How do cults react when prophecies are not fulfilled?

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance reveals something surprising.

Yesterday I was watching the APM! zapping program with some friends when, at a certain moment, Alvaro Ojeda, a well-known Internet "opinionator", appeared on the screen. Ojeda has become known, among other things, for the vehemence with which he defends his ideas: He shouts, bangs on the table he uses to record his videos and always seems to be in a bad temper..... In addition, as he often touches on political issues and uses a poorly worked argument 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 barroom opinionator 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 fictitious character created by the Catalan television to give a bad image of conservatives using a lot of stereotypes about them. 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 Alvaro Ojeda's rise to fame and that, in fact, he has a lot of followers through his social networks, not only did he not believe us but he was even more shocked at the idea that a media outlet could run from the shadows such a convoluted plan 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 the time by himself.

The reason was probably that, having identified Alvaro Ojeda with the stereotypes about conservative Spain in front of all of us, acknowledging that he is not a fictional character and that he has become famous because of the support given to him by many people would mean admitting that those stereotypes describe a part of the population quite well. In a way, he was chained to what he had said before, and was unable to assimilate information that contradicted his initial ideas..

Leon Festinger and cognitive dissonance

This anecdote is an example of what the social psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance. The term cognitive dissonance refers to the state of tension and discomfort that is produced in us when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, or when our interpretation of the facts is contradictory.The term cognitive dissonance refers to the state of tension and discomfort we experience when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, or when our interpretation of the facts 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 what it leads us to do.

Because the state of mild stress it produces in us is unpleasant and we want to reduce this tension, we try to make the dissonance go away in one way or another. And, although this can be an important driver of learning and reflection, we often take the short route, we often take the shortcut and "cheat" to make it seem that the contradiction between beliefs is not real, which can lead us to deny that we have any real contradiction.This can lead us to deny the evidence, as we have seen in the previous example. In fact, accommodating evidence so that it fits well into our belief system without causing too much discomfort not only does not happen exceptionally, but may be the law of life, judging by Festinger's findings. In this article you can see some examples of this.

Thus, Cognitive dissonance is something quite commonplace, and it often plays against our intellectual honesty.. But... But what happens when we don't just cheat to neutralize beliefs on an ad hoc basis? In other words, how do we react when cognitive dissonance is so strong that it threatens to destroy the belief system on which our whole life has been built? This is what Leon Festinger and his team wanted to find out in the early 1950s when they set out to study how a small sect coped with disillusionment.

Messages from outer space

In the 1950s, an American apocalyptic cult 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 members of the sect through Dorothy Martin, alias Marian KeechThe fact that the members of the fanatical group believed in the authenticity of these messages was one reason why the religious beliefs of the entire community were reinforced. The fact that the members of the fanatical 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 is classically the case with cults of this type, the life of each of its members revolved around the needs and objectives of the community.

Being part of the cult required significant investments of time, effort and money, but apparently it was all worth it; according to the telepathic messages Keech received, devoting body and soul to the cult meant being guaranteed salvation hours before the apocalypse reached planet Earth. Basically, spaceships were to arrive that would transport them to a safe place while the world was carpeted with corpses..

Festinger and his team members decided to contact cult members to document how they would react when the time came when neither the end of life on earth nor a flying saucer would appear in the sky. They expected to encounter an extreme case of cognitive dissonance not only because of the importance of the cult to the cult members but also because of the significant fact that, upon learning of the day of the apocalypse, they had said goodbye to everything that tied them to their planet: houses, cars, and other belongings.

The end of the world that did not come

Of course, the alien Noah's Ark did not arrive. Nor was there any sign that the world was breaking apart. The cult members remained gathered in silence at Marian Keech's house for hours while Festinger and his collaborators remained infiltrated into the group. At a time when despair was palpable in the air, Keech reported that he had received another message from the planet Clarion: the world had been saved at the eleventh hour thanks to the faith of the Seekers. 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 breach of prophecy. It also had one more reason to strive in its endeavors. Although some members of the collective abandoned it out of sheer disillusionment, those who remained showed a greater degree of cohesion and began to defend their ideas more radically, to spread their discourses and to 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 his death in 1992.

An explanation

The case of the Seekers and the 1954 apocalypse is recorded in the book When Profecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter. It provides an interpretation of the events related to the offers an interpretation of the facts 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 happen the night before, and that the world still existed after that moment. But the cognitive dissonance generated by this situation did not lead them to give up their beliefs. They simply They simply accommodated the new information they had to make it fit into their schemas, devoting as much effort to this readjustment as the tension produced by the dissonance was strong.. That is, 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 had made them incapable of recognizing the failure of their ideas, something that entails making more sacrifices.

As the cult members had made many sacrifices for the community and the belief system held within it, the maneuver to accommodate contradictory information with the initial ideas also had to be very radical.. Cult members began to believe much more in their ideas not because they proved to explain reality better, 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 in explaining the inner workings of cults and collectives linked to obscurantism and divination. In them, the members of the group are required to make sacrifices that at first seem unjustified, but that could make sense considering that their very existence could be the glue that holds the community together.

Beyond esotericism

Of course, it is not easy to identify too closely with people who believe in apocalypses orchestrated by alien forces and mediums who have telepathic contacts with the upper echelons of the intergalactic realm, but there is something in the story of Marian Keech and her followers that, intuitively, we can relate to our day-to-day lives. Although it may seem that the consequences of our actions and decisions have to do with the way in which we change our environment and our circumstances (whether or not to have a university degree, whether or not to buy that house, etc.), it can also be said that what we do builds an ideological framework that keeps us tied to certain beliefs, without the capacity 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 some time ago that certain explanatory schemes of reality, such as psychoanalysis, have been used to explain reality. psychoanalysisare so ambiguous and flexible that they never seem to contradict the facts. This is why the case study on Marian Keech's cult 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. First of all because it makes us realize that we might 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 are not committed to certain causes..... As judges who can distance themselves from what happens to them and decide what is the most reasonable way out of situations. There is a reason why, in social psychology, there is less and less belief in the rationality of human beings.