SJT: How Preexisting Social Attitudes Can Suppress Evidence of SCADs
According to SJT, there are many “social psychological mechanisms by which people defend and justify the existing social, economic, and political arrangements, often to their own detriment” (Jost et al., 2008, p. 591; see Figure 2). Similar to reducing the negative effects of mortality salience proposed by TMT, justification of the system also maintains “consistency, coherence, and certainty, and existential needs to manage various forms of threat and distress and to find meaning in life” (Jost et al., 2008, p. 598). SJT is supported by research showing that people can be strongly motivated to truncate their evaluations of information to acquire or preserve a “definitive answer to a question as opposed to [experiencing] uncertainty, confusion, or ambiguity,” known as the need for closure (e.g., Kruglanski, 1989; cf. Kruglanski & Young Chun, 2008, p. 84). The persistence of faulty beliefs, then, at both individual and societal levels, may perform an important psychological function, for example, by promoting feelings of safety and justice rather than permitting acknowledgment of potential vulnerability and exploitation (Baumeister, 1997; J. Greenberg et al., 2008; Jost et al., 2008; Thompson & Schlehofer, 2008). Hence, system justification motives may interfere with SCADs inquiry because people are highly motivated to defend the institutions with which they are most familiar (e.g., religious and political conservatism, American capi-talism, and military foreign interventionism), behavior that is supported largely by selective attention and interpretation of information (Jost et al., 2008):
Even when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the system’s failings, people tend to support it as the best available option. Enduring support for the status quo is often explained in terms of the power of ideology to explain, justify, and rationalize discrepancies between the ideals of the system and its reality…. Several studies have shown that ideological endorsement, stereotyping, and ingroup (or outgroup) favoritism are all undertaken in response to system threat. (pp. 594-595)
Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004) argue that citizens’ needs to “defend and justify the system against threat” have contributed greatly to the important psychological and social aftereffects of the 9/11 attacks, as with bolstered support for the otherwise quite unpopular President Bush (Moore, 2001), significantly increased trust in the U.S. government (Chanley, 2002), and heightened stereotyping of Arab Americans (Goodwin & Devos, 2002; c.f. Jost et al., 2004). Research on authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1988, 1996) and political conservatism (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) indicates that system justification is a mechanism for some people to resist change and to rationalize inequalities in the status quo, even to their own detriment. In addition, social change is largely impeded by the low occurrence of collective action and protest against the system unless it is brutally unjust and by the fact that criticism of the system can paradoxically increase justification and rationalization of the status quo, particularly when alternatives appear unlikely (Jost et al., 2008). This is especially true for alternatives proposed by a minority of dissenters, as research shows that information appearing to represent the majority opinion tends to induce “immediate persuasion,” in comparison to minority opinions, which often induce “immediate resistance” (Wood, Lundgren, Ouellette, Busceme, & Blackstone, 1994), as confirmed by Tormala, DeSensi, and Petty (2007):
The traditional explanation has been that people seek to publicly agree with majority messages and reject minority messages to avoid aligning themselves with deviant groups or positions…. Thus, whether it stems from simple, low-effort rejection or more thoughtful but negatively biased processing, people often show immediate, direct, and public resistance to messages associated with minority sources…. Of interest, though, initially resisted minority sources have been known to exert a hidden or delayed impact. For example, when people resist minority sources, they often show evidence of persuasion when their atti-tudes are measured at a later point in time. (p. 354)
Contributing to people’s failure to think critically about the validity of their worldviews is another psychological phenomenon known as naive realism: the tendency to believe that oneself always sees and responds to the world objectively, and thus when others do not agree, it is because their cognitions and behaviors are not based on reality (Ross & Ward, 1995, 1996). In fact, research shows that when people are reminded of their mortality, they exaggerate the number of people who hold similar worldviews (known as consensus bias; Pyszczynski et al., 1996). Naive realism, cognitive dissonance, TMT, and SJT all indicate that what generally supports the persistence of preexisting worldviews—particularly in the face of evidence to the contrary—is uncertainty reduction and threat management (J. Greenberg et al., 2008; Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2008; Jost et al., 2008; Ross & Ward, 1995, 1996). It is not surprising, therefore, that when confronted with the inconsistencies of the events of September 11, 2001—for example, conflicts between information widely reported by the mainstream media, government, and 9/11 Commission and dissimilar information presented by less-well-known alternative media, dissenting experts, scholars, and whistleblowers—many people initially react by aggressively defending the official story, even to the point of fabricating arguments to support their beliefs. As playwright Arthur Miller once remarked,
