Power induces cognitive dissonance that makes its own abuse unreal to victims

Evidence

At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile OBE – Sir Jimmy Savile – Jimmy Savile, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile’s victims quiet. Who’s going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer, someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable – this can’t possibly be happening. What has happened can be pieced together only in retrospect. The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover–up can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now… — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 210

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that power warps victims’ reality-experience — that abuse gets admitted only when confined to ‘the past’ as a temporal distancing device — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting observation about how power operates through time itself.
• XREF: This temporal strategy — ‘that was then’ — connects to Fisher’s hauntology project throughout the book about stalled historical time. — connects to: Unimaginable trauma is unrememberable precisely because it is repression itself — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 291; Victims’ aggression gets reframed as the victim’s own deviance; Euphemistic reframing of abuse as atypical can enable institutional inaction. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 498 (+1 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘confessing the past to protect the present’ as a structural move of institutional power — the IRA/BBC/Hillsborough patterns are all instances.

Broader Connections

• Victims’ aggression gets reframed as the victim’s own deviance #expands (0.85)
• Euphemistic reframing of abuse as atypical can enable institutional inaction. #expands (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 498