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Cognitive Dissonance & Cultural Breakdown
As humans, we tend to have overconfidence in what we actually believe and an overrated notion of the rationality of those beliefs. If pressed to describe how we arrive at our beliefs, we might enthusiastically relate a process of logic and level-headed reasoning.
But the truth is, the vast majority of our beliefs do not emerge from the noble halls of logic. Here’s an example: overwhelmingly, we sink our teeth into a particular ideology and its basket of political positions in lieu of patiently reasoning through singular issues in an individual manner — which would appear to be the more “intelligent” option.
The reason? The latter is hard to do, doesn’t necessarily feel natural to us, takes a lot of time, and most of all, tends to leave cognitive dissonance in its wake. Cognitive dissonance is a topic of relevance, I believe, in the sense that more and more people appear to show the signs of conflict between what their ideological loyalties teach that they should think and what they actually think. Merely the strength of “outrage culture” nowadays is one such sign that I’ll explain in a moment.
Cognitive dissonance is best described as the discomfort that arises when we realize our beliefs don’t line up or we otherwise find that our actions are incompatible with our beliefs. It’s a term long aquatinted with the…
