How the flames of Hong Kong’s out-of-control protests are being fanned by a rigid mindset, leaving no place for those with an open mind
- Like a political rally, the Red Guards or a heated football match, the protests have been taken over by a frenzied mindset. It’s no longer clear what the protesters’ goal is, but it is obvious that they are doing lasting damage to Hong Kong
I’m struggling to comprehend the lemming violence at the radical fringe of Hong Kong’s protest movement. I am struggling to see the dotted lines linking mounting street violence with any semblance of a plan.
My thoughts cast back to the months of student riots across Europe in the early 1970s. I remember a long discussion with the then-vice chancellor of our university, a formidable academic with a lifetime dominated by reason and logic, where he confessed: “I’m not equipped to deal with these upheavals. I’m trained to see both sides of an argument. In these circumstances, this is a fatal weakness, not helpful at all.”
Now, four decades later, I am that man. I’m not mentally equipped to deal with these upheavals. I suspect many across the senior levels of the Hong Kong government face the same predicament.
In short, there is a type of mind that is associated with extreme partisanship, and that kind of mind is strongly linked with “cognitive rigidity”. As Zmigrod summarises in a paper in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: “People who are very attached to their parties display greater mental rigidity, relative to those who are moderately or weakly attached.”