Cognitive Dissonance - What is it and What does it have to do with Writing?

Recently, I stumbled on an article about cognitive dissonance and immediately thought, "I've got to write a blog about that." 

What is it? It's humans' ability to hold two contrary beliefs at the same time and the mental discomfort that arises with holding contrary beliefs, or even more specifically, from learning new information which contradicts a deeply held belief. 

Wikipedia describes it this way: 

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, belifs [sic], values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as pyschological [sic] stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.

[The inserted '[sic]' notations are mine. The Wiki info apparently hadn't been well proofed.] 

Cognitive dissonance also sometimes comes into play for authors. In fact, for many works, it's essential. It's something ALL writers must face to some degree, in particular when giving voice to a villain. And even, sometimes, a hero. 

This Blog comes with a Trigger Warning!

Controversial content ahead dealing with an unsettling topic which some may find disturbing. If you become offended, upset or squeamish by the discussion of the darker aspects of human nature, please stop reading here.

To explore this topic more fully, I need to take a closer look at one of the most difficult and challenging aspects I ever had to deal with in penning a novel. (Actually two difficult aspects, but I'll get to that.)

Writers have to put themselves in the bad guy's head ("guy" is used loosely here and throughout the post - of course villains can be any gender). They have to have the ability to reach a mental state where they can effectively relate what the villain believes, what motivates him, and how he justifies his actions while making it understandable and meaningful for the reader. Even when it's something deeply upsetting and repulsive to explore, they have to be capable of relating the villain's mindset (perspective, justification, etc.) to the reader. Villains need to be real and have emotions and motivations that feel real.

And that can put an author in a very dark and questionable place.

One aspect in the anchor novel of the Inherited Stars Universe caused me a great deal of mental angst and bouts of emotion that ranged from gut-wrenching disgust to extreme sympathy and sadness for what some of the characters were subjected to and threatened with. 

This also caused me to question if I shouldn't steer clear of this element entirely. Take a safer route. It's a tough one to explore even in a blog post, and caused me to question my instincts, because I knew it was going to put some readers off from even finishing the book. 

But I decided, for the integrity of the storytelling, it was essential to stay the course. 

Let me delve into the specifics as much as possible, while avoiding major spoilers. In order to make the villains, uh...habits...workable, I had to have one of their leaders explain to a hero why his subspecies evolved into cannibals, and it had to make sense to readers -- as skin-crawling as the subject may be. The Ithians had a dark history and an evolution to cannibalism that had to make sense to me as the writer before I could even begin to convey their culture (not justify it, mind you) via the story line. 

But why cannibals? Why even go there?

Here's the background. I based the Ithian empire, in part, on ancient Rome. Rome was a great culture of poets, writers, philosophers, builders, scientists, and craftsmen, with a strong and disciplined military, who enjoyed a lavish lifestyle rich in culture and the arts. But on weekends they went to the coliseum to cheer on bloody and horrific spectacles of human and animal carnage. It was all for sport, in their empire. The juxtaposition of refinement and savagery is still a little hard to accept or even understand, but it was a fixed and accepted part of their society.

I had to make my Ithian Alliance worse. Much worse. Forcing humans to fight each other or wild beasts as gladiators just wasn't bad enough. (Not to mention it's been done-to-death in science fiction.) The culture of Ithis had to be just as enlightened and enriched as the Roman Empire was in its day, but it also had to have a much, much darker side. But why had their culture evolved in such a disgusting and horrifying way? That was my struggle with cognitive dissonance as I created a history and traditions that allowed them to justify their actions.

 

But there's a caveat. What happens to the Ithian Alliance as a result of their horrendous mistreatment of other subspecies -- as bad as that was -- was also gut-wrenching but in a very different way. They lost something truly precious to them, as a means of rendering them defenseless. Did the ends justify the means? That's left an open-ended question. 

Certain members of the "hero" side of the equation believed there was only one way to restore basic human rights to the known galaxy, without instigating a conventional galaxy-wide war that would kill millions, if not billions. The Ithian Alliance had become so dominant, oppressive and heartless to the rest of the known galaxy, that the inhumanity they forced on others had to be clearly drawn in the story  before they could be dealt so devastating a blow in the story arc. In order to deal with monsters, the good guys had to become monsters themselves in the actions they took to end the horrors perpetuated by the Alliance. But in spite of the unmitigated oppression and callousness of the villains' society, I still had struggles writing those passages and even had readers and reviewers ask, "Wow! Should they have done that?"

That was the flip side of the coin. I had to be able to explain the thoughts and motivations behind the "good guys" extreme actions -- as well as the "bad guys" -- and why they took the steps they did, when they did, and how they did it. 

Cognitive dissonance to the max on both sides of the equation.

As the author, some of the situations described in Inherit the Stars and related books still bother me. I still sometimes feel a certain uneasiness about where I took the story. But that doesn't mean I don't think it was the right call. Call it a danger of the occupation, but cognitive dissonance as it applies to writing, is an integral but uncomfortable part of the writing process.

I welcome your thoughts and comments below.