The Cognitive Dissonance of Darien Fenton

Cognitive dissonance is one of those phrases one hears a lot these days, but it took decades to bubble up to public familiarity from Leon Festinger’s pioneering research into human thinking.  In essence, dissonance is the unpleasant feeling of holding contradictory thoughts simultaneously.  It drives us to resolve the conflict, usually by changing at least one of those beliefs.

Brief example:
Belief 1: I am good at my job.
Belief 2: Someone whose opinion I respect says that I am not good at my job.

To remove the dissonance, one could simply change the first belief to “I am not good at my job”.  In practice, of course, that is very difficult . In this case, the more common route is to change the second belief, say to “Someone whose opinion I don’t respect says that I am not a good person”.  Conflict removed, dissonance relieved.

For a perfect example (although somewhat lacking in the virtue of brevity), we can turn to a sad Facebook posting by Labour MP Darien Fenton.  Being a Facebook posting, it may not of course be available to you, gentle reader, as you may not have direct access to that part of the Labour echo chamber.  If not, it is reproduced below in full below.

I’ve known Matt McCarten for more than 20 years. He was an organiser with the Hotel Workers Union when I was a rookie organiser. In fact I spent my first day on the job with him showing me the ropes.

Snowball destroyed the windmill!!!

He was notorious then for his fights with Richard Prebble in Auckland Central. He became even more notorious when he left Labour to start the New Labour Party with Jim Anderton. There were rifts in the union with those who wanted to follow and those who wanted to stay and fight within the Labour Party.
I don’t know where Matt went after that. I guess he was involved in Wellington as the Alliance Party President.
But I do know that I spent the next ten years of the 1990’s fighting defensive battles against National’s attack on workers, including Hotel workers, restaurant workers, fast food workers, aged care workers and cleaners.
The damage that was caused by the National Party was far, far worse that some in the union movement back then said that couldn’t be worse than Labour.
It was.
So Matt’s description of our caucus as a “bunch of gutless wonders, resigned to coast along for the next six months and lose, rather than get a backbone and make the change” is beneath him.
Matt must know, more than most, that unless Labour is part of the next government, the people he says he cares most about – the working poor – are stuffed.
And he must know that unless we who are just as passionate as he is about the poor, the low paid and the struggling are part of the Labour Party, he and his followers will be consigned to fighting on the margins – and no real change.
I’ve been there. I don’t want to be there again. And if it were as simple as changing the leader, Phil Goff would be the first to volunteer.
Matt – before you write any more crap about our Party, pick up the phone and talk to me.
You are better than this.

There is so much here that that is so sadly typical of the modern Labour party.  Perhaps we’ll return to dissect the dissonance further in a future missive...