Cognitive Dissonance on the March
As noted on the previous page, an equally shocking instance of cognitive blindness involves the current incarnation of Philip II, namely, Barack Hussein Obama, who is demonstrably enacting policies that have brought his country to the verge of economic collapse. His effort to impose a European-style dirigiste model of governance along with a state-dominated economic apparatus upon a historically free-market republican nation is predicated on both willful ignorance and the conviction of personal infallibility. Europe is gradually unravelling, the eurozone is coming apart, cradle-to-grave entitlements are bankrupting one country after another, renewable energy projects are fiscally unsustainable and largely unworkable, and the corporatist paradigm of administrative control is proving inimical to entrepreneurial initiative and individual freedom. The European model of welfare state dependency is an undoubted catastrophe.
No matter. Convinced of his superior insight into domestic and international affairs, Obama will persist in his folly and will not rest satisfied until he has brought America unexceptionally to the sinking condition of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and France. And, mirabile dictu, he has perhaps half the American electorate with him. As former New York Post op-ed columnist Arnold Ahlert fears, there may soon be more people “riding the wagon” than pulling the wagon. “Europe’s ‘wagon’ has already stopped moving. We can learn from their experience–or be part of it.” Given the prevalence of and temptation to epistemic dissociation, the latter option is a distinct possibility.
Cognitive dissonance was defined by Leon Festinger, the coiner of the phrase, as the discomfort caused by holding irreconcilable beliefs, although the term has been popularly extended to signify as well the discontinuity between fact and opinion in which people wilfully invest. In When Prophecy Fails, Festinger pointed out that one of the ways to diminish the sense of cognitive dissonance is to obfuscate or “reduce the importance of those cognitions that are in a dissonant relationship.” This is plainly what is now happening. Moreover, the harbingers of confusion and mystification enjoy wide public support. Festinger noted that if the attempt to disregard the obvious is to be successful, it must “meet with support from either the physical or the social environment.” In the various cases under consideration, since the physical environment actually disconfirms habitual assumptions, it is the social milieu that reinforces the deception and the self-deception. “If more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.” In effect, it becomes “less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief.”
This is why public support is a primary factor in the maintenance of harmful delusions, that is, why the public must be bribed or systematically misinformed—and, almost as if by intention, poorly educated. It must be admitted, too, that the material purveyors of social and political nonsense are often in the same state of derpy-eyed disorientation. They do not see reality but its refractive distortion. Cognitive dissonance, understood as the rift between a mental construct and an actual state of affairs, is a fact of human nature and has always had its part to play in social, political, military, and economic ruination. But in the contemporary world of instant communication, enhanced media dissemination, and pervasive credulity, it has assumed planetary proportions. The capacity for disinformation and misreading is now global. It is as if the mind has been critically uncoupled from the way things really are.
Forget about having a second cup. Cognitive dissonance will see to it that the first cup is served empty.
Yeah, but, David, the one trick pony has arrived and we can all take a ride! Sure…when someone stops feeding the pony, we all fall off a dead horse…but, let’s beat it to death even though we know the outcome!
Scarily, about 48 percent of the American populace has bought the golden ticket to pure idiocy.
Laziness is the NEW American way.
For shame.
Laziness may be the outcome of statist government policies, but the original impulse is hatred of “the money power” also known as “the Jews” who worship the Golden Calf, and who are “a stiff-necked people.” I wrote about the hatred of finance capital in lots of blogs that are indexed here: http://clarespark.com/2012/08/05/hating-finance-capital/.
Will there ever be a day in PJ Media where we don’t see a Clare Spark post thats pluging her blog?
almost as if by intention, poorly educated
Oh, I can assure you this is thoroughly intentional and has been for decades. If not by the actual teacher or principal or district super, it is certainly the intentional policies of the accreditation agencies involved with schools and higher ed and the professors designing the credentialing programs in the colleges of education.
Thanks to President Obama’s education policies, especially Common Core, Race to the Top, and those poorly understood NCLB waivers, all of American education, K-12 and higher ed, is shifting dramatically away from content to an organized psychological assault on the essence of individuality. With data being collected on how amenable each student is to transforming his consciousness to a new concept of self. One that puts the community and the so-called common good first.
Which is why teachers get sent for expensive cognitive dissonance training to break down those irreconcilable ideas and the sense of self at the same time. Of course they are told this will be engaging for the students. Equitable instruction. Performance Excellence for All Kids. What could be more glorious than psychological PEAK training in Vail in the summer to learn how to get at each child’s emotions and values?
The cognitive dissonance is any nation surviving the psychological manipulation of its young people without discovering it takes out the foundation of core values and principles just as systematically as Formosan termites.
Except they do not bill school districts an advisory fee of $4000 a day.
This has been going on since around 1900. Before that time character mattered. Most people lived in small towns and everyone knew everyone. If you were a sociopathic power grabber or cheat, people figured it out pretty quickly and you were in trouble. However, by 1900, things changed. More people were living in big, crowded cities where character and ability mattered less than being able to outcompete others for resources.
Along comes Dale Carnegie. He figured out how to use charisma and mind tricks to become a great salesman. He applied that to dealing with people and selling yourself in his famous book. He wasn’t the only one of course, there were others like PT Barnum, etc., etc. The point is that character was no longer important but being able to put one over on others to get ahead yourself.
Social skills and networking, that’s what mattered now. Even in college. Before college had been a place of serious study where retiring types were welcome. After 1900, those people were out. Loud, extroverted networkers were in. Some college deans were even quoted as saying serious traditional students need not apply. So today there strict requirements for all manner of extracurricular activities to get in and stay in college.