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. (quoted in. Pilger, 2004, p. 23)
Research on TMT and SJT strongly suggests that defending the current U.S. political system and its prerogatives post-9/11 requires individual and collective denial to block out any and all information undermining the government’s account of 9/11 and hence the archetypal image of “America under Attack.”5 When a particular mindset governs the collective consciousness to promote a particular agenda, such as the U.S. government’s account of 9/11 parroted by the mainstream media without judicious investigation, the result is what McMurtry (2007) refers to as a “ruling group-mind” (RGM):
Here is a “regulating group-mind” or socially regulating syntax of thought and judgment which locks out all evidence against its assumptions and blinkers out the destructive effects which reveal its delusions…. Since the ruling group-mind always operates a priori, facts cannot dislodge what its categorical structure perceives and knows already…. [For example] primary connections which are preempted on the most general plane are: (1) the policy declaration in 2000 by U.S. national security planners in PNAC,[6] which expressed the commitment to “full-spectrum dominance” by the U.S. state across the world; (2) its expressed desire for a fast-track to this dominance rather than a “pro-longed one”; and (3) the perfect consistency between this policy, what happened on 9/11, and what happened afterwards through the 9/11 Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. (p. 225)
The specific role of defensive denial in supporting flawed ideological belief systems was recently highlighted in two case studies analyzing the psychodynamics of attitude change. Bengston and Marshik’s (2007) identification of several mechanisms of attitude resistance (e.g., dissociation,7 narcissistic withdrawal,8 and hyperrationalization9) underscored the fact that merely arousing cognitive dissonance is not a sufficient catalyst for changing behavior. Bengston and Marshik also identified several mechanisms of attitude change (e.g., moral culpability,10 realism,11 and experiential enlightenment12) and discussed both findings in regard to public education on matters of democratic responsibility:
For [democratic governance] to work as a viable alternative to rule by sheer power, citizens have to be not only knowledgeable but also educable—able to learn from civil experience and debates about policy to take a more perspicuous view of what constitutes their interests than they might have started with. But defensiveness has its appeal. If it did not, if ideologues and neurotics would not be amply gratified by their illusions and delusions, they would have no reason to resist moving forward. And so it is a measure of teaching effectiveness, on a par with successful psychoanalysis, that it can cultivate open-mindedness in persons who would otherwise be happily closed-minded. (p. 1)
However, according to SJT, when changes to the collective worldview become inexorable, people’s defense of the status quo begins to weaken in response to a growing support for the emergent worldview (Jost et al., 2008):
The implication of a system justification analysis for social change is that it will either come not at all or all at once, the way that catastrophic change occurs in dynamic systems and in tipping point phenomena (e.g., Gladwell, 2000; Johnson, 1966). (p. 602)
Since 2001, a growing number of Americans do not believe that their federal government has been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News in 2006, “53% of respondents think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28% believe it is lying.”13 An Angus-Reid poll comparing responses from 2002 and 2006 found similar results and that in 2006, only 16% of Americans believed that the government was telling the truth about prior knowledge of the events of 9/11 (i.e., in response to a) “telling the truth,” b) “hiding something,” c) “mostly lying,” and d) “not sure,” the proportion of people endorsing these statements were, respectively, 21%, 65%, 8%, and 6% in May 2002, and 16%, 53%, 28%, and 3% in October 2006).14
Indeed, citizen trust in the current political system is moving toward a tipping-point phenomenon that threatens to change the status quo: Questions about the motives of the Bush administration post-9/11 are translating into questions about the complicity of U.S. officials in the events of 9/11, which could have future repercus-sions on democracy in America. According to Grossman (2006),
A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. (p. 1; italics added)
Consequences of the Dismissal of SCADs by the Mass Public
