Cognitive Dissonance in Tacitus

Over the next few days I thought I'd write up a few notes from the presentation I've been preparing recently. Unfortunately, they are colossal digressions and mostly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Jamming them awkwardly into an already full twenty-minute presentation would only look self-serving, incredibly pretentious and slightly ridiculous - so my plan is to 'vent' them here.

The first is that I love the theory of cognitive dissonance. It's an attractive theory, because it makes me imagine subterfuge at play in my head, personified with spies in slinky jumpsuits. Cognitive dissonance is essentially the idea that when you are faced with two opposing 'signals', you tend to try to reconcile them. The story goes that Ben Franklin tried to ameliorate relations with a particularly frosty senator by asking him a favour. The book lent, his attitude towards Franklin improved. According to cognitive dissonance, the reason was that the senator had two conflicting feelings: (1) I dislike this man, and (2) I only do favours to people I like. After a few rounds in his head, he gradually became reconciled towards the view that Franklin must be fairly decent after all. (Hence the slightly counter-intuitive theory that if you want to curry favour, get someone to do something nice for you.)

My presentation is on tyranny and the oppression of memory, with reference to Tacitus (specifically, the opening of Agricola, and the Cordius Cremutius section from the Annals). However, in my broader reading, I came across the ever-so-familiar axiom from Agricola 4:

proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris

it is human nature to hate those you have injured

I remember hearing this quote quite a few years ago - as a morose teenager, I used to collect quotes - and I'd wondered why. It would be logical to hate someone you are about to injure, or, if you have injured them through hate, to continue to hate them - but why should you hate those you have injured? Are there no circumstances in which you might pity them? Or hate yourself? Or feel indifferent?

Reading it again, it immediately struck me as a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance in action. You hate those you have injured, because part of you is desperately trying to overcome the dichotomy between 'I am a good person who does not do bad things to good people' and 'I have done a bad thing to a good person'. Somewhere along the line, you start to think 'actually, maybe he or she deserved it.'

Of course, there are many reasons to hate (or not) those you have injured. Cognitive dissonance is extremely difficult to discern, because it is not a conscious phenomenon. That said, I think it does go some way to explain why - in my view - it is more difficult to be forgiven than to forgive, and an insight into the sick mindset of cyclical domestic violence.

Coming tomorrow: Solzhenitsyn's Salamander