Anyway, my point is that, as you say, real education is seen as secondary. Reading? Writing? Math? History and Economist, Pfeh! What’s important is working in a group, thinking in a group, and above all, having the correct thoughts. Creativity and real individuality? Nonsense: follow the herd, just another cow.
In addition to most people living in small towns or villages in 1900, therefore knowing most of their inhabitants, most of the families were self-professing Christians and church goers. They heard Scripture every week — a character-building exercise — which talked about loving your neighbour as yourself and serving others.
One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of discerning spirits — being able to tell the difference between which ones are truthful and life-giving and which are deceptive and damaging. Today, when more people stay home or go golfing or to brunch on Sunday mornings rather than to church, a large swath of our society seems to have lost the ability to discern what is reasonable and probable from what is unreasonable and improbable.
Having forsaken our Judeo-Christian heritage here in the West for a mess of pottage, people are increasingly vulnerable to snake-oil salesmen who only want power and riches for themselves and have no intention of delivering a product that actually does what it says it will on the package. We’ve become duped and that’s how Barack Hussein Obama got elected to the presidency.
Kyrie eleison.
This is what I’ve been saying. It is refreshing to hear someone else say it! Thank you.
You’re welcome! We need to wake up to the consequences of forsaking the faith of our forebears. Cognitive dissonance didn’t just happen in the West. We let our spiritual defenses down and we’re no longer spiritually protected. This is the truth that too many commentators skate around. They diagnose the disease — in this case, cognitive dissonance — but fail to diagnose the cause.
Disaster. If you don’t discern the cause, you can’t cure the ailment.
We’re in spiritual free fall.
Some things we have learned from the last 100 years:
1) Someone will tear down the wall.
2) The utter collapse of a prevailing or conventional wisdom leaves behind enormous wreckage of long term social and psychological damage.
Cognitive dissonance, particularly on the worldwide scale David Solway is writing about here, is not a “fact of human nature”. It is generally an active choice (and one that must be made over and over, and so made habitual). It is avoidance behavior, a feckless clinging to unquestioned, and false, dogmas (including scientific ones, like the theory behind global warming, which is not just wrong, it is incompetent). Obama has given us all an unhealthy dose of it, and it is now merely a question of how far gone the US voters are, whether they will throw off the baleful influence, or embrace it as an addict embraces his narcotic.
David, cognitive dissonance, the bane of our western PC existence!
It is noteworthy that you utilized one of Dr Martin Sherman’s quotes for one of your supportive statements.
As a matter of record, I am in close contact with Dr Sherman, and I can attest to his inestimable strategic acumen. In fact, my blog – http://www.adinakutnicki.com refers to him at the ‘About’ tab, as well as references him in some of my commentaries.
Check it out.
Specifically, read – ‘What Happens When Resident Leftists/’Peace’ Fantasists Hold The Reins Of Power…’.
Great job, David. There used to be a commenter on some conservative blogs who always began or ended his comments with a phrase such as this: “Librulism [my spelling not his] is a mental disorder.”
In essence this is the theme your excellent and example-laden piece gives us, and this is the unfortunate truth of our politics today. Sue the states because they want to know that only the legally entitled will vote? Yes yes yes. That is ‘voter suppression’. And yes yes yes, that is librul insanity. Thanks, David.
Michael Savage. He was the guy who invented (or at least, popularized) the phrase.
How can you “occasionally frequent” a coffee shop?
I always go there sometimes myself.
Ha! Love it.
But nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded!
That’s easy. Occasionally, you go there frequently. Say, once every couple of months you go there every day for a week. Then you go somewhere else for the next seven weeks…
Sort of like how Obama occasionally frequents the Oval Office, then goes back to fund raising and golfing.
Because ‘frequent’ as a verb has come to mean “go to” or “hang out at.”
I don’t quite see Solway hanging out, but it is a poet’s habit.
Mental masterbation is harder to cure than the physical kind.
George Carlin made a career out of pointing out life’s contradictions. And in reality, one cannot control these contradictions when things are “normal”. But the left revels in, looks for and actually prefers to create, not just contradictions, but acts of pure buffoonery.
pure buffoonery as acts of deliberate malice and cruelty.
“George Carlin made a career out of pointing out life’s contradictions.”
Yes, but he never saw the contradictions in his own very progressive political advocacy. He was as much a victim of cognitive dissonance as any other liberal, hooked on the narcotic of willful ignorance, and rewarded generously by his fellow addicts who enabled his career. Where do you think old George’s path would have led if he had been an outspoken truth speaking conservative?
This is, of course very true and perhaps one of the most glaring contradictions in and of itself. But not atypical of the liberal left.
may be willfully ignorant or blind, but its leaders act out of deliberate malice and cruelty.
failure to face up to this harsh reality is essentially to be both willfully ignorant and blind.
You omitted a very important component in your analysis. What you’re really talking about is “the stark contrast between their deeply held beliefs and the cold facts of reality that somebody else will have to endure“. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about Israel, global warming, tax policy, mass transit, housing, food or anything else… those advocating the policy always exempt themselves from it. Or, in the case of Israel, live far, far away where they can watch the mayhem and “tut, tut” in the comfort of their gated community. In no way is there any cognitive dissonance, it’s just the utter hypocrisy of “do as I say, not as I do” because the policies do not apply to the advocates. Paying taxes is for the little people, firearms must be banned except for my properly licensed and expensive bodyguards, cars must be banned to free the highway for my fleet of SUVs. Ultimately, it boils down to “I care enough about the issue to destroy you and your way of life… peasant!”.
