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Cognitive Dissonance
By Thinking Man | November 14, 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 Dissonance.
The term — rather vulgarly en vogue these days — is defined as “A psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling when a person begins to understand that something this person believes to be true is, in fact, not true.”
In this way, cognitive dissonance invariably leads to prevarication, rationalization, and equivocation galore. For who will readily do an about-face on a subject he’s spent most of his life denouncing?
Example: rather than accept the fact that human freedom and its economic corollary — free markets — are far better equipped to deal with environmental issues, including this ambiguous beast known as global warming, environmental activists will go to frightening lengths to keep their statist cause alive, because psychologically their entire self-concept is invested in the environmental premise. Metaphysically, environmentalism represents a whole worldview, albeit a hellish one. Thus, abandoning that premise is tantamount to abandoning self and world.
Convictions, however, that are based upon any kind of bigotry, zealotry, or unsubstantiated belief — i.e. faith — are very different from convictions hammered out on the anvil of reason.
In the words of one thinking man: “[True believers] insensibly twist facts to fit theories, instead of twisting theories to fit facts.”
The hallmark of a rational brain consists of one thing only, and that one thing has nothing to do with the meaningless “open-minded versus close-minded” platitude you’ve been bombarded with all your life. The purpose of that platitude is the attempt to illustrate that one should never form firm convictions.
The mark of a rational brain, rather, is a brain that’s always open to facts and data – and only to facts and data: a brain, in short, that comes to conclusions and forms convictions based upon evidence, a mind which, in the words of a wise American judge instructing a panel of jurors, “Listens with a disposition to be persuaded.”
In this sense, one Fox Mulder, with his famous poster, is the diametric opposite of the proper cognitive starting point. His poster tells us everything we need to know about his epistemology: namely, his desire to believe supersedes everything, including data.
For similar reasons, environmentalism not only can but must be rejected, at the very outset, not because of the falsehood of any of its specific claims, but rather because its starting point is definitionally statist. Environmentalism, therefore, requires the massive and continual abrogation of rights. Human freedom, however, is axiomatic.
It is axiomatic precisely because rights are inalienable, which among other things means that rights can never be lawfully infringed or revoked — not by governments, not by environmental bureaus, not by lobbyists, not by anyone.
Thus in the brain of the environmentalist, the mere suggestion of relinquishing the eco cause in favor of freedom produces a sense of so-called cognitive dissonance; for an entire worldview is at stake.
A deep and inseparable connection exists between reason and rights, and property, including money, is merely an extension of person. Indeed, the individual’s right to her own life and property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom and justice; and yet to achieve even a fraction of its stated goals, environmentalism must by definition trammel the individual’s right to life and property. Therefore, to the environmentalist, rights are not inalienable, and humans exist only by permission.
Whose permission?
Answering that completely exposes the fatal flaw in all forms of statism, including environmentalism.
In the end, cognitive dissonance can be largely avoided provided one thing: reason alone is the guide, and truth is the goal. As long as your epistemological foundation is to go where the evidence leads, to always twist theory to fit facts and not the other way around, you’ll forever be epistemologically safe.
(Read this brief account of a remarkable fellow who overcame his cognitive dissonance.)
Stumble it!
Topics: Climate change, Cognitive Dissonance, Environmental propaganda, Environmentalism, Eric Hoffer, Individual rights |