Eric Hoffer

Cognitive Dissonance

Friday, November 14th, 2008

In his book True Believer, the brilliant autodidact and intellectual workingman Eric Hoffer wrote the following:
“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”
The term cognitive dissonance, which presupposes faith above reason, was popularized (but not coined) by a social psychologist named Leon Festinger (1919-1989), in his seminal work on the subject A Theory of Cognitive [...]