Democracies are not immune from government officials using fear and propaganda to gain popular support for policies of external aggression and internal repression (Wolf, 2007). As North Americans struggle with repercussions of the attacks of September 11, 2001—the deaths of nearly 3,000 people from 90 countries on that day, the U.S. declaration of a global war on terrorism, the erosion of civil liberties by the passing of PATRIOT Acts I and II, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—American and Canadian citizens continue to be manipulated by their governments and media into forfeiting their freedoms and duties in exchange for security, grave matters that continue to be ignored by the mainstream media (Rich, 2006; Zwicker, 2006), the putative “watchdog” of democracy. As a political culture grows increasingly intolerant, public dissent is often demonized, as with the persistent, broad refusal to challenge current political posturing despite over-whelming evidence that the Bush administration misled or outright lied about the events of 9/11 and its ensuing wars (Bugliosi, 2008; Griffin, 2004, 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Scott, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). The integrity of a free press, where dissenting opinions and public discourse are presented—a matter integral to democracy—is already disappearing in Canada, according to a report on the news media from the Senate of Canada (2006).15 One of the greatest threats to democracy is mainstream news media’s collusion with government in censoring information, especially in times of war (Williams, 1992):
Wars prosecuted by democratic societies are done so in the name of the people. If the public supports a war then it has a responsibility for the consequences. Citizens have rights and responsibilities, and surely one of the responsibilities in wartime is to see—or at least be provided with the opportunity to see—the price being paid to prosecute the war, whether this is the body of your neighbor’s son or innocent civilians killed in the crossfire. Even if people do not want to accept their responsibilities it is difficult to argue that they have a right to be protected from seeing what happens on the battlefield. This would appear to deny a necessary democratic impulse. (p. 161)
According to alternative news media, this “necessary democratic impulse” is being sublimated to the detriment of both “democratic” and “nondemocratic” lives, albeit unequally, as reported by Escobar (2008):
Roughly two minutes of coverage, per network, per week. This is what the 3 major U.S. networks [ABC, CBS, NBC] now think that the drama in Iraq is worth…the networks are not telling Americans that more than one million Iraqis have been killed due to the 2003 U.S. invasion, according to sources as diverse as the medical paper The Lancet, [the website] Iraq Body Count, the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, and the website Just Foreign Policy. The networks are not even discussing the different numbers of violent Iraqi deaths, which may range from 600,000 to 1.2 million. The networks are not talking about the Pentagon under-reporting or not reporting Iraqi civilian deaths. As Donald Rumsfeld used to say, the Pentagon “don’t do body counts.” The networks are not talking about the millions of Iraqi widows of war. The networks are not talking about almost 5 million displaced Iraqis – 2.4 million inside Iraq and 2.3 million in Jordan and in Syria. And the networks are not talking about – and especially not showing – U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. Iraq is a human disaster worse than 9/11. (transcript)
Recently, insiders from both the Bush administration and U.S. news media publicly acknowledged that under-reporting on the 9/11 wars is not because of lack of sensationalism—just the opposite: a collusion to manipulate public opinion in favor of wars of aggression,16 constantly invoking 9/11 and falsely reporting links to Saddam Hussein.17 The effect of government and media manipulation on political tolerance is summarized by Snow and Taylor (2006):
The dominance of censorship and propaganda is a triumph of authoritarian over democratic values. During times of international crisis like the Cold War or now in the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’, authoritarian values of secrecy, infor-mation control and silencing dissent would appear to take precedence over democracy, the First Amendment and a free press. The general trend since 9/11, especially in the U.S., has been away from openness and toward increasing gov-ernment secrecy coupled with what can seem a rise in contempt among inner circle policy-makers for a public’s right to know that may override national and homeland security concerns…. The military-industrial-media complex is likely to remain a formidable force in American politics and foreign policy. It is unlikely to weaken because power once obtained does not voluntarily give up its domination. (pp. 390, 401)
Managing Fear by Justifying the System: Denial of Deep State Politics and Defense of Disaster Capitalism
Perhaps the most serious threat to political tolerance, and thus democracy, is the one-percent doctrine:18 a policy, emanating from the Bush administration, of preemptive aggression against any state or nonstate actor posing even a “1% chance” of threat, which must be treated as a 100% certainty (Suskind, 2006; see Figure 1). For example, as the November 2008 U.S. presidential election neared, neoconservatives continued to invoke the threat of “radical Islamic extremism” as the “absolute gravest threat” to the existence of America, even conceding that another 9/11-like terrorist attack would be “a big advantage to [Republican Presidential candidate John McCain].”19 Incredibly, the Bush administration and mainstream media were still following in the same steps that led up to the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, this time preparing to support a possible Israeli-led war on Iran before President Bush left office in January 2009.20 In fact, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that covert operations against Iran “to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” including plans to use “surrogates and false flags—basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics” similar to those used in Afghanistan, have been under-way since 2007 with congressional approval and no major public debate (Hersh, 2008, p. 6). In fact, war propagandists are now predicting that Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities will be welcomed by the Arab world, stating that their reaction will be “positive privately… [with] public denunciations but no action,”21words sounding alarmingly familiar to Vice President Dick Cheney’s erroneous pre-diction that Iraqi’s would greet Americans “as liberators.”22 Furthermore, the rhetoric of fear in attempting to link 9/11 terrorism to Iran cuts across both conservative and liberal party lines. In a speech as the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama made repeated references to the terrorist threat facing the United States as “a powerful and ideological enemy intent on world domination” with the “power to destroy life on a catastrophic scale” if terrorists were permitted nuclear bombing capabilities:
The future of our security—and our planet—is held hostage to our dependence on foreign oil and gas. From the cave-spotted mountains of northwest Pakistan, to the centrifuges spinning beneath Iranian soil, we know that the American people cannot be protected by oceans or the sheer might of our military alone. The attacks of September 11 brought this new reality into a terrible and ominous focus.”23
Within the first 6 months of taking office, President Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, asserting similar fear-provoking rhetoric as the prior Bush administration:24
My single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe…. This responsibility is only magnified in an era when an extremist ideology threatens our people, and technology gives a handful of terrorists the potential to do us great harm. We are less than eight years removed from the deadliest attack on American soil in our history. We know that al Qaeda is actively planning to attack us again. We know that this threat will be with us for a long time, and that we must use all elements of our power to defeat it…. For the first time since 2002, we are providing the necessary resources and strategic direction to take the fight to the extremists who attacked us on 9/11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are investing in the 21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of a nimble enemy. We have re-energized a global non-proliferation regime to deny the world’s most dangerous people access to the world’s deadliest weapons, and launched an effort to secure all loose nuclear materials within four years. We are better protecting our border, and increasing our preparedness for any future attack or natural disaster. We are building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. And we have renewed American diplomacy so that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world. (p. 1)
This continued shift toward ever-increasing authoritarianism and imperialism, precipitated by the mass fear and propaganda of 9/11, brings in its wake an ever-more-closed security state (Wolf, 2007; see Figure 1). According to Wolf (2007), all of the 10 historical steps prospective despots employ to close down open societies are well underway in North America: (a) invoking national external and internal threats, (b) establishing secret prisons, (c) recruiting paramilitary forces, (d) surveilling ordinary citizens, (e) infiltrating citizens’ groups, (f) arbitrarily detaining and releasing citizens, (g) targeting dissenting individuals, (h) restriction of the free press, (i) reframing criticism as “espionage” and dissent as “treason,” and (j) subverting the rule of law. In The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, Scott (2007c) argues further that at least since World War II, the emergence of a “deep state” (e.g., covert actions by the CIA and other officials with little or no congressional oversight) and a “security state” (e.g., similar military actions by the Pentagon) have circumvented the “public state” of politics, threatening the future of North American democracies. Scott (2008) proposes that the attack on 9/11 was a deep state event with serious constitutional repercussions that have redirected political control away from the public state permanently:
With the introduction of COG [continuity of government] before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001, the status of the U.S. constitution in American society has changed, in ways that still prevail…. The mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out. This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone…. The problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them…. Congress has shown little or no desire to challenge, or even question, the over-arching assumptions of the war on terror. The constitutional implications of this state of emergency were aggravated by the President’s “National Security and Home-land Security Presidential Directive” (NSPD)-51, of May 9, 2007, which decreed (without even a press release) that: “When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an “enduring constitutional government.” (pp. 5-8)