I am struck by the amount of diagnosis presented on the patient by the learned and concerned. I am also struck by the lack of stated treatment required to bring said patient back to health. It seems we all dance around the unsaid truth as if it will happen without our physical input. Sorry, the garden has yet to be invented that will weed itself…
Be Prepared! Have a plan and know the plan, work the plan. Have a back up plan as well.
Finally! Someone other than myself stating what I know others here think is heretical: What are we going to do about the left and their continuing existence in America?
We have been taught a lesson that answers this question. The liberal never learns and never gives up. Following the successful presidency of Ronald Reagan the liberal didn’t review his thinking and revise for the obvious. He dug in even deeper. Even his former VP Bush didn’t run with the ball. So the answer is obvious. We must continue to realize that the liberal mindset is as solid as concrete so we have no other choice but to continually outvote them while simultaneously making life miserable for the RINO as we purge them and take the Republican Party and develop it into a conservative force for good by cultivating the next generation of voters.
Why should that liberal have changed? Reagan backed away from defunding the Left. And during the Reagan years the Defund The Left bumper stickers that began appearing during the Carter years simply faded away.
So who was the most “successful” during the Reagan years? Reagan or the Left?
You’re just a radical rational.
Key understanding: It’s about doing what’s “right,” not doing what works.
The leftist definition of success is that there’s a system in place to take care of the “most vulnerable members of society.” Doesn’t matter if the system is cranky, inefficient, expensive, a drain on the country’s resources, unfair to those whom it is not designed to benefit, and a perpetuator of poverty and hopelessness rather than a cure. At least we can brag that we have a system, that we live up to our principles, that we don’t compromise with greedy capitalists. People first! We can be proud even if we do break the bank.
It’s hard for us to get into that mindset, but it might be useful when arguing with leftists to remember that their criteria for success are completely different from ours. It’s not general prosperity – it’s taking care of poor people and minorities, PERIOD. Everybody else can go hang.
No, those are just excuses. The objective is power, pure and simple.
The left view themselves as “special” people, more enlightened, more moral, more “feeling”, and just more of everything “good” than anyone else can ever hope to be. By this “logic”, they believe that they are fit to rule, and no one else is, or can ever possibly be so.
As such, they believe that whatever they do is inherently good, and necessary, in order to obtain and maintain the power over everyone else that is their birthright. With which they will reward or punish as they perceive is deserved.
But in the end, it’s all about having power. And all about them. Their ambition, their contempt for others (yes, even the “underprivileged” they constantly hold up as justification)- and their abject hatred of anyone whom they perceive as failing to acknowledge their self-perceived “perfection”.
This is why “egalitarian” socialist states tend to end up as either Orwellian nightmares, genocidal prison states, or both.
As Adam Smith said,
clear ether
eon
I think it’s just two sides of the same coin. They feel superior in intelligence and morality, therefore they need power to implement all their superior plans and schemes to “help” the disadvantaged. The more brilliant ideas they come up with (positive liberty, multiculturalism, social justice, equality of outcome), the more power they need.
It takes mighty strength to bend uncooperative reality into a shape it wasn’t meant to be. And they’ll never be happy with the results – that’s the pathological part. Small, incremental changes will never be good enough. Total transformation is what they want, and that takes power – infinite power, absolute control. They want to be God.
To add to what Bugs set: Leftism is basically narcissistic/borderline personality disorder, rendered in the form of politics. If you read up on the cluster B personality disorders, you’ll see what the roots of leftism are. Narcissists and borderlines view themselves as inherently superior, and other people simply as tools to be used as they desire. The only emotions these people are really capable of feeling are lust for power over others, shadenfraude at others’ misfortune, and in the case of borderlines, perpetual anger. They are not capable of love, empathy, or compassion; nor do they really feel ambition (other than in pursuit of self-aggrandizement), desire for learning, or pride in accomplishment. Lust and anger, that’s pretty much it.
Leftist philosophy is basically their desire to arange the world so that it affirms their worldview. They want people to be poor and dependent so they can feel superior. They want suppression of beliefs that compete with theirs, because they know in their heart of hearts that their beliefs will not hold up to rational examination. They must arrange their entire lives so that their views are never challenged, because they fear that questioning will destroy them (and in many cases, they’re right). Cluster B’s are often highly skilled at mimicking and manipulating the emotions of others, because they have to be in order to survive; if they didn’t, they would quickly be exposed as the frauds that they are.
So yes, there is no point in trying to reason or debate with a leftist. Their views are, in their own minds, unchallengable by either word or deed. They respect no limits on their own behavior, in their minds, law and morality are mrerely tools they used to control others. To borrow an oft-used phrase, leftists have no God but themselves. Literally. Their entire lives revolve around constant affirmation of their self-perceived superiority.
“Cognitive dissonance was defined by Leon Festinger, the coiner of the phrase, as the discomfort caused by holding irreconcilable beliefs,……”
And the relief from this discomfort is “willful ignorance” which is at the bedrock of Progressivism. If you could bottle Willful Ignorance it would be the hottest selling product ever invented. And, for its purveyors, the real beauty is that for liberals it is addictive! And when they are “on it”, which is constantly, truth will never break through its barrier of resistance. They’re totally immunized! Wow, if only there was a way to get the stuff into a bottle!
the coiner of the phrase, coined a good one, but his definition of it is all wrong.
Cognitive dissonance is the very opposite of holding two opposing opinions at once.
It is holding one opinion, period, despite all facts that support the opposite opinion.
Holding two opinions at once is confronting paradox, which cognition often, but not always boils down to.
It’s often discomfiting, but on ultimate unanswerable issues it is as close to wisdom as one can get.
