In the mid 1980s I worked as an RA for Leon Festinger, one of the giants in the field of social psychology, and as demanding a boss as they come. Chain smoking through our occasional lunches, he would grow irritated if I tried to pin him down with requests to hear more about the times he studied cults by pretending to be a member, building his theory of cognitive dissonance.

He had at my time turned his back on his earlier bodies of work as an experimental psychologist and was exploring completely new domaines.  He studied archeological sites and data collections which led him to speculate about the nature of early man and the structure of primitive societies, summarized in The Human Legacy in 1983.

Eventually he became passionate about the history of religion and its implication for the development and acceptance of technology. Comparing two societies, alternatively dominated by the Eastern and the Roman church, he analyzed material technology and what it meant for political and national development, in particular warfare. Consider the adoption of the stirrup, for example, the foothold that allows a rider to be safely and in balance positioned on horseback. If you don’t have to cling with your arms to the horse’s neck, why, you could use them for all kinds of belligerent actions, holding swords, throwing spears, you name it, giving you a distinct advantage on the battle field. (The stirrup, by the way, was invented in China and made its way to the West in the early 8th century, something we know both from archeological data and medieval art.) These kinds of technological inventions and adaptations are fostered in forwards looking societies, leaving others, quite literally, in the dust, as we can see with the decline of the Byzantium.

Here is an old obituary by his friend Stan Schachter – Leon died in 1989. https://motherjones.com/files/lfestinger.pdf

All this came back to me when I read the article linked below about cult membership, Trump and the Republican party, which introduces Festinger’s earlier research, to get eventually to the bigger question of how one gets people out of these cults, persuading them to change their views and question their identity.

I am not sure I agree with the approach the author offers in consultation with renowned scholars of peace and conflict resolution. Many of them recommend a community-based approach (after modeling of the Irish initiatives that laid the groundwork for peace in that divided country: “Important work to overcome divides is done at the grassroots level—through NGOs, religious initiatives, social service programs, schools, at the workplace, etc.,” …. “Civil society organizations that cut across identity borders can promote reconciliation and reduce conflict.”

That I can see as a requirement for success, and I can see how it works when the feuding parties are on somewhat equal footing. What, though, when one party has been oppressed to the point of being dehumanized, and is now expected to reach out a hand to the oppressor who deems himself a victim these days? I don’t know how to reconcile that with the racism and anti-Semitism that is the basis for the identity formations for the 25% of our population that adheres to the White Supremacy cult. Would you have asked Jews to start reconciliation groups in Germany after the war, or Blacks in SouthAfrica, reaching out a hand to those who approved of their murder?  Hard reading below:

https://newrepublic.com/article/152638/escape-trump-cult

Photographs todays are of sandhill cranes seen last week on their long, long journeys to the South. Maybe we can also travel some distances in this country bridging the canyons that divide us.