by Chris McGinty
For all of my flaws, I have at least one virtue. I believe in truth most of the time. I get that there are times that the truth has to stay buried, but those times are not very often. Those times are certainly not for the people who abuse their power. More importantly, it’s not for the common man to try to lie for those in power. They wouldn’t do it for you, because they don’t know who you are, and they aren’t your friends. And even if they did do it for you, it would only be at their benefit somehow.
I believe that we have gotten to a point in our society where cognitive dissonance is not just a trending term, but it’s also our reality. I hear people every day in interviews and on their shows ignore the most basic of logical fallacies coming out of their own mouth, because they feel the need to lie for those on their team. And I know that these people can recognize logical fallacies, because some of them complain about why a movie doesn’t work based on plot holes. If you can recognize a plot hole, then you can recognize when you’re lying about something because you’re on a misinformation team.
I might do a longer post on this, because it ended up going on the whole show, but recently David Pakman was reporting that Donald Trump was so out of touch about the Los Angeles fires that he thought Beverly Hills was burning. If you listen to what Trump said, he said Beverly Hills is virtually burning when he likely meant it could potentially burn. I know David Pakman is smart enough to figure out what Trump meant to say, but he sat there for an hour and played dumb. Cognitive dissonance.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump himself seems to believe that there these super qualified workers out there who have all this experience in jobs that they aren’t currently working. It’s unclear why they’re not employed in these industries at the moment; especially, the ones that have been short staffed for years. I know that Donald Trump is smart enough to know that new talent needs to be trained into industries consistently to avoid worker shortages, and that there are intelligent people who are passed over for various reasons who would be good candidates for the training. Yet, he plays dumb about why certain programs exist and how they work. Cognitive dissonance.
For my part, I will defend those who I don’t like and criticize those I do like. Cognitive dissonance is a way of lying to yourself, because you have a belief that is stronger than the facts that you can see before you. It’s a way of lying to yourself when you realize you’re wrong about something, but you think you can convince everyone around you, who know you’re wrong, that you aren’t.
The more I talk to people these days, the more I hear people on the YouTubes, the more I realize that there is an epidemic of cognitive dissonance out there. I hear David Pakman act like he’s super confused about what Trump is saying, and I think, “You’re smarter than that, you lying fuck.” But there are people out there who know in the back of their mind that there’s something wrong, but they hate Trump so much that they’ll turn the blind ear and repeat what he said. I hear people say that “disliking DEI isn’t about racism” and I wonder if they mean to say, “it isn’t exclusively about racism,” because that I could agree with; but let’s be clear, disliking DEI is about racism, or you wouldn’t care that the programs exist. I will stand by the argument all day that the programs should also help underserved white people and these programs aren’t designed to do so, but it’s still about racism.
My problem is that we’re being metaphorically gang raped in the ass by the people in power and then when they say, “I didn’t just ass rape you,” we say, “Of course you didn’t, sir. Can I have another?” And it’s not to our benefit. Yet, we continue to suggest that anything good we get out of life is because of, or in spite of, whoever is in power. And I know that we’re smart enough to know that they really don’t do all that much for us, but we give all the glory to our demagogues. Cognitive dissonance.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who really doesn’t understand why people would lie to themselves. Of all the people you could lie to, why lie to yourself?