Obama is not that kind of a question. A creep is a creep is a creep.
Agreed. It is an absolute fact that sometimes there is no other choice than to hold contradictory beliefs. It is also possible to believe one thing in one situation and something completely different in another. Human survival often depends on our ability to believe one thing but, when circumstances warrant, do another.
Most of us consider killing other people to be wrong. But when threatened, we can and do kill other people. During a war, we usually continue to think of ourselves as “the good guys.” When the war is over, we go back to believing that killing other people is wrong. Does that makes us hypocrites? No. If you take away that kind of mental flexibility, you end up with nothing but sheep and wolves, Quakers and serial killers. Not very nice people to live with.
from the start political correctness (pc) has always been about turning away from the truth. i once said to a friend, ‘that’s not true’, to which she replied ‘but it is p.c.’ p.c. was just a way of shaming people away from the truth, and foisting an untruthful agenda upon us all.
imho, the whole thing about not telling the truth became chic with the inception of feminism in the early ’70′s. remember ‘legalized abortion will make it safer for women, and eventually rare’? how about ‘tax money will never be used for abortions’? ‘late term abortions will never happen’? ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’? and dozens more cliche’s that were the beginning of it all. placating one group or another for political backing of same soon became s.o.p. for all of our society. in no time at all the truth became p.c. dependent. if you want to know a truth, you are now a racist, or a bigot, or a hater. hate speech and hatred of traditional groups (white men for instance) became so prevalent as to be invisible, except to those being dumped upon daily. even when this abnormality is pointed out (ex: commercials vilifying men) in some very obvious way, those fully vested in the new ways refused to see it. then come the excuses, and we have all heard them. its not his/her fault because bla bla bla.
the law has eagerly followed suit, unfortunately. equality? what group or person is equal to another? let me check with the (p.c.) judge. the precepts of law such as truth, equality and fairness became variables, case dependent, if you will. divorce court became a rubber stamp to bring in more business, which led to more divorce. want a fair trial? how much money you got?
we have now gotten to a point where the absolute truth on any given topic is off limits. we now have his truth or her truth. the things we have always needed (i.e. constitution, laws, etc.) are things to be overcome, avoided even. now that the whole thing (society) looks to be about to jump the tracks, people ask can we fix it? can we go back to better more honest times? the obvious answer is yes, but good cannot be born of evil. lie enough and the truth will someday catch up? lie enough and it will eventually become the truth? yeah, that’s it.
nice comment. I agree totally. Tell a lie enough times and it will be true.
Daveinga, great comment. I don’t think Socialist leaders believe what they tell the useful idiots. It’s not so much cognitive dissonance as it is an insidious propaganda war against capitalism and traditional Western Culture. Theirs is a political cold war of seductive lies strategically spread throughout the cultural institutions they use to undermine the society they are determined to destroy/displace. They’re very clear on their goal of totalitarian control, but in order to reach it they must conceal their evil intent within soothing humanitarian promises. Widespread cognitive dissonance among the useful idiot believers in the smarm of “hope and change” political correctness is an indication of the success of their
Machiavellian methods.
Truth for a Leftwinger is not what we traditionally call and define truth.
There are 2 schools operating…truth is personal/individual/group/culturally subjective….so their is no absolute truth. This is post modernist claptrap.
And then there is what is referred to as “revolutionary truth”. Truth defined as whatever is useful to promote revolution/leftist change.
Hope that helps.
The Left isnt interested in the truth or facts, merely advancing their agenda, kind of like the Islamists/Muslims.
There is this strand of thinking in conservative circles that rails at the stupidity of marxist, progressives, liberals, et al. Why oh why can’t they see what is plainly obvious to anybody who cares to look. i.e., you can’t improve lifestyles by destroying the most dynamic and creative people; you can’t lift people out of squalor by giving them stuff for nothing; and on and on.
But this is really a flaw in the thinking of conservatives, because they fail to understand the people they rail against.
Progressives simply don’t give a rat’s ass about the greater good. What they care about is THEIR PERSONAL GOOD. Point two, they don’t have the slightest ability to look beyond the present moment. Long term consequences are meaningless to stupid people.
Or in other words…they are criminals, not political theorists. They must be defeated, because hard-core criminals can’t be persuaded about anything.
“…you can’t improve lifestyles by destroying the most dynamic and creative people…”
I understand what you are saying and I agree to a point and it is about taxing the wealthy which is what I believe you are stating here.
This is where I get off our train. I think we should be taxing the hell out of the “dynamic and creative” people because they are the left. The left owns all the big monied CEOs, Wall Street, MSM, Hollyweird, unions, lawyers, charities/foundations/Soros and professional sports.
Perhaps we can make an exception for business owners with < 100 employees and maybe sweeten the pot by reducing the corporate tax, but I say we tax the rich. Everybody's first instinct is to say the CEOs will close up their businesses but that is yet to br proven. Did they close shop in the 30s, or under Clinton? And really how many of the upper 10% are employers? How many people does Matt Dumbon employ?
The left exists only because they get unfettered amounts of money. Tax the source of the money and the left goes away.
I’m all for taxing marxists. It’s a great idea!!
But I dispute your contention that the most dynamic and creative people are all liberals. You are basing that on a relative handful of high profile nutjobs.
What you would likely find if you were able to honestly survey the 1 or 2% of people who continually advance the ball 99.9% of the way to the goal line is that their politics would be a good fit to the politics of the general population.
