This article is part of Mafaza Digital Zine that explores the concept of survival. You can read also: The Republic of Wounded Bodies by Nabil Muhammad, Apocalypse in the Body by Kinana Issa, To Fall from Nowhere by Nour Mousa, Identity Survival in The Diaspora by Ola Barqawi, The World is Not a Small Village by Raja Salim, Living Wounds: Violations & Victimhood by Sasha Zack, To Be Understood Without Talking by Shaunt Raffi, and Furnishing Memory by Ali Zaraket.
Read the Arabic Issue here.
___________________
Hsain Al-Shihabi
He has spent the last decade working at the grassroots level building capacity of marginalized youth. With an undergraduate in neuroscience and a master’s degree in developmental psychology and education, his work has focused on developing practices and programs that put the strengths of people first. With values of co-design and trauma-informed practice, they are currently working at the Canadian Mental Health Association in advocacy and partnership development.
____________________
The “Western” colonial project bets on collective amnesia for its survival, because without memory, an imagination for an alternative future is not possible. Those who want to imagine an alternate future must be deeply connected to the reality of the present moment, and that is only possible with a deep remembrance of the past.
Naturally, violent events that seeded the Western settler colonial project left an imprint, a biological footprint, on the nervous systems of the survivors. From the workers of the Aztec floating farms in 1520, to my Palestinian grandparents who fled their land barefoot in 1948 and were never allowed to return. Similarly, the perpetrators of this violence, from Cortés’ foot soldiers to the members of Haganah and other zionist militia; the acts of violence also left an imprint on their nervous systems. The human body has adapted to be exceptionally good at remembering trauma, so good that it gets coded epigenetically and passed from one generation to the next.1 Painful as it is, our bodies evolved with the ability to remember deeply into the past, understand the present, and imagine futures. However, even when our amnesia turned into deep memory as the genocide in Gaza awakened centuries-long trauma, something still obstructs our imagination. As Mark Fisher puts it “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”2 The governance of hope refers to the systemic processes that obstruct our imagination, and asserts that hope is the fuel for the workers of building new realities, wherever we are.
The starkly wide spectrum of responses to something as morally clear as genocide might be perplexing and shocking from a moral standpoint. However, from a psychological standpoint, it can be accounted for with surprising clarity. From this lens, this article aims to answer two pressing questions. First, what are the psychological processes that generate such a wide range of responses to genocide? Here, we explore the concept of cognitive dissonance. Second, how can an appreciation of cognitive dissonance empower us in the face of the relentless ongoing colonial violence and demoralization? I answer this question through telling the story of a youth I work with, and how we teamed up to reclaim the governance of hope and fuel the building of a small and beautiful reality in his neighbourhood that neither of us thought was possible.
Surviving the Cognitive Dissonance of Colonialism
The psychological mechanisms that help people respond to genocide are naturally inheritable because of the biological footprint in the body. One’s position on genocide is tied to their position on the premise of dehumanization. This premise is the fundamental ethos that sanctioned the geopolitical and economic activity of the ongoing Western settler colonial project over the centuries.3 There is a wide spectrum of responses to this premise with total rejection on one end and total acceptance on the other. It is clear to many that it is neither possible nor useful to explain the disparate responses to genocide based on identity. In other words, there are plenty of people of color who support genocide and plenty of white people who fight tooth and nail against it. I propose that where an individual lands on the rejection-acceptance spectrum depends on their survival strategy in response to colonial dehumanization. For this article, I will refer to them as the acceptance strategy and the rejection strategy.
If these survival strategies are so powerful in influencing our identity, alignment, and actions, then the threat they are adapted to evade must be equally powerful. The threat of not meeting basic needs and ultimately death is a powerful one, but it is not this threat these strategies address. Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative at the Security Council, did not raise her hand to veto a ceasefire resolution to survive death. Similarly, it would be an oxymoron to say that Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in rejection to genocide in front of the US Israeli Embassy to survive death. The real threat the acceptance and rejection strategies address is not external, it is inside the human mind. It is cognitive dissonance.
Our understanding of the depth and breadth of the effects of cognitive dissonance (CD) on human behavior has grown dramatically over the years since the beginnings of CD theory in the mid-20th century. The CD is regarded as the brain’s main mechanism for learning.4 It is described as a subtle, but deeply seated sense of disease when one is faced with new information that contradicts their existing knowledge, opinions, or beliefs about oneself or their environment. CD creates a powerful motivation state that seeks to reconcile the contradiction and mobilizes cognitive resources accordingly to reduce it and return to an acceptable state. The magnitude of the CD and the resources one mobilizes to address depends on the importance of the subject matter of the contradiction to one’s life. If the contradiction is relevant to one’s whole way of being and sense of reality, one might find oneself doing things they have never done to address it.
