspiracy theorists, post-ironic doomers, people who brand as outside the mainstream while desperately trying to wedge themselves into it.
Finally, #5: not actually resolving the dissonance. It turns out that feeling powerful is a good antidote. People who are rich or well-connected enough to ignore their critics. It doesn’t require a large scale, so long as ideological challenges only come from those much weaker. Reddit administration comes to mind. I think—I want to believe—that this is pretty ineffective, and that autocrats great and small are lying awake at night. But, well, I wouldn’t bet on it.
I’ll conclude with this chapter recently posted to /r/rational. It’s a tidy example of someone dealing with #3: a bureaucracy which professes one mission, but internally, derides it as naïve and unsophisticated. They have contorted themselves to avoid admitting that their system has failed. As fiction, this is taken to an extreme. I still find it more realistic, more human, than a group sitting around and directly saying “yes, let us make the problem worse so we keep our jobs.”
God, I love you. This is why I come here. Thank you for writing this out.
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