Cognitive Dissonance Between Us And The Moon

     If you’re like me, you once won the top prize of $300 for your historiography regarding the moon landing. It remains the most I’ve ever been paid for my academic ability.

     Historiography focuses not on the history of an event, but on the way history of an event is managed. As objective as we like to think history is, it’s difficult to deny that it is impacted by the time and place from which it is written.

For example, a history of The Soviet Union written today would read a lot differently than one written in 1995 while Russia was still seen as trying to come back from the Soviet era. By the same logic, that book written today in the U.S. would be radically different than one written today in China.

     The time and place that produces a history has an effect on the way that history is articulated. That’s why we are still writing biographies of George Washington and there’s a new history of the Civil War coming out every other day. In order to make a story from the past relevant to the intended audience, different features are emphasized that might have otherwise been a sidenote. Some of this is intentional and some of it is the subconscious bias of the author. If I wrote a biography of Lincoln, I would naturally highlight his affinity for reading because that’s something I can relate to.

     None of these things make a work of history wrong in an absolute sense, but it is important to consider the cultural, personal, temporal, and ultimately situational lenses through which we view everything, history in particular. There is an objective truth to things that happened but our ability to see them clearly is hindered by far more than whether there was a photograph or not.   

     So, back to the moon. I wanted to focus on the moon landing in no small part because of the folks that deny it ever happened. It’s one thing to have a different interpretation of an historical event, but to claim it never happened seemed radical.

     Over the course of the paper, I concluded that those conspiracy theories, while garbage, were to be expected. Denial was a logical outcome of landing on the moon.

     For centuries, scientists and poets alike talked about landing on the moon as the ultimate, unachievable goal. Since humans first looked up, the moon had been this borderline mystic presence that sits up there taunting us every night. Landing on the moon is a work of poetry, of fantasy, that through a lot of hard work and determination, we made real. That’s a rough shift in perceived reality.  

     Even Walter Cronkite, the man who was the news for generations, as he watched the event unfold, claimed it still felt like a dream. It was real. It happened. There are witnesses, evidence, and documentation but it is still difficult to adjust your view of reality to allow for what you had perceived as pure fantasy up until then.

     Moon landing denial and a lot of other, more serious conspiracy theories come from a difficulty in matching a perceived world with the empirical world. An idea is too big or too divorced from what they have been told that any contrary evidence can’t be fully perceived.

     I ended my paper by claiming that the cognitive dissonance that comes from a fantasy conflicting with reality should be expected to generate conspiracy theories and radical behavior. Believing something so strongly that reality becomes the fantasy is a dangerous state of being. Luckily, moon landing deniers are relatively peaceful.