"They're bombing you to help you." Cognitive dissonance in the war on Ukraine. Sarah Stein Lubrano.

The news is awash with stories about Ukrainians calling family and friends in Russia to explain that their lives are being destroyed by the Russian war on their country. In many cases, they are simply not believed. Many families have fallen out over this sense of living in different worlds.
For example here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/wo...
or here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro...

The phenomenon can be explained by Cognitive dissonance theory.

Sarah Stein Lubrano is a DPhil candidate at Oxford University. Her research focuses on cognitive dissonance and the role it plays in ideology and false consciousness. She studies how psychological resistance to contradiction may impede transindividual reasoning, and how critical theorists can build on this psychological research to further their theoretical insights. Sarah has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge. She is a professional instructional designer and content strategist. In earlier lives, she made films, and worked as a prison tutor, student welfare officer, and obituary writer.

Sarah has a chapter in the Perspectiva Press book, Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity which can be seen and bought here:
https://systems-souls-society.com/ins...

The chapter is called: *The Conundrum of Cognitive Dissonance: on the uneasy relationship between agency and understanding, and why it matters*. Political Theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano reflects on the nature of political agency, whether it might be thought of as a necessary illusion, and the kinds of discomfort that follow from the experience of having it, particularly in relation to cognitive dissonance.

Is it possible that the intense discomfort of such dissonance may lie at the root of political apathy? Stein writes: ‘…Passionate certainty and disengagement may appear to be opposing tendencies, but in many cases these are fueled by the same underlying motivation: the desire (sometimes unconscious) to avoid facing and feeling responsibility for one’s ambivalence, uncertainty and contradictory beliefs’.

The challenge is to collectively rework our relationship to decision-making so that we are less pressured into strong opinions or disengagement, such that we become more free than we currently are, if only in our capacity to change our minds.

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