Another factor in play on this topic, of course, is that the media influences the public expressions of politics for ALL of the high profile innovators. For example, I would bet that there are a helluva lot more conservatives in Hollywood than it appears. It just is very very difficult for them to speak out because they will be blacklisted. (and btw, “hollywood” creativity is nice, but hardly what humanity really needs. The guy who invented yellow stickies is more important than a thousand hollywood types. And that guy was trumped by the guy who invented DDT. Oh wait.)
Have you ever noticed how so many of the “dynamic and creative” people in your list make their living off money from people of low intelligence and low self control. That’s the core of the racket. Give money to people who lack the wherewithal to earn it in a free market and they then give it to the “dynamic and creative” by buying tickets to their shows, the grotesquely overpriced products they endorse, the ridiculous “educations” they offer (etc.) or maybe just electing them to office.
How many engineers, accountants or Doctors own a pair of “Air Jordans” or whatever else the latest fad may be.
blotto, I think it’s just a matter of terms. You’re using the terms “creative” and “dynamic” as the Left defines them, and using those definitions, I’m totally with you. It’s just that those words don’t mean what the Left claims they mean; most of the people they apply the words to are ordinary apparatachiks and political hacks. If we can just figure out how to write a law that will tax the crap out of people who have made all their money from political connections, I’ll go all out to support that bill.
“When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”
–H L Mencken
+1
From time to time the people of this country make mistakes in their choice of president. But they have never doubled down on their original mistake and cast their vote again for the same demonstrably failed president. As regards those who believe that O has been a good president the issue of cognitive dissonance is completely irrelevant.
Scorn and ridicule is about the only effective methods of communicating with habitual beggars.
These people are on a stolen ox cart to Disneyland. They’ve not any money nor sustenance and will have to butcher the ox for food very soon. And their lack of skills and planning will have them at each others throats soon thereafter.
Anyone who encounters them from outside the clan will be begged and pleaded with for handouts, and summarily mugged.
There’s a technical term for creatures like this: PARASITE
One concrete proposal for action is active discrimination against Leftists in institutions. This was done and is being done to Conservatives.
Active promotion and hiring of employees for all positions with Conservative values and principles, political positions.
Put conservatives in positions of power to influence organizational policy.
People will figure out very quickly that if you hold Leftwing opinons, you have to keep them to yourself and keep your head down, lest it negatively impact your economic and professional advancement.
The culture of the organization will change to enforce and reinforce conservative American values and principles, cultural norms, morality, etc.
This MUST be done.
Affirmative Action MUST be ended, as this is a legal prescription for the opposite. Minorities and women are more often than not, supporters of the Left, smashing White European social norms and Christian norms. Affirmative action is legal support for marching through the institutions by the Left and in an accelerated manner into positions of power.
IT MUST BE A PRIMARY TARGET FOR TERMINATIOIN.
There blotto, one boots on the ground, where the rubber meets the road, plan of action. This is only one facet, of what no doubt needs to be a many pronged approach, but I think it is one that will pay big dividends.
Okay, so who is going to make the first step? Mitt? I doubt it? The GOP? No way! And risk the scorn and abuse by the MSM. Who then if not us?
I think too many of us-conservatives- still believe in our party to do what is right. I do not.
Until shown otherwise, I am firmly convinced that a second civil war must be joined in order to save America. Yeah, I know, I can hear the gasps of horror…the knashing of teeth. “Why you idiot you just gave the left more ammo.” “Why you dimwit how could you think of such a thing?”
“Put conservatives in positions of power to influence organizational policy.”
Mitch Daniels has been selected as the new president of Purdue University and the libs are furious. The teachers union hates his guts which is a good omen. Send your kids to Purdue. It’s a damn good public university. I’d hire an engineer or science major from Purdue long before anybody the Ivy League would send me.
Good news, but it is not enough. The faculty hiring committee which recommends hires is staffed with Women’s, African American, Middle Eastern, and so on and so forth Studies department leftwing radicals.
You cant just elect Romney or put Daniels in charge, you have to get rid of the bureacracy and staff through attrition and replace them with conservatives. This has to be a conscious effort…..just as it was with the Left who entered the institutions and took them over….now blocking access to them to conservatives.
Conservatives must sneak in and subvert the system….just as the Commies did.
That isnt to say that Daniels and Romney cant help move that direction with their power and influence in the institutions. But there also has to be a ready pool of qualified candidates with conservative credentials that are in it for the long haul….with a clear vision of what they are about to march back through the institutions.
Elegant as usual, David.
However, in order to have cognitive dissonance, one needs to have cognition. I’m not quite sure that the comrades in arms on the left “know”…as much as they simply “believe”.
Being wholly untethered from fact-based reality puts most of the followers, adherents, lemmings in a cult..”zen zone”, a consciousness of the lowest state…in fact, reaching the lowest level of consciousness is how the cult controls its minions and lackeys. Geeky hippie hypocrisy without batting an eye is Nerdvana.
Achieving blatant buffoonery, bleating out ridiculously impossible fractured syllogisms that make no sense, but perfect nonsense…with mind-numbing regularity (What IS the meaning of “is”?)…is a perfect mental state. One can at once be utterly intolerant and be a scold to others about tolerance. One can be so closed-minded as to be hermetically sealed off from a different point of view and castigate others as not being “nuanced” enough. Or that one’s problem as a Nerdvana leftist …the sole and only blemish…is simply one of not explaining leftist positions often enough or with enough clarity for the poor non-leftists to absorb.
One has achieved bliss when one becomes a leftist in Nerdvana. Perfect ignorance/perfect bliss.
Incapable of cognitive dissonance, incapable of cognitive anything. It’s reflexive and rote. Unlayered thought is never in dissonance. It simply “is”, whatever that means.
It’s true, absent a cognitive, it’s hard to have a dissonance.
