(From Wikipedia) Vocalist Eddie Vedder about “Dissident”:

In “Dissident”, I’m actually talking about a woman who takes in someone who’s being sought after by the authorities for political reasons. He’s on the run, and she offers him a refuge. But she just can’t handle the responsibility. She turns him in, then she has to live with the guilt and the realization that she’s betrayed the one thing that gave her life meaning. It made her life difficult. It made her life hell. But it gave her a reason to be. But she couldn’t hold on. She folded. That’s the tragedy of the song.

At Pearl Jam’s March 17, 1994 concert in West Lafayette, Indiana at Purdue University’s Elliot Hall, Vedder said that the “holy no” in the song refers to date rape, explaining that “a woman’s word is sacred and the no means no and that’s what a ‘holy no’ is.”