How Do Sects React When Prophecies Are Not Fulfilled?
Yesterday I was watching the zapping show APM! with some friends when, at a certain moment, she appeared on the screen Alvaro Ojeda, a well-known Internet “opinionator.” Ojeda has become known, among other things, for the vehemence with which he defends his ideas: He shouts, hits the table he uses to record his videos and always seems to have a significant bad temper Furthermore, since he often touches on issues related to politics and uses poorly worked arguments associated with the propaganda of the Spanish conservative right, outside the circles of people who think like him he usually gives the image of being the classic bar counter reviewer who speaks without having much idea about anything. For example, a button.
The thing is that one of my friends did not know Álvaro Ojeda, and assumed that he was a fictional character created by Catalan television to give a bad image of conservatives using a lot of stereotypes about them. When we explained to him that Catalan television had nothing to do with Álvaro Ojeda’s rise to fame and that, in fact, he has a lot of followers on his social networks, not only did he not believe us but he was even more scandalized by the idea that a media outlet could direct such a convoluted plan from the shadows just to make a part of the population of Spain look bad. Someone who normally listens to reason had just embraced a conspiracy theory invented at that time by himself.
The reason was probably that having identified Álvaro Ojeda with the stereotypes about conservative Spain in front of all of us, recognizing that he is not a fictional character and that he has become famous for the support that many people give him would mean admitting that Those stereotypes describe a part of the population quite well. Somehow, He was chained to what he had said before, and was unable to assimilate information that contradicted his initial ideas
This anecdote is an example of what social psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance. The term cognitive dissonance refers to the state of tension and discomfort that occurs in us when we simultaneously hold two beliefs that contradict each other, or when our interpretation of the events we experience does not fit well with our most deeply held beliefs. But the interesting thing about cognitive dissonance is not so much the subjective state of discomfort it leads us to, but rather what it leads us to do.
Since the state of slight stress that it produces in us is unpleasant and we want to reduce this tension, we try to make the dissonance disappear in one way or another. And, although this may be an important driver of learning and reflection, Many times we take the short route and “cheat” to show that the contradiction between beliefs is not real, which can lead us to deny the evidence, as we have seen in the previous example. In fact, arranging evidence so that it fits well into our belief system without causing too much discomfort not only does not happen exceptionally, but could be the law of life, judging by Festinger’s discoveries. In this article you can see some examples of this.
So that, Cognitive dissonance is quite an everyday occurrence, and many times it plays against our intellectual honesty But… what happens when we don’t just cheat to neutralize beliefs in a specific way? In other words, how do you react when cognitive dissonance is so strong that it threatens to destroy the belief system on which our entire lives have been built? This is what Leon Festinger and his team wanted to find out in the early 1950s when they set out to study the way in which a small sect faced disappointment.
Messages from outer space
In the fifties, an American apocalyptic sect called “The Seekers” (The Seekers) spread the message that the world was going to be destroyed on December 21, 1954 Supposedly, this information had been transmitted to the cult members through Dorothy Martin, alias Marian Keech, a woman who was credited with the ability to write strings of words of alien or supernatural origin. The fact that the members of the fanatic group believed in the authenticity of these messages was one of the reasons why the religious beliefs of the entire community were reinforced, and as classically occurs with cults of this type, life of each of its members revolved around the needs and objectives of the community.
Becoming part of the cult required significant investments of time, effort and money, but apparently all this was worth it; According to the telepathic messages that Keech received, dedicating himself body and soul to the sect meant having guaranteed salvation hours before the apocalypse reached planet Earth. Basically, Spaceships were going to arrive that would transport them to a safe place while the world was covered with corpses
Festinger and the members of his team decided to contact the members of the sect to document how they would react when the time came and the end of life on Earth did not occur and no flying saucer appeared in the sky. They expected to encounter an extreme case of cognitive dissonance not only because of the importance that the sect had for the members of the cult but also because of the significant fact that, upon knowing the day of the apocalypse, they had said goodbye to everything that united them to their cult. planet: houses, cars, and other belongings.
Of course, the alien Noah’s Ark didn’t arrive. Nor was there any sign that the world was breaking up. The cult members remained gathered in silence at Marian Keech’s house for hours while Festinger and his collaborators remained infiltrated in the group. At a time when desperation was palpable in the air, Keech reported that she had received another message from the planet Clarion: the world had been saved at the last minute thanks to the faith of the Search engines A sacred entity had decided to spare the lives of humanity thanks to the dedication of the sect.
This obscurantist collective had not only given new meaning to the failure to fulfill the prophecy. He also had one more reason to strive for his tasks. Although some members of the collective left it out of pure disappointment, those who remained showed a greater degree of cohesion and began to defend their ideas more radically, to spread their speeches and seek greater visibility. And all this since the day after the false apocalypse. Marian Keech, in particular, continued to be part of this type of cult until her death in 1992.
An explanation
The case of the Seekers and the apocalypse of 1954 is collected in the book When Profecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter. In it An interpretation of the facts is offered, relating them to the theory of cognitive dissonance
The cult members had to fit together two ideas: that the end of the world was going to occur the night before, and that the world continued to exist after that moment. But the cognitive dissonance generated by this situation did not lead them to renounce their beliefs. Simply, They accommodated the new information they had at their disposal to make it fit into their schemes, dedicating as much effort to this readjustment as the tension produced by the dissonance was strong In other words, the fact that they had been examining an entire belief system for a long time had not served to make them more informed people, but rather had made them unable to recognize the failure of their ideas, something that entails making more sacrifices.
As the members of the sect had made many sacrifices for the community and the belief system held within it, The maneuver to accommodate information contradictory to the initial ideas also had to be very radical The members of the cult began to believe much more in their ideas not because they proved to better explain reality, but because of the efforts that had previously been made to keep these beliefs afloat.
Since the 1950s, the explanatory model of cognitive dissonance has been very useful to explain the internal functioning of sects and groups linked to obscurantism and divination. They demand sacrifices from the members of the group that at first seem unjustified, but that could make sense considering that their own existence could be the glue that holds the community together.
Beyond esotericism
Of course, it is not easy to identify too much with people who believe in apocalypses orchestrated by alien forces and in mediums who have telepathic contacts with the upper echelons of the intergalactic kingdom, but there is something in the story of Marian Keech and her followers that, intuitively , we can relate to our daily lives. Although it seems that the consequences of our actions and decisions have to do with the way in which we change our environment and our circumstances (having or not having a university degree, buying that house or not, etc.), it can also be said that what What we do is building an ideological framework that keeps us tied to beliefs, without the ability to maneuver between them in a rational way.
This, by the way, is not something that happens only in sects. In fact, it is very easy to find a link between the functioning of cognitive dissonance and the way in which political and philosophical ideologies are held uncritically: Karl Popper already pointed out a long time ago that certain explanatory schemes of reality, such as psychoanalysis, are so ambiguous and flexible that they never seem to contradict the facts. That is why the case study on the Marian Keech sect is so valuable: the conclusions that can be drawn from it go beyond the typical functioning of apolcalyptic cults.
Knowing that we can so easily fall into a kind of fundamentalism through dissonance is, of course, an uncomfortable idea. Firstly, because it makes us realize that we could be blindly carrying ideas and beliefs that are in fact a burden. But especially because The psychological mechanism studied by Festinger can lead us to think that we are not free to act rationally as people who do not have commitments to certain causes As judges who can distance themselves from what happens to them and decide what is the most reasonable solution to situations. There is a reason why, in social psychology, there is less and less belief in the rationality of human beings.