In an increasingly fearful and intolerant political culture, this authoritarian mindset—escalated primarily by the events of 9/11—is also a disastrously dissociative one: It exemplifies “democracy for the few.” This belief system places a premium on democratic rather than nondemocratic lives and compartmentalizes a paranoiac fear of terrorism away from a patriotic fervor to spread democracy and capitalism through war and occupation to anti-American states in the Middle East. These simultaneously disparate beliefs are fueled by the imperialist agenda of American leaders committed to both military and economic conquest of regions in the Middle East (Chossudovsky, 2008; Klein, 2007; Mandel, 2004; Sachs, 2005; Scahill, 2008). The Bush administration implemented numerous policies that promote disaster capitalism—economic profiteering in the aftermath of collective shocks, such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and war—both in America and abroad in regions where it maintains military control, primarily, Iraq (Klein, 2007; Scahill, 2008; see Figure 2). Huge profits can be acquired in the aftermath of wars through “post conflict reconstruction” loans provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, organizations “often consulted prior to the onslaught of a major war” and that have been pivotal in “channeling ‘foreign aid’ to both Iraq and Afghanistan” (Chossudovsky, 2008, p. 1). Rationalization of free-market policies in difficult times, such as falsely promoting beliefs that economic markets must be free for democracies to survive even though example shows that democratization “does not reliably translate into faster economic growth” (Sachs, 2005, p. 315), serves to manage the American public’s anxiety and reduce uncertainty about U.S. interests in anti-American states. System justification research repeatedly shows that “endorsing fair market ideology [is] associated with the tendency to minimize the seriousness of corporate ethical scandals” and that “people generally believe that companies with profits are more ethical than companies posting losses” (Jost et al., 2008, p. 594). These policies have permitted collusion between war profiteers and elite opinion makers in Washington on one hand and the news media on the other to support a growing disaster capitalism complex, one in which corporately controlled media fails to investigate allegations of a “global war [being] fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with the public money” while simultaneously promoting “the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all ‘evil’ abroad” (Klein, 2007, p. 12). U.S. officials have also used justification of free-market economic systems to minimize focus on the human disaster in Iraq and to rationalize and defend the exportation of American capitalism as a means to support democracy in the Middle East: Recently, the major U.S. entertainment conglomerate Disney announced its plans to increase profits by building an amusement park on expropriated Iraqi national park land in the middle of one of the most violent war zones in the Middle East, even though it clearly will not service the immediate needs of the Iraqi people (Arbuthnot, 2008; see Figure 2):
In an “agreement” with the “Mayor” of Baghdad, the fifty acre Zawa Park is to be developed into a trashy Disneyland by the Tigris, complete with malls, hotels, housing, amusements, entertainment and a museum. Iraq’s National Museum with its millennias of treasures and the National Library’s irreplaceable ancient volumes and manuscripts were looted and destroyed under the U.S. watch in 2003…. Announcing his plans in Baghdad, financier Llewellyn Werner stated: “I’m not here because I think you are nice people. I think there is money to be made here…I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t making money.”… On May 9th, Dick Cheney, on the Paul Gallow Show in Mississippi, told Americans that the proposed development was a sign that things in Iraq were “going swim-mingly.” The Pentagon is fast tracking this development as a centerpiece for the new Baghdad in the new Iraq.
… The obscenity of this project—before limbs, wheelchairs, clean water, hospitals, schools, sufficient food, decontaminating the radioactive waste, from weapons designated three times by the United Nations as weapons of mass destruction, which litters the country and the region from the U.S. and U.K. weapons—beggars belief. When Medical Aid for Iraqi children sent children’s wheel chairs after the invasion, the U.S. Army disappeared them. But with countless hundreds of thousands of legless, limbless children, throughout Iraq, resultant from their actions, not medical help, but free skateboards can be funded. (pp. 1-4)
To preserve what is left of North American democracy—and our responsibility for tolerance and restraint toward citizens of nondemocratic states—the culture of fear and political intolerance and a governing dissociative mindset of “democracy for the few” must be subjected to immediate serious public scrutiny and debate. This must begin with the thorough and scientific vetting of evidence that contradicts the U.S. government’s official account of 9/11, on which two wars of aggression have been predicated, with the possibility of a third looming in the near future; for it was this event, more than any other in modern history, that has precipitated an epochal change in the social psychology of “We, the People.”
