Inside the Echo Temple: Moral binding and architecture of belief - Part 2A

From rebellion to ritual, the NPP now reverberates within its own sanctified walls. This essay investigates how moral certainty, tribal loyalty, and choreographed performance have displaced scrutiny — transforming a once reformist movement into a closed temple of affirmation, where questions perish and only echoes remain. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt's moral psychology, it explores how the architecture of belief within the National People's Power (NPP) has become a fortress of cognitive closure, where loyalty is virtue and dissent is sacrilege.

- By Dr. Jayalath Bandara Adikarige

IN the first part of this essay, I explored Jonathan Haidt’s challenge to the Enlightenment belief in human rationality. Moral decisions, he argues, are driven less by reasoned deliberation than by fast, intuitive, and emotionally charged responses. His metaphor of the mind as a rider on an elephant — where reason merely justifies choices already made by instinct — reveals the psychological foundations of political tribalism.

This lens helps explain the unwavering loyalty of the National People’s Power (NPP) base, which is shaped less by policy than by a shared sense of moral virtue and redemptive identity. In the (NPP), loyalty has become a liturgy, and reason a postscript. In such a matrix, critics become apostates, and dissent is framed as betrayal. We now turn to how this moral logic constructs echo chambers that insulate power and silence doubt.

2.The moral echo chamber: Binding, blinding and the architecture of belief

One of the most revealing features of the NPP’s rise is its success in constructing a sealed moral soundscape — a space where dissent is not simply rejected, but rendered inaudible. This is nowhere more evident than in the NPP’s meticulously staged rallies. These events are not civic deliberations but moral performances, carefully choreographed to bind believers and sanctify leadership. The physical and emotional architecture of these gatherings resembles what Jonathan Haidt describes as a “moral community”: a closed system where virtue is defined internally and doubt is expelled like a virus¹.