For example, an individual might believe that: “me, my government, and my country would never support genocide”. Then, when the genocide started, this person heard their government announce their unconditional and steadfast support for Israel. In response to this contradiction, they might look for ways to justify what they just heard, and when they come across the common “it’s complicated” narrative on Palestine and Israel, they can accept it and move on with their lives. Alternatively, it may lead them to realize that in certain instances their government supports genocide, which could then prompt a learning journey of rethinking what they thought they knew about their government, their country’s colonial heritage, or their own.
This scenario demonstrates the two pathways evolution has equipped the brain with to deal with cognitive dissonance: Assimilation and accommodation. Normally, the two pathways work closely together in a balanced way to help us make sense of reality. Roughly, assimilation fortifies our pre-existing models of reality and makes them more efficient, and accommodation re-organizes existing models or generates new ones.5 However, when the balance is thrown off, being in touch with reality becomes harder. The two pathways have an uncanny resemblance to the two survival strategies discussed earlier.
If settler colonialism is not possible without a worldview that makes the colonizer infallible and dehumanizes the colonized,6 then there must be a robust mechanism for protecting and maintaining this worldview. This robust mechanism is cognitive dissonance when assimilation is hyperactive at the expense of accommodation. This is the acceptance strategy; it moves an individual deeper into the dehumanization premise every time the cognitive dissonance is met with it. It allows the individual to keep their power and allies them with others like them but alienates them from humanity. On the other hand, the rejection strategy prioritizes accommodation over assimilation. The person who believes their government would never support genocide and sees the contrary is forced to endure a learning journey that builds new models of their world to reconcile the contradiction. It is difficult because it challenges their whole way of being, but it moves them towards humanization and closer to their fellow humans.
The unprecedented live stream of settler colonial genocide created nothing less than a worldwide cognitive dissonance pandemic. One way in which it manifests is the unprecedented “showing of true colors” through resignations and firings, ex-communications and self-exiles, and more. This societal re-organization is a reflection of our collective internal survival strategies in response to the cognitive dissonance imposed by the genocide. It is well-known that there are no limits to what people are willing to do to alleviate cognitive dissonance7. This is demonstrated by the absurdity of genocide apologists on one hand, and the massive risks taken by those who challenge them on the other. Witnessing settler colonial genocide triggered 400 years’ worth of intergenerational trauma and memory. The genocide shook up the world because it undid hundreds of years of collective amnesia of settler colonial genocide and with it equal amount of cognitive dissonance.
The fuel that sustains the acceptance of dehumanization is state power. The system maintains and fortifies dehumanization through the power of institutions and policies and rewards those who accept it. On the other hand, the fuel that sustains rejecting dehumanization is less tangible and more elusive; it is hope. Because the rejection itself implies a belief that a different reality is possible, even if not known to us—we simply hope to make it. However, since hope is capable of generating imagination that threatens the dehumanization premise, some structures govern it. The next section discusses the governance of hope.
Taking the Reign of the Governance of Hope
I grew up in Yarmouk Camp, the dense, self-sufficient Palestinian refugee camp-turned-neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus. Before emigrating I had not come into direct contact with the premise of dehumanization. When I moved to Toronto at age 14, I faced the premise that my culture and identity were not beautiful and powerful and that the “Canadian” way of being was superior. The shock was so powerful that within the first few months, I adopted the acceptance strategy to this cognitive dissonance. By the time I got to my first year of university, I decided that I was going to call myself Zain. It was not my name, but years of studying “whiteness” let me know that it would quench the appetite for exotic but not too “other”. This worked, but I soon realized that changing my name wasn’t enough; no amount of self-erasure could make me “be them”. Eventually, I went through the classic journey of questioning the premise of whiteness being superior, grieving what I lost to assimilation, rebuilding my identity through accommodation, and learning more about the dehumanization premise.
