A Contradiction in Germs
Foreign Agents - MET - Chapter 68
I gather from friends and family around the world that a lot of people are feeling unusually anxious these days. Mostly it's those who are curious about the world beyond their doorsteps, who pay attention to the news on TV, who read the newspapers, and who follow the unfolding events of the day on social media in between the official hourly broadcasts of death, destruction and depravity.
It’s entirely understandable. What with Trump, Zuma, Netanyahu, Zelensky, Biden and Sunak; what with Palestine, the Ukraine, Haiti and the Sudan; with floods ravaging the countrysides of Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Afghanistan and Oman, and what with the routine assassinations of notable politicians and personalities in countries we last heard of in high school history lessons, you can hardly blame them.
The most hysterical among them are predicting a cataclysmic global war in the very near future. But even the most level-headed observers will be muttering to their spouses, friends and children that the world is surely going to hell in a hairy hand-basket. If COVID didn’t get us, the next foreign-manufactured virus almost certainly will.
I’ve been telling myself it was ever thus.
So I did what I could to avoid being sucked into the media cycle of doom and despair that threatened to swallow me down the nearest existential plughole. But when it occurred to me the other day that watching Killing Eve felt more life-affirming than watching the BBC, I realised I needed to adjust my thinking.
Urgently.
I changed my meds. It didn’t help.
I went to bed early and slept in late. Nada.
I walked fifteen blocks to the dentist and back. Sweet Fanny Adams.
When enlightenment finally dawned on me it was from two very unexpected sources: Chinese solar panels and those Georgia riots.
Which was when I realised I was suffering from nothing more serious than an acute episode of cognitive dissonance.
It's been happening more frequently these latter days, the problem of trying to accommodate two contradictory ideas in the same vestibule in my brain without them coming to blows or tearing one another to pieces while they wait for my common sense to bring them a soothing cup of tea.
Their shouts are getting shriller by the day. It’s as if they both know only one of them will get out of there alive.
The first story, originally from Euronews but repeated on the BBC, went like this:
Cheap Chinese solar panels are flooding the EU market and threatening the viability of homegrown companies.
Europe's solar industry warns it faces an "existential threat" and that unless action is taken soon, it could collapse in a matter of months.
I was puzzled by both the logic of it, and by the somewhat hysterical animosity of its tone. Surely, I naively thought, with fossil-fueled global warming clearly responsible for the terrifying natural disasters we’re witnessing from Jakarta to Rio Grande do Sul, the availability of cheap solar panels in Europe and elsewhere could only be welcomed as a wholly benign and significantly advantageous development?
Apparently not.
An industry group is calling on the European Commission to introduce emergency measures, for example by stocking up on solar panels to ensure liquidity.
They say the influx of China-made solar panels, whose price is artificially lowered through generous state aid, into the EU market is to blame for the critical situation. According to the industry, Beijing has a near monopoly in the field: "China has been subsidising its industry for more than a decade," says Johan Lindahl, secretary general of the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC).
A solar module produced in China is about 50% cheaper than its European equivalent. The quality, experts say, is nevertheless comparable. The industry has therefore no choice but to innovate if it wants to survive.
To innovate? How awful!
What will those baby-eating communists want us to do next? Stop bombing women and children in Palestine?
The sheer nerve of it!
And what suddenly happened to that thing about the invisible hand of the free market that was supposed to enrich and improve our lives with precisely these kinds of manifold blessings?
And was I wrong in thinking that the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the other big western democracies didn’t supply grants, subsidies and tax incentives to their major manufacturing industries?
Apparently yes. They did, and they all do.
The second story was even more sensational in manner and vindictive in tone than the first.
In far away Georgia, on the streets of Tbilisi, a lot of very nice, decent people were protesting peacefully and loudly, if sometimes rather impolitely, against a parliamentary bill that would require non-governmental organisations and media outlets with more than 20 percent of their funding coming from outside Georgia to register as bodies “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”.
The police clamped down on them with anti-fascist ferocity.
The BBC was clearly on the side of the protesters. It labelled the bill, “A Kremlin-like law”.
I gulped.
It had seemed to me, at first glance, that they were protesting because they wanted to know which foreign countries and companies were funding the media that was telling them what to think and how to behave. Hence, I assumed, the reason for the BBC’s support.
Then it dawned on me, with the queasy feeling of finding yourself upside down in a barrel at a fun-fair, that I had it precisely the wrong way around.
I checked and checked again. Yes, the Georgians were protesting because they didn't want to know who was telling them what to think and how to behave.
They were protesting, in effect, because they didn’t want the kind of media transparency that existed in the UK, Germany, France, Australia, Canada and Italy. Which countries, among many others, long ago recognized that transparency in media ownership was crucial for upholding democratic principles, preventing media monopolies, and ensuring that the public had access to a wide range of information and perspectives. And who had passed “Kremlin-like” laws to ensure it.
Oh.
In the hope of understanding why these and several other logically contradictory stories were making me more queasy even than usual, I looked up the symptoms of cognitive dissonance.
The first thing I found was this:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
George Orwell, 1984
It only made things worse. Orwell always does.
So I asked ChatGPT.
Its verdict?
Yes, it diagnosed without a blush or a blink. I was indeed suffering from a rather severe case of cognitive dissonance. It advised me to wash my hands:
When individuals experience cognitive dissonance, they seek ways to reduce the mental tension. One such method is through symbolic acts that can help restore a sense of moral and psychological cleanliness. Hand washing is a physical act that metaphorically signifies the cleansing of guilt, impurity, or ethical conflicts. Studies have shown that engaging in hand washing can help individuals feel more at ease with their decisions and reduce the discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance. This act provides a tangible way to reconcile internal conflicts and regain a sense of purity and moral clarity.
I’m washing and washing but it isn’t working. Not for the clarity. And certainly not for the purity.
Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
H.G. Wells, Love and Mr Lewisham, 1900
Or maybe I’m just too politely and rationally English to believe I was ever one of those savages in need of plastering.