Amnesia and Comfortable Memory Blindspot / Mystification

Research and Sense-Making
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This has been inspired by Arendt, Bauman and Althusser to a degree.
I’m still struggling with the concept - but something seems to be there.

  1. Appearance of this bindspot or sense-making pattern

It’s partly to do with ritualising and domesticating memory to convert moral lessons into safe historical narratives. When we’re remembering the past in order to avoid engaging with the present - but not as in burying our heads in the sand - but as an active attempt to stop the enquiry.

  1. Psychological / sociological / ideological reasons behind it

There are multiple undercurrents going on - one is definitely trying to “conform” and share “vibes” - or do moral posturing, virtue signalling - but at the same time you don’t want to refer to anything that’s potentially controversial, so you stick so themes that are in the spirit of what you want to manifest and you know that others are equally likely to subscribe to them without touching on “dangerous” subjects

Its may be explained by the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence and assuming cognitive patterns that give us a functional but distorted image of the world and our place in it. There’s also an aspect of disavowal where people are often aware of contradictions or incoherence of their system - but continue participating because it’s safe - when people are knowingly fooled but act as if they are not.

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Feel free to help out, if of interest. Maybe with building a better diagram or clarifying concepts.

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I don’t know the philosophical background to this, but it does look like you are pointing out a very real problem area. Some of my starting points might be these.

  • People don’t like psychological discomfort, especially challenges to their sense of their own identity.
  • When people don’t feel that a part of them is acceptable, they deny it in themselves, split and project it onto others, often with a surprisingly harsh judgemental tone.
  • A vicious cycle sets in.
  • Because of their denial of the possibility of the denied bad patterns, the people end up being closet abusers, perhaps inventing bizarre justifications of their behaviour that protect their false sense of identity.

I guess what I’m saying is that I start from the perspective of personal psychology. It would be really interesting to marry this to your more sociological perspective.

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One of the building blocks of UTOK is the “influence matrix”, which is one way to map the sorts of factors you are analyzing.

This goes along with justification systems theory, which forms a bridge between personal and social psychology

I’m not a UTOK literalist, and I’m certain not insisting on that framework as a final statement on anything, but it does provide a turnkey structure to get into a wide range of psychological theory in a rather convenient way. In short, I doubt anyone in the UTOK community (which is overweighted with practicing therapists) would quarrel with your analysis above. UTOK could theorize it all to the Nth degree, however, for whatever that is worth.

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Thank you for this thought-provoking contribution @Martin
I find the post’s core argument, on how memory can become ritualised into a form of ideological containment, especially resonant. Drawing from Arendt, Bauman, and Althusser, the idea that remembrance can function as a moral placeholder rather than a springboard for ethical enquiry is a compelling critique of contemporary sense-making.

A pertinent, albeit sensitive, analogy might be drawn from the role of Holocaust remembrance in shaping global moral discourse. The Holocaust rightly occupies a singular position in history, its scale, structure, and legacy continue to inform legal, moral, and educational frameworks worldwide. The imperative of “never again” has become foundational to much of modern human rights thought.

And yet, the post invites us to consider the limits of how that imperative is applied. For instance, when contemporary crises, such as the ongoing suffering in Gaza, fail to trigger the same depth of moral clarity or institutional response, it raises difficult but necessary questions. This is not to equate distinct historical events, but to interrogate the selectivity with which moral universals are mobilised.

Bauman’s work on the compartmentalisation of ethics, Althusser’s insight into ideology as a lived misrecognition, and Arendt’s reflections on the bureaucratisation of responsibility all help frame this dynamic. These frameworks suggest that memory, while framed as a moral act, may paradoxically serve to stabilise systems by diverting attention from present complicities.

The key issue here is coherence. If historical memory is invoked to uphold moral principles, those principles must remain applicable in the face of contemporary suffering however politically or emotionally fraught that may be. Otherwise, remembrance risks becoming a ritual of self-exoneration rather than a tool for ethical engagement.

Appreciative of the nuance this discussion brings to the ethical-political role of memory. I’d be keen to hear how others approach this tension across different historical and geopolitical contexts.

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Interesting and definitely up for exploring a bit more. But I’m not sure I fully get it: can you provide another example? Is it sort of like: we’ve weathered the storm before, so we’ll weather it again- and then this gesture shifts focus towards any meaningful discussion? Just want to make sure I understand it fully

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it’s about making a “historical” principled stand against something, and still using it in your propaganda but refusing to acknowledge that now you actually actively participate in what you’re (explicitly and oficially) still condemning. You can’t abandon it because it sits prominently in your specification as a fundamental belief and value and would remove justification for something else that your doing under that excuse.

