Page 267 - The Social Animal

Self-Justification 249

all over the Middle East and Europe who are suffering from a loss
of dignity. According to Friedman, these young men were

taught from youth in the mosque that theirs is the most com-
plete and advanced form of the three monotheistic faiths—su-
perior to both Christianity and Judaism—yet who become
aware that the Islamic world has fallen behind both the Chris-
tian West and the Jewish state in education, science, democracy,
and development.This produces a cognitive dissonance in these
young men—a cognitive dissonance that is the original spark
for all their rage. . . . They reconcile this by concluding that
the Islamic world has fallen behind the rest of the world either
because the Europeans, Americans, and Israelis stole some-
thing from the Muslims, or because the Europeans, Americans,
and Israelis are deliberately retarding the progress of Muslims,
or because those who are leading the Muslim world have
drifted away from the true faith and are behaving in un-Islamic
ways, but are being kept in power by America . . . . They see
America as the most powerful lethal weapon destroying their
religious universe, or at least the universe they would like to
build. And that is why they transform America into the ulti-
mate evil, even more than Western Europe, an evil that needs
to be weakened and, if possible, destroyed. Even by suicide?
Why not? If America is destroying the source of meaning in
their lives, then it needs to be destroyed back.

Dissonance Reduction and Culture

How universal is the experience of cognitive dissonance? Is it some-
thing that is experienced mostly by Americans or is it part and par-
cel of the human condition? It is impossible to answer that question
definitively—because dissonance experiments have not been done
everywhere. But I can say this: Although most of the research has
been done in North America, the effects have been shown to exist in
every part of the world where research has been done. It should be
noted that the specific effects do not always take precisely the same
form in some other cultures that they do in North America. For ex-
ample, in less individualistic societies than ours, dissonance-reducing
behavior might take a more communal form. Consider the classic