Reform Initiatives for Improving Public Discourse Regarding SCADs
The importance of continued public education and debate about SCADs in the post-9/11 world cannot be emphasized enough, especially with governments and media attempting to silence dissenting voices, often with ad hominem attacks. Many scholars have already “debunked” non sequitur labels, such as “conspiracy theory/theorist,” as mechanisms for a priori dismissal of a person’s arguments, particularly within the realm of scientific discourse (E. Herman & Chomsky, 1989; Simons, 1994; Parenti, 1996; Coady, 2003; Chomsky, 2004; Fetzer, 2007; Griffin, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Jones, 2007a, 2007b). In a recent sociological analysis, Husting and Orr (2007) discussed the inherent dangers of applying “conspiracy” labels to public exchanges of ideas and scholarly dialogues in a democracy:
In a culture of fear, we should expect the rise of new mechanisms of social control to deflect distrust, anxiety, and threat…. Our findings suggest that authors use the conspiracy theorist label as (1) a routinized strategy of exclusion; (2) a reframing mechanism that deflects questions or concerns about power, corruption, and motive; and (3) an attack upon the personhood and competence of the questioner…. The mechanism allows those who use it to sidestep sound scholarly and journalistic practice, avoiding the examination of evidence, often in favor of one of the most important errors in logic and rhetoric—the ad hominem attack. While contest, claim, and counterclaim are vital to public discourse, we must recognize that “democracy is a fragile and delicate thing” (Denzin, 2004) and mechanisms that define the limits of the sayable must continually be challenged. (pp. 127, 147; italics added)
Accordingly, social truth and justice movements and reform initiatives must add-ress the social and psychological defense mechanisms that their inquiries into SCADs can provoke in the mass public. This approach needs to address both short-term and long-term solutions. First, immediate strategies to increase public awareness of SCADs should focus on framing information in neutral, nonthreatening language that gradually introduces people to the most serious of charges. Alternative accounts should be rep-eatedly presented within the public sphere with specific requests for citizens to themselves research the information presented to them and pass their findings along to others. This is supported by research showing that (a) when controlling language is used to influence a message, it can arouse psychological reactance in people that results in rejection of that message (Brehm, 1966; C. H. Miller, Lane, Deatrick, Young, & Potts, 2007; Worchel & Brehm, 1971); (b) civic participation is greatly increased when people are recruited to become involved during discussions of social responsibility (Klofstad, 2007; Zuckerman, 2004); and (c) message repetition increases familiarity, which can translate into message tolerance and/or acceptance (Weaver et al., 2007). Regarding alleged 9/11 SCADs, public messages should encourage people to compare information presented by the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) with facts reported by nongovernmental sources and to contact their political representatives to follow up on any questions that they have not had answered. To reclaim their democratic rights and responsibilities, Scott (2008) recommends that citizens mobilize nationwide pressure on Congress and the media, compelling their political representatives to
- Review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9.
- Unequivocally outlaw torture.
- Review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protected America Act of 2007.
- Vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by the U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign.
- Insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51.
- Support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009. (p. 10)
Concerned citizens can also refer to papers published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies that provide evidence refuting the U.S. official account of 9/11 (e.g., Griffin, 2007a; Jackson, 2008; Jenkins, 2007; Jones, Farrer, et al., 2008; MacQueen, 2006; Scott, 2007b) and provide detailed examples of how to effectively discuss such information with fellow citizens (e.g., Legge, 2007; Manwell, 2007a, 2007b).
Additional long-term solutions should include future public policy changes focused on increasing public education on (a) media literacy (Senate of Canada, 2006) and (b) the social and psychological manipulation of citizens by the state (McDermott & Zimbardo, 2007). This is supported by research showing that (a) knowledgeable citizens possessing “firm, well-grounded political opinions are less susceptible to priming than audience members who know little about issues that dominate the news” (Graber, 2004, p. 548); (b) “majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systemic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group” but that dissident minority influence has been most effective when it “persisted in affirming a consistent position, appeared confident, avoided seeming rigid and dogmatic, and was skilled in social influence” (Zimbardo, 2008, p. 267); and (c) when people are educated about and highly motivated to reduce their interpersonal biases, they “exhibit less prejudice” and develop more “shared social beliefs” (Stroessner & Scholer, 2008, p. 583). Regarding SCADs, secondary- and post secondary-level education should include courses on political psychology that deal with the social psychological foundations of democracy and citizens’ rights and responsibilities to protect themselves from manipulation by the state and media.
Conclusion
This article presented, first, a brief review of the social psychological foundations of democracy; second, research suggesting how preexisting beliefs can interfere with SCADs inquiry, specifically in relation to the events of September 11, 2001; and third, strategies to educate the public on how it can be manipulated by government and media into forfeiting civil liberties and duties. In the same year that William Golding proffered his warning about the importance of dissent in a climate of fear, another great spokesman, Edward R. Murrow, also reminded us of the necessity of dissent to fulfill our responsibility of defending democracy from rampant fear:
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.25
We scholars can and must take seriously the citizen’s call to action and not allow fear to override the demand for interpersonal tolerance of different political views. We can and must create dissonance in the public psyche to encourage social responsibility and education on matters of national interest. We can and must investigate the current state of affairs for ourselves and not delegate accountability to elected officials who may harbor alternative agendas. We can and must remember that trading freedom for security divests our contemporary and all future collective power to participate in democratic governance. We can and must believe that change is possible when we choose to be a part of it. We can and must dissent in the face of everyday denials of democracy.
Original HERE (w/footnotes)