Like the knee jerk response, when the nerve impulse travels only to the spinal cord and then directly back to the knee, never getting near the brain for processing.
A good metaphor for Leftism.
Or that one’s problem as a Nerdvana leftist …the sole and only blemish…is simply one of not explaining leftist positions often enough or with enough clarity for the poor non-leftists to absorb.
Barack Obama trotting out one of his favorite excuses, used almost as often as blaming his predecessor or anything else handy…
“We just haven’t spent enough time explaining and articulating our (brilliant) positions to our(stupid) opponents.”
(We’re too damn busy with the important business of government to take time for the troglodytes.)
Barbara Tuchman reports a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” …Tuchman understands such self-defeating absurdity as a function of human governance in general and gives four reasons that serve to explain “the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests”: tyranny, excessive ambition, incompetence or decadence, and folly or perversity.
In the case of the USA and its current leadership, arrogance and dogmatism should be figured in.
cognitive disengagement from reality…Nevertheless, “the inevitable cognitive discomfort two-staters must experience when confronted with the stark contrast between their deeply held beliefs and the cold facts of reality” does not impinge on their ability to wreak ever more havoc as they pursue a discredited and calamitous line of action.
If the truth of any situation is out of step with the applicable (lockstep) leftist narrative, it is the facts that are wrong.
…counter-productive policies that inevitably trump the welfare and advantage our political leaders ostensibly seek.
Keyword, ostensibly
The weakening of constitutionalism and capitalism is exactly what our current crop of leaders wants. Chaos, confusion, the weakening of a population’s self- confidence (in a word, demoralization) is the point, the necessary groundwork for widening government control over individual lives.
…an equally shocking instance of cognitive blindness…“If more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.” In effect, it becomes “less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief.”
willful, intentional cognitive blindness.
cognitive blindness on the part of duped voters, yes, who want to believe, but not on obama’s part.
obama is fully aware of all, ALL the damage he’s doing. it is intentional.
the failure of david solway and others to confront this reality is cognitive dissonance and blindness.
is their cognitive dissonance and blindness also willful and intentional?
that is a question david solway, and others, ought seriously to ponder.
but Solway, and others, will never ponder that question, ever. It’s beneath them, you see.
By the laws of human nature, cognitive dissonance is supposed to alert the perceiver that something’s amiss, and to respond by checking into what’s real and what’s not. But instead, after decades of deconstructionist postmodernism, nonsense from bored professors and sold by craven news entertainers, things not making sense is now ok. And why not, the condition lets a person do his own thing, enjoy the pleasures of correctitude and being totally intellectually lazy, pious, and even obtrusive.
Thus tens of millions will vote to reelect Prez Barack Hussein, regardless of the fiscal damage and tramplings of the rule of law he’s wrought. Forget his fake birth certificate, that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that a population doesn’t blink when it sees, to take one small example, the equating of opposition to homosexual marriage to hate speech. There are dozens of examples of recently unacceptable things that are now New Normals.
The limitless attraction of free money is the lubricant that makes all this work. Thanks a lot, Karl.
cognitive blindness
You’d mentioned the entire concept of “Climate Change.” Now there is such a wonderful example.
Consider the US. We spend amounts of money larger than many other nation’s entire GDP, on such things as pet food, entertainment, eating out, etc. Each and every one of these things also bears it’s own carbon footprint, as they all must be manufactured, transported, etc.
And yet, not one word about perhaps we should stop pissing so much money away on such frivolous things.
But no…the “guilty party” is always big business and the oil/coal companies. People have decided to be willfully stupid about the entire issue. “The climate, the climate,” they wail, but man, they still have to do their $100 dinner out, their “gourmet” pet treats, what have you, without ever considering that they are a part of the problem themselves.
Reminds me of my idiot Harvard Law grad. neighbor. She’ll lecture you about such things as second hand smoke – and then get into her car and be back in ten muinutes, a trip she could have walked instead. Yet she is utterly blind to the fact that she just polluted the air to an extent that would take 10,000 smokers to create. But no, she just doesn’t “see” it.
Liberalism continues to survive because it has yet to kill its conservative/capitalist host. I think it would be interesting to split the country in half; one side a constitutional conservative republic and the other governed under liberal ideas.
Without its conservative/capitalist host the Leftist nation would quickly descend into South Korea style despotism. Businesses would flee, they wouldn’t have any energy, and people would be at each others throats fighting for resources.
I for one would enjoy the show.
Without hard working, middle class conservatives to foot the bill, liberalism is unsustainable.
North Korea style despotism.
Without hard working, middle class conservatives to foot the bill, liberalism is unsustainable.
It’s what the Iron Lady said 30 yrs ago: Sooner or later, socialists run out of other people’s money.
Unless we draw up a divorce settlement the spendthrift spouse will bankrupt both parties; but we, the host organism, will have to craft it and insist on it, before “compassion” consumes us as well as them. Have you noticed how often, when reality stubbornly refuses to reinforce belief, the result is “unexpected”?
“His [Obama's] effort to impose a European-style dirigiste model of governance along with a state-dominated economic apparatus upon a historically free-market republican nation is predicated on both willful ignorance and the conviction of personal infallibility.”
Likewise, to demonize profit per se, from which Obama’s “Socialist” gov’t must obtain its revenue and its own standard of living, and repress its very existence and growth instead of facilitating its growth – not to mention the like matter of the maintenance and creation of profit [and wealth] upon which the maintenance and increasing standard of living of the State’s citizens depends – is based on Obama’s notion of his own personal infallibility.
