Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [93]
When the Iranian students took those Americans hostage in 1979, the event seemed a meaningless act of aggression, a bolt that came out of the blue as far as the Americans were concerned; Americans saw themselves as having been attacked without provocation by a bunch of crazy Iranians. But to the Iranians, it was the Americans who started it, because American intelligence forces had aided in a coup in 1953 that unseated their charismatic, democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed the shah. Within a decade, many Iranians were growing resentful of the shah’s accumulation of wealth and the westernizing influence of the United States. In 1963, the shah put down an Islamic fundamentalist uprising led by Khomeini and sent the cleric into exile. As opposition to the shah’s government mounted, he allowed his secret police, SAVAK, to crack down on dissenters, fueling even greater anger.
When did the hostage crisis begin? When the United States supported the coup against Mossadegh? When it kept supplying the shah with arms? When it turned a blind eye to the cruelties committed by SAVAK? When it admitted the shah for medical treatment? Did it begin when the shah exiled Khomeini, or when the ayatollah, after his triumphant return, saw a chance to consolidate his power by focusing the nation’s frustrations on America? Did it begin during the protests at the embassy, when Iranian students allowed themselves to be Khomeini’s political pawns? Most Iranians chose answers that justified their anger at the United States, and most Americans chose answers that justified their anger at Iran. Each side convinced itself that it was the injured party, and consequently was entitled to retaliate. Who started the hostage crisis? Each says the other. What made it intractable? Self-justification.
Of all the stories that people construct to justify their lives, loves, and losses, the ones they weave to account for being the instigator or recipient of injustice or harm are the most compelling and have the most far-reaching consequences. In such cases, the hallmarks of self-justification transcend the specific antagonists (lovers, parents and children, friends, neighbors, or nations) and their specific quarrels (a sexual infidelity, a family inheritance, a property line, a betrayal of a confidence, or a military invasion). We have all done something that made others angry at us, and we have all been spurred to anger by what others have done to us. We all have, intentionally or unintentionally, hurt another person who will forever regard us as the villain, the betrayer, the scoundrel. And we have all felt the sting of being on the receiving end of an act of injustice, nursing a wound that never seems to fully heal. The remarkable thing about self-justification is that it allows us to shift from one role to the other and back again in the blink of an eye, without applying what we have learned from one role to the other. Feeling like a victim of injustice in one situation does not make us less likely to commit an injustice against someone else, nor does it make us more sympathetic to victims. It’s as if there is a brick wall between those two sets of experiences, blocking our ability to see the other side.
One of the reasons for that brick wall is that pain felt is always more intense than pain inflicted, even when the actual amount of pain is identical. The old joke—the other guy’s broken leg is trivial;