My journey and the intersections of my identity led me to found a mentorship program for newcomer youth in 2016. The program aimed to make the lonely journey through the cognitive dissonance landscape less isolating and more empowering. Hosted by the Canadian Mental Health Association, the program now operates in select high schools in Toronto neighborhoods with a high number of refugees. My role is difficult to describe; I function as a hybrid counselor for the youth and a mediator between them and the system, including school principals, social workers, and court officials. When necessary, I also counsel those within the system to guide their assumptions about refugee youth and their cognitive dissonance.
The nature of my work fostered intimate relationships with youth, their families, and their social milieu. I spend considerable time with them in their physical spaces—busy homes bustling with siblings, their gathering spaces where no one can bother them like parking lots and buildings’ staircases. When they felt abandoned by teachers or were asked to leave class, they would come to my office at school. At the end of the day, I drive back to my comfortable 1-bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto, check my mail, and go to the gym using my discounted premium Goodlife membership I got through my employee benefits. The years of being deeply wedged into the margin and the center, and moving between the two, forced me to observe the dynamic interactions between them. I pondered what keeps youth stuck in the tyranny of the system and what disrupts this stagnation. My journey and dialogues with Youssef, one of the youth I work with, have helped me realize the depth and breadth of how hope is governed with greater clarity than ever before.
Hope is governed at three levels—imagination, beliefs, and access—to maintain its supply at subsistence levels between an upper and lower threshold, which grants the settler colonial capitalist system self-sustaining and self-organizing status. These thresholds prevent societies from becoming too hopeful, which might embolden disruptive actions, or too hopeless, which might lead to depression and decreased economic output.
The most commonly encountered form of hope governance is at the level of accessing the means to attaining a future state. Glass ceilings and tokenization are the most familiar examples. The next layer involves managing our beliefs on whether the means to attain a future state exist, evident in red-taping and information gerrymandering. The deepest, most insidious level is controlling our ability to imagine a future state altogether. Since the parameters of individual and collective behavior are set by the imagination, this level is the most critical for the self-maintaining status. Youssef and I engaged in dialogue and experimented with this one in particular. We traced how our sense of hope changed on this journey, and how that change transformed our actions and what we were able to do in our community.
Youssef is one of those people who have a formidable bullshit detector and are not afraid to use it. His lived experience of crushing pressures and insistence on surviving with integrity only strengthened this detector. I first met Youssef on a brisk September day in the principal’s office of his school, where I work. His mother had contacted me after learning he would be transferred to an “alternative school” outside their neighborhood due to frequent absences. Youssef lives in a large, dense, and self-sufficient immigrant neighborhood and has never ventured out of it in the five years he has been in Canada. Yarmouk Camp, where I grew up, was similar, so I knew what this uprooting could mean. Youssef would likely not attend the new school and would instead take full-time work, the original reason for his absences. Youssef confirmed this later. In the meeting, I managed to make a case that persuaded the principal to reverse the relocation decision. But Youssef walked out angrily, seemingly upset about what might have come of his fate if I, a stranger, had not intervened. Initially confused, I came to understand, with time and with Youssef’s immense courage and humility, the layers and complexities behind his anger.
Prying Open the Cracks of Imagination
Youssef’s journey as a refugee began at age six, gradually eroding his ability to imagine a dignified life that included his potential. His young nervous system endured the violent disruption of his family’s and community’s social fabric during the Syrian revolution, followed by the chaos of refugee life in Lebanon, where he worked as a child laborer. Finally, he faced the disillusionment of Canada’s narrative as a safe haven; by the time he faced the transfer issue, he had already witnessed people close to him getting shot. Despite five years in the Canadian education system, he had not been taught to read. He shared this with me in confidence, and I was stumped. He had 21 out of the 30 credits needed to graduate, so I asked him to connect the dots. With a pained, smug smile, he said, “There is always Google text-to-speech and speech-to-text, right?” I was floored.
Decoding language is not a natural process; it must be explicitly taught, and 48.1% of Canadian adults have inadequate literacy.8 While it was clear that the system, not Youssef’s competence, caused his illiteracy, he didn’t see it that way. Given his high aptitude, I could estimate it would take him one semester to reach reading fluency with an evidence-based structured approach available through community agencies. I was excited to share this with him, but he shut the idea down immediately.
The education system’s failure to meet students’ needs, coupled with the negative messaging around him, convinced Youssef that he was the problem, and he had internalized this belief. Both Youssef and I faced an existential cognitive dissonance: his worldview said there was no chance, while mine said it was inevitable. For the following year, the process of reconciling our worldviews helped me articulate and codify what I have been practicing and discovering for years through this work. I am in the business of interrupting the way hope is governed on all three levels, to make more of it available so that youth can have the stamina for the world-building they want to do.