So, western civilisation’s brand is to a great degree wedded to the principles of the democracy and freedom. We keep on paddling historical narratives of our democratic superiority comparing our values to the autocracy of, let’s say, China. But the gap between the rhetoric and the reality has narrowed down (or maybe even inverted ??). So, while we’re condemning China for their treatment of Uighur people invoking human rights (just an example) - we’re ignoring many other examples when we invoke “national interests” or “national security” or asserting someone’s right to “defend themselves using whatever methods…”.

Nowdays we have restrictions in place in terms of what we can say, how, when and under what pretext we can protest, we can be detained on flimsy excuse, we’re being surveilled and put into various databases shared without our oversight, etc… At the same time China has become much more relaxed when it comes to opression or intolerance, but the principle of Amnesia and Comfortable Memory blindspot works - media and politicians push irrelevant historical narratives to stop “uncomfortable” enquiries - by signalling - we still care about what you rightfully care and we’re consistent. People then assume that what they are seeing as contradiction is their incorrect sense-making (so mystification).

This again hinges on doing everything to preserve legitimacy (while not admitting incoherence). Systems must preserve the appearance of identity, direction and trust - otherwise people might stop participating in them and thus invalidate them.

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Not without reason, the foundation of UTOK’s analysis of social psychology is the “Justification Hypothesis”. Indeed, UTOK sees justification at the core of the human self. For reasons related to our primate evolution, we are constantly trying to maintain relational status in our various groups. Justification is central to that - we need a good story to tell our peers about whatever we are up to.

As a quick point of entry into the theory of false consciousness (or justification without reason), I like YN Harari’s distinction between information as power vs. information as truth. ( I like the references above to Althusser, Arendt, etc. as well - Harari is just a very easy point of entry). Anyway, social justification is generally much more about information as power than information as truth. For example, if pure research is the goal, a source like this might carry some weight: https://genocideeducation.org/resources/modern-era-genocides/ But I can’t imagine any sort of current political discourse about the middle east, for example, that would care anything at all about data like that.

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Thank you @RobertBunge this adds an important layer to the discussion. The Justification Hypothesis in UTOK offers a powerful lens: if justification is central to the human self and its relational standing, then the stories we tell, individually and collectively, are less about aligning with truth and more about maintaining coherence within a given social, political, or moral order.

Harari’s framing of “information as power” vs. “information as truth” is especially relevant here. When justification serves power (rather than inquiry), truth becomes selectively legible, it only gains traction when it reinforces the dominant group’s sense of coherence or legitimacy. This is where narrative legibility becomes deeply tied to power dynamics: it’s not just what’s true that matters, but who has the ability to make certain truths speakable, visible, or institutionally actionable.

So, the ritualization of memory doesn’t occur in a vacuum; it operates through hegemonic structures that filter which moral lessons are amplified and which are repressed or deflected. A genocide that aligns with broader geopolitical narratives becomes teachable, fundable, and commemorated. One that destabilises existing alliances or implicates global actors often remains obscure, even if well-documented. This explains why resources like the dataset you referenced carry epistemic weight in theory, but struggle to find any traction in political discourse when they don’t map onto current alignments of influence.

In that sense, we’re not only dealing with cognitive dissonance or moral posturing, but with a political economy of justification. Certain memories and facts become “usable,” while others are too disruptive to be metabolised into the dominant moral order. The cost of acknowledging them is not merely rhetorical… it’s geopolitical.

So, yes, while justification operates at the level of social cognition, it is also shaped by global structures of power and influence: who gets to remember, who gets to frame, and which truths are allowed to circulate. This makes the challenge of truthful engagement not just psychological, but deeply political.

Really appreciate this exchange as it’s helping refine how I think about the mechanics of disavowal and the way systems (social, media, institutional) create moral “safe zones” that manage dissent through narrative curation rather than suppression.

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I likewise deeply appreciate your paragraph above, which I would gladly adopt as a sort of mission statement. The UTOK community itself is not prepared to investigate the geopolitical implications of its own theoretical insights about how justification interacts with other psychological layers (such as UTOK’s “Freudian filter”), but my sense is 2R in general may have the wide-angled vision to take such topics on. UTOK needs and prefers to focus on its own starting point in unified psychology. But the application of such psychology to wider issues is also an urgent matter, one I hope participants here find resonant.

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