Quote:
Originally Posted by HERn
I think I have read that prolonged cognitive dissonance can lead to mental illness. If none of this is your experience, then please ignore all I have written, for I could be deceived.
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My experience of cognitive dissonance within the Lord's Recovery/Local Church movement, a subject touched upon often in these threads, was highlighted in the fact that members were allowed and even encouraged to criticize "Christianity", meaning all those outside the group, but not permitted to be "negative" or "questioning" regarding anything within the group itself.
Second, group leadership could excoriate rank-and-file members for faults and failures, and even drag up imaginary ones, and do it quite publicly (which I witnessed in trainings and conferences), to show who was situated where in the leadership & social pecking order. But any return questioning of the upper tiers by lower members would immediately be branded as "leprosy" and "rebellion". Criticizing higher-ups was simply not tolerated in any way.
So you got this weird combination of outspokenness and silence, depending on where the attention was focused. To me it is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, and it reminds me nothing so much as the slave in the parable in Matthew 18:23-35, who was hyper aware of the slights of others, and yet wanted his own to be ignored.
When an individual behaves this way, he is probably mentally unbalanced; when a group is persuaded to take this as its preferred social arrangement, what do we call it? Socially unbalanced? Certainly it seems to be cognitive dissonance on a larger scale. Members have to adopt this repressed and unbalanced thinking as their own, in order to flourish within the social structures of the group.
Of course it is done widely among "fallen humankind"; we demonize other races, groups and cultures whom we oppose. Those who are alien are considered as inferior. Politics feeds on this distortion of reality to highlight the opponent's faults while masking one's own. And families maintain cohesion, at least somewhat, by drawing borders, and making "us" and "them" judgments, which of course are biased.
In Witness Lee's church, we presumed ourselves beyond all of that. Fallen humankind's social arrangements never touched us! So we never questioned, and never considered, even when things got weirder and weirder, as gaps between individual perception and social consensus widened themselves.