How does a cult react when prophecies are not fulfilled?

He yesterday was watching the zapping program APM! with some friends when, at a certain moment, he appeared on the screen Alvaro Ojeda, a well-known "opinionator" on the Internet. Ojeda has become known, among other things, for the vehemence with which he defends his ideas: he screams, bangs the table he uses to record his videos and seems to always drag a major bad temper. In addition, like him many times he touches on issues related to politics and uses a little worked argument associated with the propaganda of the Spanish conservative right, outside the circles of people who think like him usually give the image of being the classic bar counter reviewer that he talks without having much idea of ​​anything. For sample, a button.

The point 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 the 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 does he not He believed us but was even more scandalized at the idea that a media outlet could direct such a convoluted plan from the shadows only to leave a part of the population of Spain. 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 Álvaro Ojeda with the stereotypes about conservative Spain in front of all of us, he recognized that he is not a fictional character and who has become famous for the support that many people give him would mean admitting that these stereotypes describe a part of the population. Somehow, he was chained to what he had said before, and he was not able 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 he called cognitive dissonance. The term cognitive dissonance refers to the state of tension and discomfort that occurs in us when we hold two mutually contradictory beliefs at the same time, or when our interpretation of the events we experience does not fit well with the most deeply held beliefs. But what is interesting about cognitive dissonance is not so much the subjective state of discomfort that it leads us to, but what it leads us to do.

As the state of slight stress that it produces 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 engine for learning and reflection, many times we go the short way 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, accommodating the evidence so that it fits well with our belief system without causing too much Discomfort not only does not occur exceptionally, but could be a law of life, judging by the discoveries of Festinger. On this article you can see some examples of this.

So that, Cognitive dissonance is something quite everyday, and many times it works against our intellectual honesty. But... What happens when we don't just cheat to neutralize beliefs in a timely manner? 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 how a small cult coped with disappointment.

Messages from outer space

In the fifties, an American apocalyptic sect called "The Seekers" (The Seekers) spread the message that the world was to be destroyed on December 21, 1954. This information had allegedly been passed on to members of the cult 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 They were reinforced, and as is the classic case with cults of this type, the lives of each of its members revolved around the needs and objectives of the community. community.

Being part of the cult required making 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 supposed to be guaranteed salvation hours before the apocalypse reached planet Earth. Basically some spaceships were to arrive that would transport them to a safe place while the world was covered with corpses.

Festinger and members of his team decided to contact the cult members to document how they They would react when the time had come, neither the end of terrestrial life occurred nor did any saucer appear in the sky steering wheel. 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, knowing the day of the apocalypse, they had said goodbye to everything that united them to their planet: houses, cars, and others belongings.

The end of the world that did not come

Of course, the alien Noah's Ark did not arrive. Nor was any sign given to indicate that the world was cracking. Members of the cult remained in silence at Marian Keech's home for hours while Festinger and his associates remained infiltrated by the group. At a time when despair 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 humanity's life thanks to the dedication of the sect.

This obscurantist collective had not only given a new meaning to the failure of the prophecy. He, too, had one more reason to strive for his endeavors. Although some members of the group left it out of sheer disappointment, those who remained showed a degree of cohesion older and began to defend their ideas more radically, to spread their speeches and to seek to have a greater visibility. And all this from the day after the false apocalypse. Marian Keech, in particular, continued to be part of this type of cults until his 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 the an interpretation of the facts is offered relating them to the theory of cognitive dissonance.

The members of the sect had to fit two ideas: that the end of the world was going to happen 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 to make it fit into their schemes, dedicating as much effort to this readjustment as the tension produced by the dissonance was strong.. That is to say, having been examining an entire belief system for a long time had not served to make them more informed people, but had made them unable to recognize the failure of their ideas, something that entails doing more sacrifices.

As the members of the sect had made many sacrifices for the community and the belief system that was held within it, the maneuver to accommodate contradictory information with initial ideas also had to be very radical. The members of the cult began to believe much more in their ideas not because they demonstrated to explain better reality, but because of the efforts that had previously been made to uphold these beliefs float.

Since the 1950s, the explanatory model of cognitive dissonance has been very useful to explain the inner workings of sects 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.

Beyond esotericism

Of course, it is not easy to identify too much with people who believe in apocalypse orchestrated by alien forces and in mediums who have telepathic contacts. with the higher echelons of the intergalactic reign, but there is something in the story of Marian Keech and his followers that we can intuitively relate to our day to day. 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 (have or not a university degree, buy or not that house, etc.), it can also be said that what we do is building a 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 occurs only in cults. In fact, it is very easy to find a link between the functioning of cognitive dissonance and the way in which they hold ideologies. political and philosophical in an uncritical way: Karl Popper already pointed out long ago that certain explanatory schemes of reality, such as the psychoanalysisThey are so ambiguous and flexible that they seem never 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. In the first place because it makes us realize that we could be blindly carrying ideas and beliefs that are in fact a drag. 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 way out of situations. For something is that, in social psychology, less and less is believed in the rationality of the human being.