But I therefore contend that to accuse Obama of “willful ignorance” vastly overestimates his intelligence. And, after all, just how smart is someone whose life goal appears to be to become adulated by idiots? Oh, and to have the most ‘elite’ social gatherings?
for power and adulation may be bad, yes, but it’s not stupid, like it or not.
As Ayn Rand related in Atlas Shrugged, the looters believe that the capitalists are so strong that no matter how much they take and how much they punish, the economy will be able to “produce”.
I.e., that the goods and services they require will always somehow magically appear, albeit perhaps at slightly reduced levels (“rationalization”) which will allow them to ration the output to reward supporters, punish opponents, and of course continue to enrich themselves. (“Austerity”, as in the version practiced by Clement Attlee’s post-WW2 Labour government in the UK.)
Where it all falls down, of course, is the old farmer’s saying, “You can’t get eggs without chicken feed”. Sooner or later, the destructive effects of oppressive regulation, confiscatory taxation, bloated government, and capricious reward and punishment based on “progressive” dogmas reaches a point where everything goes down.
That’s when the “enlightened ones” generally reach for a gun, and start first threatening, and then “making examples of”, the producers they have up to then been vilifying while constantly demanding “more” from. “Produce or else!”
What you get in the end is Zimbabwe. By which point it’s too late.
clear ether
eon
“Produce or else!”
I’ve already detected a “create jobs or else” attitude on the part of Barack Obama.
(Hey, we’ve thrown billions at “the economy”, what’s wrong with you people?)
He probably thinks he can make that happen with one of his frequent “single man rule” Executive Orders.
Uh oh.
I believe someone would only need to watch, what I consider horror/comedy film, “Idocracy” by Mike Judge, to see a very real and disturbing possibility of where our great country could be headed. Now I don’t believe that it’s destined to happen, because I like to try and remain positive and hopeful to the best of my ability. And I won’t showcase examples here of the film because I don’t want to spoil plot points for anyone who hasn’t seem it. But if you haven’t seen it, and not a lot of people had seen it until it was released on video, then I highly suggest you give it watch.
It’s rated PG-13, so it doesn’t contain too much explicit content. But please, if you haven’t watched it, do so. I’m not plugging the movie because that’s silly, I have no reason to do so. I simply would love to see what people think after watching it. To me like I said, I actually consider it horror film even though it’s labeled as a comedy. And this is easily do to the fact that I view it as a striking commentary on how our country could easily become, if we don’t stop trying to destroy how great it is! I really want to give examples of what I mean, but I despise it when people give away the plot. Not that it’s horribly deep here, but knowing the readers and authors here, well you owe it to yourself to watch it if you haven’t, it will reinforce your strength towards fighting off the liberal left and all those that would dumb down our country and morally turn it into the cesspool dystopia that is shown in the movie.
The director Mike Judge is the same guy who created Beavis and Butthead, but he also created King of The Hill. And usually, when it wasn’t glorifying disgusting things like cross dressers, which that wasn’t the norm, it was a very what I considered to be, conservative right leaning cartoon. Which is quite rare with so many American hating shows like Family Guy/American Dad (really anything Seth MacFarlane does is putrid, American hating, lunatic liberal, good morals destroying, God hating and bashing, homosexual agenda promoting, relativists, pathetic, garbage. And that easily sums up Seth and anything he touches to a tee. In fact I’m surprised this website doesn’t do a running column on how disgusting MacFarlane and his writers are, and their massive hypocrisy and unquenchable hate for our great country. Though if I were to broach the subject it would easily consume an entire website and not merely a column or article. Its funny too because I used to actually enjoy his work, but then he started using it as a virulent disgusting lunatic left pulpit, to help destroy America and further his Nazi agenda.
Anybody ready yet to amicably divide up the country? I’ll keep asking. Just let me know when you’ve had enough.
“What, is you talking about yourself?” – Ali G
The article may make a valid observation which could be digested by either side of politics in America (properly ad-libbed, of course), but what we have in this country is an impasse. Cognitive dissonance always belongs to the other side. And even if one side is truly right, and one side truly wrong, so long as an impasse exists it means we must go to the mattresses.
The progressive emphasis began a long, long time ago. Be it unuseable land declared wilderness, environmental levels of radiation proclaimed cancer-causing, trace metal constituents hailed as carcinogenic and now capitalism declared evil. Wish I knew how this show ended. Guess time will tell.
I would so so happily settle for just not funding the left with huge dollops of taxpayer money. Public television, public radio, urban community activist organizations, etc. have every right to exist, but they should all have to find their own sources of funding, and not get tax-payer money. Perhaps George Soros would enjoy coming up with more millions to keep leftwing organizations afloat.
Oh, and state per-pupil education funds should “follow the student” with open enrollment in K-12 public schools everywhere. School choice would go along way toward weakening the stranglehold that the left now has on public education. Truly special-needs students can be helped through separate systems on case-by-case bases.
My own personal pipedream would be to take every K-12 public school, privatize it, and give all staff (including administrative, office and janitorial, etc. as well as teachers and aids) stock in the new, privatized entity. Initial stock distribution would be based on a scale composed of position and seniority. Other significant factors might be included as well.
The privatized schools could specialize in all kinds of approaches to education, depending initially upon what the stockholding staff chooses to offer. Then, if parents want an Afro-Centric, or a Classical, Christian, Jewish, Islamic or an arts, music, or science/math, or sports emphasis, leftwing, rightwing, etc. in their choice of school for their kids, fine. What types of education most parents want for their kids would become very clear quickly, IMO, and some schools would succeed, some would fail. And I would allow schools to hire teachers based entirely upon their own criteria (subject to required criminal background checks) rather than on teacher certification.
