Book Titles

The pain of living with horrors we have committed but cannot morally accept is searing, which is why most people will reach for any justification available to assuage the dissonance.

If good guys justify the bad things they do, bad guys persuade themselves they are the good guys.

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, because our victims deserved what they got, we hate them even more than we did before we harmed them, which in turn makes us inflict even more pain on them.

Dissonance theory would therefore predict that when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than they do when their victims are helpless.

…people do not preform acts of cruelty and come out unscathed on the other side. Success at dehumanizing the victim virtually guarantees a continuation or even an escalation of the cruelty…

Combine self-justifying perpetrators and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality.

People will pursue self-destructive courses of action to protect the wisdom of their initial decisions.

The art of living with dissonance is as much about coping with the scars on the soul as it is about avoiding them.

Human beings may not be eager to change, but we have the ability to change, and the fact that many of our self-protective delusions and blind spots are built in to the way the brain works is no justification for not trying.

If the person who admits mistakes or harm is a business or political leader, you will probably feel reassured that you are in the capable hands of someone big enough to do the right thing…