Why People Deny or Excuse Horrific Injustice
It’s easier to look at the past and agree on evils and atrocities. It's harder to admit when it’s happening now, when all the events unfold and you’re trying to make sense of it. It can be scary to arrive at a conclusion that might require change within you, and change within a system and environment around you that is rotten, dysfunctional and destructive, but that has kept you in a level of comfort that is too familiar to abandon. It might mean that if you reject its toxicity, you might also have to reject a part within yourself you’ve become too attached to, that you identify with too deeply, as if abandoning it would be abandoning yourself, as if your survival depended on your attachment to that very belief. That’s cognitive dissonance. That uncomfortable feeling when you’re presenting with conflicting information. It’s hard to swallow. It’s hard to process. So what do you do to make it easier on yourself? Here are a few options:
You accept the new information, and change your views and attitude.
You seek out information that or align with opinions that reinforce or affirm your existing beliefs, while avoiding any that contradict them. That’s confirmation bias, or you might expose yourself only to information or sources that reinforce your beliefs, like constantly listening to a particular news outlet even if it spreads propaganda and disinformation. That’s selective exposure.
You minimize the importance. You downplay the significance of the new information that conflicts with your belief to minimize that uncomfortable feeling in your brain.
You justify behavior, yours or that of someone or group of people your belief is aligned with. You come up with reasons or excuses to support the behavior.
You ignore or deny information that conflicts with existing beliefs.
You seek social support, looking for reassurance from others who share the same beliefs, like echo chambers.
You see. Only number one is healthy. The others are dangerous, yet they are the most common ways people deal with life, because the truth is uncomfortable. It requires a degree of self-awareness, understanding, reflection and courage to manage, and see how the beliefs you hold are not helping you, or the world in which you live. Ultimately, cognitive dissonance feels like fear. It’s scary, because that comfortable cage of beliefs you live in is being shaken.
This is what’s happening now with the events unfolding in Palestine. The undeniable atrocities Palestinians continue to experience are being denied by a large part of the world. They’ve experienced a massive cognitive dissonance they don’t want to deal with, because to admit it would require an uprooting of the beliefs and foundational policies many nations are built on, like the USA, and it would require a change within the culture and collective mind of the population, which by default must agree with and reflect the principles and policies of the nation. And all of this is too uncomfortable to change, in the same way it would be too uncomfortable to end systemic racism, and the social habits of people which encourage it. In the same way ending pollution and global waste, ending fossil fuels and deforestation would disrupt a comfortably established global economy, and the superpowers and mega corporations that benefit from it, and depend on it. It would require a total change of the status quo. Institutions would have to completely change. Daily information broadcast into the minds of people would have to change. Laws would have to change, economies would have to change.
Change usually requires a breakdown. Breakdown is scary. Breakdown means recognizing that a government that calls itself democratic does not suffocate natives of a land in the name of an ideology. Breakdown means Western democratic countries stop supporting that apartheid regime in order to protect their interests.
In the early 19th century in the US, slavery had become a significant economic engine in the South. The abolitionist movement, which called for the elimination of slavery, faced opposition as it threatened the established economic structure in the South. Many believed ending slavery would cause economic destruction. Do you see the dissonance? It’s easy to laugh or be outraged at how dumb this thinking was, but I wonder what many today would have thought and said if they lived in those times. The people who justify what’s happening and has been happening for decades to Palestinians are the people who would’ve justified slavery 200 years ago. The nations, governments and politicians that stay quiet on the ethnic cleansing becoming genocide in Gaza are those who tried to rationalize slavery 200 years ago, because of interests, economic and territorial.
Breakdown also means upholding international humanitarian law when a government or group violates it, and repeatedly. The United Nations is perhaps a noble but weak attempt at establishing a world that is actually united, where humans behave as one united people that act together to protect each other from horror. We are all responsible for the atrocities that the people of Gaza are experiencing. We are all responsible for the horrible attacks of Hamas on innocent Israeli people. We are all responsible for Israel’s monstrous, inhumane and flat out inhuman response, from collective punishment and carpet bombing of the people of Gaza, to the use of white phosphorus on civilians, to the bombing of a hospital. And that’s besides the near century of suffocation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We are all responsible, because we are all human. But responsibility requires courage, and acceptance, not being one sided and selective in our empath, not easing our cognitive dissonance through denial and justification and echo chambers.
In 1939, Canada denied entry to 907 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis. The ship had to return its passengers to Europe, where 254 of them eventually perished in the Holocaust. Why were they denied entry? Excuses and justifications, cognitive dissonance in the form of antisemitism, restrictive immigration policies and economic hardships, and an international community that didn’t give a fuck. That’s the 1938 Evian Conference, where delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian, each expressing sympathy for the refugees; but most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees, including fear that refugees would compete with locals for jobs and strain social programs. We’re seeing the same bullshit repeating itself now, but with Arabs, like the Syrian refugee crisis, and right now, Palestine. Denial and excuses, because there is a narrative against the people of the Middle East, a narrative that depicts them as angry, backwards barbarians that produce terrorism, despite the fact that they are the biggest victims of it, a narrative that normalizes the wars and horrors they continue to experience, as if to suggest that this is their way of life. And this narrative has been both produced and adopted by the so-called democratic nations of the West, because it is the easiest and most effective way to create a divide, one in which the West is seen as civilized and superior in all the ways imaginable, while the rest of the world is beneath it. This narrative is the descendant of colonialism. And as a result, it allows denial and undermining of atrocities, and legitimizes responses that violate humanitarian laws, because… well, they’re barbarians. They’re savages. It justifies and even receives massive popular support for invading lands under the pretense of saving the natives of that land, using supposed evidence to suggest the invaders are the righteous heroes burdened and tasked with stopping the evil enemy. Iraq war, anyone? Yeah, even calling it a war is incorrect. It was an invasion. There is a list of war crimes committed by the US invasion of Iraq, but no accountability, no adequate investigation, just an “oh well…” attitude of denial. The same is true for Native Americans and the First Nations of Canada. The same is true for Palestine and its native people. Colonialism. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Oh well…
Denial is safety, comfort. Breakdown is courage, the courage to look forward and recognize the opportunity that comes with change. Change is for the brave. It is for those who see the truth with the vision to look at what’s in front of us and what lies ahead, instead of what’s already happened. Because you can’t change what’s already happened. That’s why it’s easy to talk about it from a place of virtue and morality, but it’s what’s in front of you that you can change. That’s what matters. But it’s not for cowards, and it’s not for the shortsighted. Most governments and leaders are shortsighted and self-centered, and many of their people are mere reflections of them, unable to see beyond the lies fed to them, or unwilling, because of the requirements that change demands. Humanity will come together, united, Palestine will be free, the narrative about Arabs will change, and all injustices and atrocities in the world will finally end only when the brave lead the way for change, undeterred by the cowardice of the hypocrites who call themselves leaders, unhindered by the ignorance of the people who are incapable yet of seeing or accepting the truth behind the veil of propaganda, unwavering and relentless in their pursuit of a better world. The brave are patient, faithful, and focused. They are the bringers of a new world.