If something like this could be implemented, the improvement in education quality would be huge, and I think would come surprisingly fast, too. Oh, and eliminate Federal controls, funding and oversight of education, as well, obviously.
Issues such as building safety would still be regulated by the states. Sorry if this has been off-topic. Couldn’t help myself. Wouldn’t the results be both fascinating and enlightening as well as higher quality, overall?
+1 on defunding the Left and school choice.
Likewise Women’s, Gay & Lesbian, African American, Middle Eastern, Native American Chicano Studies departments. Demonizing Western Civlizaiton (aka Euro-Christendom) and planning political action against it, should not be funded by taxpayers (who are mostly Euro-Christian). Haters gonna hate, but let them do it on their own dime.
The greatest shellacking ever administered to the party in power by the people, at the federal, state and local level, took place at the polls in November 2010. So don’t tell me Commiebama and his minions continue down the collectivist path because they believe the people approve. They’re ramming their agenda down our throats and reveling in ramming it down our throats. That’s half the fun to the malevolent thugs. This is all about deliberately inflicting pain and on who? on the decent.
Yes, especially the part about the reveling.
The statists are about control, or as George Will put it:
“Really modern up-to-date liberals don’t care what people do as long as it is compulsory.”
They hate freedom, ownership of private property and the citizen’s right to defend himself against the government.
The analysis omits a key ingredient that sustains the dogged maintenance of a disastrous course – the belief that failures are due to opposition by others, not the wrongness of the ideas. Thus Stalin blamed the failure of collectivization on “wreckers”, and every liberal believes that the only thing thwarting their dreams is the obstinacy of conservatives.
At the base of this belief is a belief in some version of the malleability of man and society. With today’s “modern” liberal this rarely takes the form of the strict “Blank Slate”, but if you probe a bit, you will find a version of that kind of belief is at the core.
You will also find it in many “conservatives”, who believe that it is just a matter of strict social values to get everyone to toe the line and be happy.
…predicated on both willful ignorance and the conviction of personal infallibility…
Well, y’know, the two go together. They have to. Leftism is a philosophy of self-elected moral superiority. Lazy but envious folks need to believe they are better and more deserving than the hard working middle class, so they create (or buy into) a philosophy that assigns them higher status. Of course, since their philosophy doesn’t work, it can’t be based on achievement and can’t be subjected to any real-world tests. So cultivating willful ignorance is a ecesity, as is believing in their own superiority. Without either of those two elements, Leftists couldn’t make any claim on status, wealth or power. They’d have to just earn it, but their too lazy or unskilled to do that.
Cigarettes stink, and if you smoke, so do you. :: ))
I didn’t read past the first paragraph, but PLEASE… did it ever occur to you that the proprietors of the coffee shop you patronize, are PRIVATE BUSINESS and are completely allowed to maintain a perimeter around their business where people can’t indulge in that FILTHY, DISGUSTING habit, foisted upon the world by ENGLISH traders in the 17th century, in spite of all the pollution in the street. Are you suggesting that because automobiles on the street emit toxic gasses, that PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS have no right to improve conditions in their establishments? Why do you patronize them then, just to slam their smoking policy? How about their coffee? Why don’t you look for a smoky, dirty, joint where you can get a cup of dishwater coffee, slam your 9mm on the counter, light up an unfiltered Camel, and thank [whoever] that you’re FREE.
“and, almost as if by intention, poorly educated.”
Almost had this right, there is a ‘definite’ plan afoot. Schools no longer offer traditional 3 R’s and have been completely usurped by social engineering programs. Pretty easy to control a population if the state cranks out year after year of kids who graduate barely literate. Pretty easy to circumvent Constitutional boundaries if an ever expanding group of people have no understanding of both the words and the intent of separation of powers.
The left has totally infused every level of education in both America and Canada, the mainstream media colludes by presenting misinformation campaigns protected by a bulwark of lies and governments pull the strings of both.
There is war going on, culturally and intellectually and the collateral damage are our children who, when faced with this cognitive dissonance, are doing what they have been trained and moulded to do and that is to drown out the noise by turning up Lady Ga Ga.
Fortunately all dissonance can be drowned out with harmony and that ability lies within all of us.
If you watch television (or YouTube) watch Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking”; you’ll realize why this race, which shouldn’t be close, is. Or run your own test:
1. What are the three branches of the federal government?
2. Which branch has veto power?
3. Which branch is unelected?
4. Who were the Axis powers during World War Two?
5. In which decade was the first atomic bomb detonated?
You’ll think of others. Don’t let the results depress you.
I never understand this desire to emulate European economy. Why would the reigning economic champ (and champ for almost 100 years)want to start copying the also-rans? That would be like a boxing world champ’s manager telling him he needs to copy the style of the opponents he’s already knocked out. Cognitive dissonance is right. Also known as reality disconnect.
And now a few choice nuggets about cognitive dissonance from ole’ grandpap’s book of common sense:
There is a light at the end of the tunnel. For some, it will be the headlamp of an oncoming train. For others, it will be the freedom that only enlightenment can bring.
There are a bunch of folks out there who can’t see the forest through the trees. That’s why they keep running into them.
Dogmatic individuals tend to suffer under the myopia of their convictions.
Moral Relativism: changing the world, one gullible mind at a time.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity destroyer.
This problem was most eloquently addressed by Solzhenitsyn in his essay cited below. “Cognitive dissonance ” is a fancy term for living a lie. Live not the Lie.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/livenotbylies.html
I agree with **BATB**. I feel like this has been something that I have always wanted to share with the world and it is really nice to hear it from someone else and to know people feel the same way.