I like eggs. Scrambled are my favourite and even I can rustle up a good effort upon two slices of toast. The dish does rely on a few simple processes underpinned by one fundamental truth – cracking open the requisite eggs. “Res ipsa loquitur” I hear some of you say, if, like me, you have studied English law and recall the litany of Latin peppering this discipline – “the thing speaks for itself”. In other words, it’s fucking obvious. But what if there existed a set of circumstances where this evident and observable doctrine didn’t exist and an ordinary hen’s egg, for example, couldn’t be broken? A parallel universe in which the simple act of making scrambled eggs failed at the first hurdle. Furthermore, could it be proved with certainty that part of the title of this article, an old Danish proverb (ever so slightly amended with the inclusion of the word in parentheses), is categorically false? Have I lost my marbles? I will leave you to decide…
In order to mathematically prove that you can never break an egg let us remain in our own universe and consider some simple parameters. Firstly, to crack an egg open you need to propel it sufficiently hard enough against a resistant surface. Secondly, you need to hold the egg during the process. I like to crack my eggs open against the edge of a glass jug so that the contents fall neatly into it prior to the addition of milk and butter. Let’s call the distance between the shell and the edge of the jug ‘d’. Imagine for a moment freeze framing the procedure at the halfway point of the downward action as you thrust the egg towards the hard edge. The distance is d/2. Two thirds of the way down would be 2d/3 and so on. The importance of expressing the ensuing distances in fractional terms is that any number on top divided by any number below will never equal zero. Thus, my learned friend I have proved beyond any doubt that ‘d’ will never reach the point whereby it allows the egg to make contact with the jug and therefore it can never break. Or in Latin, quod erat demonstrandum (QED) which simply means that a fact has been logically proved.
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But I regularly see with my own eyes that this logical fact is not the truth, yet the figures speak for themselves. Daft, isn’t it? Perhaps I should end the conversation here and enjoy my meal. However, turn this issue on its head and consider for a moment that even in the face of provable facts, you still maintained your former position. Knowing that eggs break when cracked hard enough against a solid surface, but still not accepting the logical outcome. Would you consider yourself daft then? The answer to this apparently logical question isn’t as straightforward as it may seem since the human brain has a tendency to hold onto fake news and indeed often defend it even in the face of facts so large that you could paint them on the side of a bus.
Human beings are hot wired to favour certainty over doubt. Ambiguity aversion is perhaps best summarised by the proverb, ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know’. Identity is combination of our qualities, personality, experience, and the way we see the universe. Yet the latter element can be skewed by our sources of information. Parents and those in authority claim the highest leverage on our view of how the world works and where we fit in it. Education seamlessly takes charge of the reins once we bid farewell to our formative years.
When these fundamental ‘home truths’ are challenged our preferred position is one of loyalty to the life narrative we have created in our own minds. These contradictions can lead to significant mental anguish which seeks a quick and effective restoration of mindfulness. This harrowing event horizon has been labelled by psychiatrists as cognitive dissonance and it literally can create a reality where the egg never breaks!
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American social psychologist Leon Festinger contended that humans crave psychological stability in order to function in the often-complex world around them. He observed a cult which believed that the earth would be destroyed by a flood that never happened. The less fanatical believers accepted that they had been foolish, yet the extremists, many of whom who gave up their homes and jobs to work for the cult, reinterpreted the outcome as justification that they were right all along since their collective belief had prevented the catastrophe.
A key belief, often concocted by falsehood, that threatens the resultant mental discomfort can motivate a thought pattern that calms the cognitive dissonance. For many of us coping with conflicting intelligence is hard work and stressful. Festinger concluded that some people would ultimately resolve this discord by irrationally believing whatever they wanted to believe. Proving, if so minded, that scrambled eggs on toast can be achieved without breaking an egg.
I knew nothing about this theory until well after the unifying referendum held in the United Kingdom on 23rd June 2016, more commonly referred to as BREXIT. If you are British, you will, no doubt, immediately detect the huge dollop of irony in the previous sentence. If you are from another territory, you may just wonder what the hell is happening in Great Britain!
Those who voted either way had their own reasons for doing so based on, unsurprisingly, a personal view of the universe. For such a small geographical location Great Britain and all the emanations that flow of English, United Kingdom, British Isles, and the Union flag have had an incredible impact upon the whole world. For example, English is arguably the global language, and our flag is incorporated within the nation state emblems of several independent countries. To add to our invincibility, we even adopted a non-indigenous animal to represent our inner roar. We aren’t Great by accident! But then again, dig a little deeper and perhaps our history, our identity isn’t as simple and glorious as that.
‘Take back control’ was the central tenet of the leave campaign. This presupposed that the United Kingdom had lost it. Britishness has never been shaped by loss. Our national identity is heavily influenced by domination. At its peak, The British Empire covered around twenty-five percent of the worlds entire land surface. In our most recent history, we have been on the winning side of two World wars. To suggest so graphically that this had occurred, akin to having slept walked into this abyss, was bound to cause huge cognitive dissonance within a significant proportion of the population, especially as some of those who held offices of power chanted the same slogan. Yet our constitution would never ever allow that to happen.
Parliamentary supremacy is the robust and impregnable defence mechanism which basically means we can do whatever the fuck we want underpinning the notion that Britannia does indeed rule the waves. But, unless you studied Law amongst other disciplines, generally at undergraduate level, this notion was as common as unicorn doodah. If you would prefer a second opinion then ask the current Prime Minister, or better still read his own Government policy paper entitled ‘The United Kingdom’s exit from, and new partnership with, the European Union’ (item 2.1, May 2017) which states emphatically, “The sovereignty of Parliament is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution. Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.” But even though I may have contradicted some of your views, and I accept that some Parliamentarians are still peddling this fake news, the firestorm of cognitive dissonance will allow some to ignore the facts.
Some commentators may label this as the definition of utter stupidity yet that would be alien to how our brains actually function when we are faced with bewildering and terrifying mental agony. It’s not just BREXIT. Ask yourself why some people stay in corrosive relationships? Whilst others follow football teams for the whole of their adult lives believing them to offer success yet being disappointed with incredible regularity? To coin a phrase, I am there, and I have the shirt (indeed, over fifty of them!). Cognitive dissonance can keep us all in a parallel universe which really does have unbreakable eggs.
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I could dismantle the rather misleading term ‘free movement’ or indeed the words on the side of a red bus but there is no point if you are unwilling to break some mental eggs. If not, you will accept as fact the sudden dire consequences of BREXIT. You will see them as mere turbulence within the overall sunlit uplands promised to us by the people in power who capitalised on Festinger’s theory. The economic plunge, the repatriation of British citizens from Spain, the chaos and violence in Northern Ireland, etc., will be simply blamed on that lot from over there who have no control over us, and never did!
However, if you have managed to last up to this point maybe your own cognitive dissonance isn’t as disruptive as you might have thought. Your inner force may be strong enough to accept, even if you feel a tad silly, that you may have been misled. Strong enough to grasp that your core beliefs aren’t as important as you may have imagined. Otherwise, best of luck with your attempts to make scrambled eggs!
© Ian Kirke 2021
Title photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash