Sunday, July 29, 2012

The Method in the Madness: Americans and Their Collective Cognitive Dissonance


In the well-known Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, the namesake protagonist tells Ophelia: “That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty." In doing so, Hamlet exposes an underlying philosophical truth about the contradictory nature of the human condition. This theoretical stance is deeply rooted in man’s psychological substrate, and is featured in literary, scientific, and cinematic themes. From the Shakespearean tragedies, to Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to Sigmund Freud’s vision of the ego and the id locked in a constant struggle for domination of an individual’s mind, to the conflicted nature of the Hulk, we are, for better or worse, seething with contradictory impulses, beliefs, and behaviors, resulting in a myriad of irrational decisions and behaviors.   

In 1957, The American social psychologist Leon Festinger shed some light on why we act in ways that contradict logic and drive us to not only make poor decisions, but also to stand by and justify these decisions. Festinger’s theory is called cognitive dissonance. Simply put, when people have a contradiction between their belief systems (and resulting behaviors) and information that refutes these beliefs, they experience an unpleasant tension. This tension creates a motivation to reduce the contradictory and unpleasant feelings. Either the individual must change their behavior, or modify their beliefs to create harmony between the two conflicting worlds. This theory explains precisely why Barrack Hussein Obama remains popular and why so many people are ready to vote him into office again, despite his atrocious record.

No matter how bad the economic crash was in 2007, no one, save Obama, his cronies, and a quasi-sycophantic press, really believes we are any better off now. Real unemployment is close to 16%. Foreclosures are still rampant. People are draining their retirement accounts in desperation to pay their daily bills. The Middle East is on fire, and the revolutions we supported in Libya and Egypt are bearing dubious fruit. And thanks to Mr. Obama’s rhetoric, we are more divided as a nation, along social, economic, political, and gender lines, than we have been since the Vietnam War. We have lost credibility in the world as we have spent ourselves into oblivion, laughably tracing the footsteps of our European cousins while expecting different results. We even have a group of Democratic senators and representatives willing to plunge our economy and our people into ruin (damn the poor who would be hurt the most, a few morsels of welfare largesse will suffice) in order to auger their belief in social justice via a tax hike on the supposedly heinous and villainous people who dare to make a seemingly arbitrary figure of $250,000.

And yet, day after day, I meet people who praise the President, laude his decisions, celebrate his policies, and support his reelection. In the black community, where unemployment is at a historic high, support remains steadfast. What is our president’s response? President Obama takes to the bully pulpit, offering support for a community grieving and writhing with anger over the death of Travon Martin, bolstered by our attorney general’s accusations that we lack the courage to engage in honest discussion about racism. Meanwhile, in Chicago, where Rahm Emanuel presides as equal opportunity destroyer and purveyor of corruption, somewhere between 30-50 young adults, mostly black men, die at the hands of other young black men every month. The silence from D.C. is deafening. 

Amid the increasing poor, Obama is perceived as the last bastion of empathy, rather than the causative agent of their woes, further miring them in the welfare state that has so rapaciously, yet systematically, destroyed and continues to destroy families in our inner cities. The President chides them to "take of your slippers and put on your marching shoes." But it's difficult to march when you can't pay your rent or feed and clothe your family. Meanwhile Obama has met only tow times with his economic team in the past six months. nothing shows commitment like inaction, at least in the Obama White House. 

Then, there's academia. Recent college graduates, their $30,000, often meaningless diplomas held aloft, are promised a slightly lower loan repayment and a health care system they will not be able to afford in the future, a debt that will burden them all of their adult life, and little prospect for attaining a decent job in the near future. Yet they press the flesh and beat the drum for their man, the champion of the oppressed and underserved, whose disdain for the cupidity inherent the free market knows no bounds, save for the universities, who gush money  for Obama's campaign coffers, and who pilfer these very students so their elite professors can teach comparative politics six hours a week whilst they engage in tax-payer funded “research” to unearth new evidence of the greatness of Che Guevara and other Marxist revolutionaries. It would not be shocking if Che himself votes for Obama in 2012, especially if he does not have show a legal form of ID, courtesy of Eric Holder’s Heroes who selectively enforce the Voters Rights Act as long as it tilts the tables in their favor. 

And among women, Obama is still the hero who protects reproductive rights while fostering the illusion of a “wage gap.” Ironically, the only real wage gap is the one that has resulted from women who are involuntarily unemployed and who now outnumber men in joblessness. And given the lack of career opportunities for women, they will need birth control, because they certainly cannot afford another mouth to feed, much less save for their child's inflated college education. 

He is also the guardian of our public school system, so corrupted by the apathy propagated by teacher's unions as they shovel unapproved campaign funds fleeced from union members to the Democratic party. The result? Hundreds of thousands of kids regularly fall through the cracks, cracks wide enough that our society as a whole will eventually fracture if left unaddressed. By almost every measure, America and her people are lessened as a result of President Obama’s stewardship; yet polls show almost a dead heat between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

The only logical explanation, the only credible reason, is mass cognitive dissonance. The vast majority of those who installed Obama in 2008 (including the liberal media) cannot come to grips with the consequences of their collective decisions; rather, they justify and hyper-rationalize their way out of their dissonant state. Hence, instead of holding the thin-skinned narcissist-in-chief responsible for his agenda and decisions, thereby admitting a sense of culpability, they resort to baser instincts. Opposition to Obama’s feckless and reckless agenda becomes colored by the emotionally charged language of racism, cloaked in the calculus of righteous self-indignation over perceived socio-economic justice, or obscured by empty, hypocritical accusations of capitalistic malfeasance or lack of transparency over taxes. So the most corrupt administration in the last sixty years, whose Fast and Furious scandal makes Watergate look like mere child’s play, whose political appointees and czars are steeped in corruption and ethics breeches, and whose senior -level security members seem unable to hold national secrets anymore than a newborn can control their bladder, escapes largely unscathed. Shakespeare once again portends this universal condition through the role of the Player King in his tragedy Hamlet:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

Shakespeare used this contrivance of a play in a play to provide commentary on our moral dilemma. And so now America’s fate is now in the hands of a populace that must reconcile our present condition and undeniable future with the ephemeral and duplicitous slogan of Hope and Change. It's time to step out of the play in the play and face the harsh light of truth.  It's time for an entirely new script, one in which our ends are our own. 


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