Youssef told me he avoids feeling hope because the pain of unmet hopes is too great. His experiences made it psychologically too costly to imagine a self-actualized future. The realities of his life repeatedly told him that such a future was unattainable, and imagining it only led to a deep yearning for something unreachable. Not hoping became an adaptive survival strategy. Otherwise, that yearning could turn into despair, then anger and resentment, and eventually apathy towards life itself. For Youssef, that is not an option. He has a large family that relies on him, and his love for his mother would not let him. He must work to support her, and the apathy and grief that could keep him in bed is simply not affordable.
Youssef’s story with literacy shows how settler colonialism governs hope at its core. His sense of hope was constrained long before he was born. After World War I, the Western colonial powers split the spoils of war by dividing the region into geographically and culturally incoherent nation-states. In doing so, they set the stage for endless grief and chaos, including the establishment of Israel and Arab dictatorships. This geopolitical and psychological landscape, shaped by lines of division running through our mountains, lakes, plains, and communities, has caused endless suffering, including the Syrian regime’s long war on its people.
Youssef lost access to the power of literacy when he fled Syria to Lebanon with his family at age 6, the age most of us began to learn letter-sound correspondence. This gave him his first glass ceiling, not based on gender or race, but based on literacy status. Here, his otherwise wide-open sense of hope earned its upper and lower markers. Over the following decade, these two markers would slowly encroach on each other as the governance of hope progressed into the second and third levels of belief and imagination.
When Youssef moved to Canada, the first level of hope management had not yet fully taken hold, but as barriers to accessing literacy persisted, it gradually did. Initially hopeful, Youssef approached his teachers for support, but the system had nothing in place to address his needs. At best, he was given demoralizing worksheets that were gibberish to him, while other attempts earned dismissive responses or unfulfilled promises from overworked teachers. Now, the question of access–framed as “I know there are means to learn to read and write, can I access them?” being met with a “no”–ushered him into the second level of hope governance: belief. With narrowing hope, the question became, “I know a literate version of me is not possible, are there other means for my potential to unfold?” Youssef’s goal was to support his family, but literacy was a gatekeeper at every turn. He worked in construction and used his social skills and strong work ethic so his bosses tolerated his inconsistency as he continued to attend school. However, the acrobatic balancing act of sweet-talking the principal about his absences and maintaining relationships with work proved unsustainable. On that brisk September day, Youssef walked out of the principal’s office angrily because he knew the balancing act had to end, and his family’s already subsistence income was jeopardized further. More importantly, it was because he got the answer to the belief question, and it was a resounding “no”. The upper and lower limits of hope are closing in.
When that second level, belief governance, takes hold, we enter the third level of hope governance as an automatic adaptive response. Our imagination yields to the reality we are facing. We no longer imagine and dream because dreaming invokes potential, and the chasm between potential and reality creates an untenable, unbearable tension. We stop dreaming to conserve energy, we conserve energy to increase the likelihood of survival.
In the year that followed, Youssef and I worked together to map out this journey and find ways to interrupt the governance of hope and take it into our own hands, and we did. The means for Youssef to access literacy existed, but agreeing to try predicates on believing that, and he did not. The parameters of our beliefs are set by our imagination, and the governance of hope had calibrated his imagination too narrowly. We had to reverse-engineer those hope governance mechanisms starting with imagination. Just as his imagination narrowed through experience, only experience could pry it back open.
As we discussed meeting the literacy instructor, a trusted colleague, Ray, from a local agency wanted to hire at-risk youth to advise on program development for at-risk youth in his neighborhood. When I presented the idea to Youssef, he rejected it, claiming he had nothing to offer. Youssef is a natural diplomat who daps up the most at-risk youth on one corner and then walks on to banter with the aunties and their children down the street. He was perfect for this position. After months of encouraging the idea, and meeting the same hesitation, I made a last-ditch effort: I asked Ray to call during a scheduled meeting with Youssef and invite him for a face-to-face chat. Youssef accepted on the condition that his friend be hired too. We walked over to Ray’s office before Youssef changed his mind. Ray was blown away by Youssef’s astute judgment and methodical thinking and told him that the meeting would count as paid work hours if Youssef accepted the job. By the evening, Youssef and I had to go to another youth-led soccer program nearby for at-risk youth, so we invited Ray to join us. After the game we chatted outside with the coach about strategy and challenges of the program, and Youssef got to play with his thinking again just as well as he plays with the ball on the field. In a moment of silence on the drive back, he said, “You know something, it was nice working with you guys today.” Youssef does not have a habit of saying things like that, so I was curious.
