Heretic's Mirror: Moral psychology and collapse of reform in NPP - Part 2B

This essay explores the NPP's transformation from reformist force to morally enclosed echo chamber. Drawing on Jonathan Haidt's moral psychology, it shows how loyalty eclipses truth and dissent becomes apostasy.

- By Dr. Jayalath Bandara Adikarige

Through cases of judicial appointments, smuggling scandals, and silenced critics, it examines the costs of binding without introspection - and the rise of a sacred order resistant to correction.

THIS analysis builds on the argument introduced in Part 2A, where the NPP's evolution was examined through Jonathan Haidt's framework of moral psychology. There, we saw how moral binding the deep loyalty forged through shared identity and emotional resonance enabled the movement's rise but also planted the seeds of introspective decay.

In this continuation, we trace how that binding has hardened into cognitive closure. What began as idealistic performance rallies, symbols, and calls for justice has solidified into a sacred script. Moral critique is no longer welcomed; it is condemned. Dissenting voices are not engaged but excommunicated. The NPP’s public rituals, once expressions of collective conscience, now function as loyalty tests, where the price of dissonance is erasure.

This transformation is not merely ideological, but structural. The movement has constructed a moral echo chamber that feeds on affirmation and immunises itself against contradiction. Critics are not treated as interlocutors but as traitors. Leadership is sanctified, not scrutinised. The party behaves like a politicised immune system, attacking all perceived threats not only from opponents, but also from reformers within.

Reform has not disappeared. It has been displaced by ritual, rhetoric, and strategic forgetting. Haidt warns that when morality binds too tightly, it also blinds and this blindness now defines the NPP’s refusal to self-correct, even in the face of scandal and internal dissent.

It is within this sealed landscape that we encounter the Heretic’s Mirror a space where the cost of questioning is exile, and the distortion of memory becomes a tool of political survival.

5. The Heretic's Mirror