Sociology of dissonance

Express Tribune

21-03-2025

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Warning: This piece delves into big idea debates. If you are distracted or fasting, leave it for now. Come back to it with a stimulated mind and a full stomach.
We live in an age of cognitive dissonance. That strong bond between people's thoughts, opinions, values and actions is long gone. In other words: do as I say, not as I do. But what caused it? Technology?
At a time when schools and workplaces go out of their way to encourage people to participate in mindfulness exercises, the first suspicion naturally falls on smartphones, screens and social media. But the erosion of moral clarity predates not just social media, smartphones or even the internet.
The other potential culprit could be the decline of state institutions. Notice how, despite Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, no less — waging war on the American federal bureaucracy, there is no spontaneous groundswell of sympathy for the axed departments or employees. In fact, an AP report titled "Thrust into unemployment, axed federal workers face relatives who celebrate their firing" is enough to tell you about the zeitgeist.
But politics is the process of making and unmaking. Institutions rise, decline and fade away. Since power knows no vacuum, they are replaced by new, durable ones. So, blaming institutional decline, including the alleged erosion of democratic values, runs the risk of putting the cart before the horse — or of confusing causes with effects.
My view on this matter will require patience, as I have to show you how I reached that conclusion. But I promise we will get there soon enough.
I was reviewing my old pieces, and one article stunned me. In 1998, I published a piece using Hegelian dialectics, as they were all the rage back then due to Dr Francis Fukuyama's work. The piece was about the consequences of the collapse of the communist sphere of influence. My argument was that during the Cold War, capitalism and communism acted as natural thesis and antithesis. Instead of taking us to the logical synthesis that could emerge as a compromise between the two visions, the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc left us with the uncanny situation of an unevolved thesis - without competition or resolution.
Because this happened without much forethought, fascism was stepping up to fill the gap. You saw what happened after that. Dr Fukuyama declared the end of history. Elsewhere, domain experts proclaimed the arrival of a new unipolar world order. And then began the cutthroat competition of inventing a new enemy. Why? Because the emphasis on globalisation in this unipolar world seemed to lead to the inextricable decline of nation-states. How could nation-states tolerate that? So, the institutions and organisations meant for the Cold War were repurposed for new fights. And you cannot have new fights without new enemies. Hence began the new quest of inventing enemies.
Who should the enemy be? Islam? China? Russia? Terrorism? Or the existential challenge posed by technological and climate change?
The last one should have been the main focus. But here's the rub: an existential challenge to human civilisation would have required new institutions - not the old ones. That would have dramatically reoriented the state infrastructure and rendered massive military hardware useless. So, Islam, China, and maybe Russia were all fair game. There was only one problem with this approach: none of these identities were in a shape fit to contest. To present a threat as credible, you have to make it real. Hence, big guns were brought in.
Dr Samuel Huntington used some of the oldest tricks in the priming book to invent a threat. Tell some of the identified depressed identities that they were important enough to pose a threat to Western primacy. Tell Muslims that they had a distinct civilisation that could not coexist with the West. Why? Because there were enough disaffected and recently disowned jihadi Western proxies in the Muslim world - used against the Soviet Union and then dumped - that could be conditioned to pose an immediate threat in the shape of terrorism.
Then China. And so on. In hardening various identities, he was laying the foundation of extremism and fascism at home and abroad. Look at the following clever bit from an obscure novel by Michael Dibdin titled Dead Lagoon, which he quoted in his book:
"There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven."
Within a decade, both these bogeymen were ready for deployment. And for a heartbeat, it felt like it worked. The aftermath of 9/11 unified the world behind the US. But within years, the country's political and financial elite had driven this goodwill into the ground. The 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2008 financial crisis of greed fractured our world and eroded people's faith in institutions.
When repeated attempts to reset the system did not work, they voted for Trump in 2016. You saw how the existing system reacted to his first term in office. In this way, Western media also ended up eroding its credibility.
But the death knell was yet to come.
The sudden emergence of the Covid crisis made many already suspicious of the proverbial deep state believe that this "weapon" was launched to defeat Donald Trump. Remember, paranoia flourishes the quickest in the presence of trauma. And it was an unprecedented trauma, where millions died, and billions were forced to stay indoors against their will. Hence began the erosion of faith in reality itself.
What followed was a total and irrevocable tribalism. If you cannot trust reality, you can at least trust your beloved leaders, right? So, cognitive dissonance became an acceptable price for survival.
But what about the need for bipolarity as the oversight mechanism of overenthusiasm?
There is no chance of the resurrection of communism. However, the democratic socialism that emerged as the repudiation of Donald Trump's platform in 2016 under the leadership of Bernie Sanders — which was snubbed by establishment politics — is resurfacing. AOC and Sanders have joined hands under the banner of "fighting oligarchy".
That means we are in for two intermittent cycles — one libertarian conservative, and the other socialist. The middle ground is all but gone. Centrists like us will drift between the two extremes. However, this tribalism may eventually result in a better synthesis than the one we witnessed at the end of the Cold War.