“Yeah? How so?” I said, taking a glance at him in the rearview mirror.
“Well when it comes to making money I’m used to doing it with my hands. It’s nice to make money with my brain.” A small crack in the imagination gate had pried open.
Over the next two months, Ray and I worked diligently with Youssef, with a focus on making space for him to express himself and guide the direction of Ray’s work. When summer arrived, Ray hired Youssef for a student summer position. In that incubator, Youssef developed a novel program for middle school at-risk girls who usually don’t attend mainstream programming. Meanwhile, Youssef began warming up to the idea of improving his literacy, especially as he noticed the challenges of moving from construction to office work without it. The glass ceiling was coming to his attention, this time with a renewed sense of the possibility of breaking it. The imagination was back, but the stakes were higher than ever. Reclaiming the governance of hope was one leap of faith away, and the trust we built between us was now enough. With a similar maneuver that got him to meet Ray, he agreed to meet the literacy instructor.
The program Youssef and his friend created was so successful that my colleagues and I wanted to build on it. Youssef was hesitant again, but with his literacy improving, some money coming in, and hope thresholds reopening, he went for it. He and three more at-risk friends developed a theater program for younger at-risk youth, culminating in a play staged to family and neighbors who left the theater having seen their children achieve things they never imagined possible. After the program, one of the youth leads said she had a question for me. “Is there more work like this? My plan was to become an aesthetician, but I feel like I’m kinda good at this work?” She certainly was. After a short break, the four youths entered a demanding visioning phase, imagining their next steps. They are now implementing their vision, bringing in more at-risk friends as leads, developing more arts-based programs, and incorporating sports later in the year.
This story is not a Youssef story, nor is it a youth story. In my conversations with one of my friends about my work, we now say “Youssef is us, and we are all Youssef”. We all have something in our lives that went through the same process Youssef’s literacy went through. And we all have something in us that is calling upon us to take it on the same journey Youssef took in his literacy. The road Youssef took was full of bumps, and he spent more time wanting to quit on that road than he spent wanting to continue. So taking the reins on the governance of our sense of hope starts with recognizing that it is indeed governed. The next step is to identify what in our life needs the fuel of hope. Then we need to ask how the governance is operating on the level of access, beliefs, and most importantly, our imagination. Because the governance of hope can gaslight us into accepting a reality regardless of how far it is from the truth.
The war against children in Gaza has caused a new cognitive dissonance in all of us. The dehumanization premise that was invented to realize and institutionalize the settler colonial system has neither retreated nor repented. Rather, it has been carefully passed on down through the generations that shaped the world over the past four centuries and is more vicious than ever. As we cope with this cognitive dissonance, we lean deeper into the rejection strategy away from the dehumanization premise and towards love. Meanwhile, the genocide apologists lean into the acceptance strategy and the dehumanization premise, wielding state power to do so. Choosing love means facing this overwhelming power, and to do that we need to wield hope and insist on prying open the cracks for a new reality… one crack at a time.
- Yehuda, R., & Bierer, L. M. (2009). The relevance of epigenetics to PTSD: Implications for the DSM-V. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22(5), 427-434.
↩︎ - Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
↩︎ - Druckman, J. N., & Lupia, A. (2023). The role of political science in addressing the challenges of contemporary democracy. Annual Review of Political Science, 26, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-062321-041446
↩︎ - Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (2019). An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In E. Harmon-Jones (Ed.), Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology (2nd ed., pp. 3–24). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000135-001
↩︎ - The Simply Psychology website offers a good introduction to CD theory.
↩︎ - Druckman, J. N., & Lupia, A. (2023). The role of political science in addressing the challenges of contemporary democracy. Annual Review of Political Science, 26, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-062321-041446
↩︎ - Aronson, E. (1999). Dissonance, hypocrisy, and the self-concept. In E. Harmon-Jones & J. Mills (Eds.), Cognitive dissonance: Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology (pp. 103-126). American Psychological Association.
↩︎ - The Conference Board of Canada. (n.d.). Adult literacy and numeracy. The Conference Board of Canada. https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/adlt-lowlit-aspx/
↩︎
