New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

Anxiety and stress in people trying to resolve inconsistent thoughts has been around since the dawn of time. In the throes of a global pandemic and economic uncertainty with confusing mixed signals coming from officials on high is sending the psychological problem soaring. Our world is now awash in what experts call “cognitive dissonance.”

It is distressing to report that I know people, I am related to people, who have spent much of their adult political lives raging against corrupt politicians and government. Yet they embrace the most corrupt politician to ever come along, Donald Trump, as some kind of savior for what they perceive is an external threat to a false vision of a white, Christian America.

Related: Trump Promotes Messiah Complex With Low IQ, Religious Voters

So they load their AK-47s and threaten to go after Black Lives Matter protesters, even if that might mean supporting a fascist dictator president king and civil war.

They demand that schools be reopened. But they vow to fight to the death to denounce any knowledge gained in schools or factual information in the press. Education, science and factual information are “the enemy of the people,” or at least the people like them.

They will say over and over that the coronavirus is a hoax created by Democrats to defeat Trump, then a minute later, say it was created by the Chinese. Can it possibly be both?

Stress, anxiety, don’t make me think about that.

It is “all a bunch of bullshit.”

But at least some do wear masks in public and are afraid to return to work. They would rather remain on federally and state subsidized unemployment than to pull themselves up by their own boot straps and go back to work.

They took the federal stimulus money provided by Democrats and Republicans in Congress rather than refusing it and sending it back, justifying this by thinking that since Trump’s name was on the check, it was a gift from the rich businessman who agrees with them that Mexicans and negroes are not real Americans. They got the check in the U.S. mail, but deny that the Postal Service is an agency of the federal government.

The list goes on, and on. The contradictions abound. Heads are exploding.

Only the non-union working man knows the truth. They will celebrate the working man on Labor Day, but fight to the death for the belief that unions are bad.

Anyone who dares to fact check Trump are to be derided, ignored, or better yet, killed.

They claim to be Christians, and support the birth of unwanted babies. Yet if given half the chance, they would shoot down their fellow Americans for a man who calls them “losers” and “suckers.”

Try telling them about that story, and they immediately defend Trump and repeat after their master: “He never said that. That’s fake news from the liberal media.”

Even Fox News confirmed it. Nevermind. Blow up the TV and turn on YouTube on the Android phone.

How can a tyrannical federal government be so bad, yet somehow this president is to be believed above any other sources of information, including even Fox News?

I know people, I am related to people, who have even stopped watching Fox News or listening to talk radio, because even there sometimes commentators call Trump out for obvious falsehoods. They have turned off all other channels of information, and now turn to Trump’s YouTube channel for their talking points among their shrinking circle of friends.

This is entirely consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. See below.

A Qanon conspiracy theory about a growing threat from Hollywood pedophiles and satan worshipers is their new reality. Never mind that Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump’s friend.

If you throw out a term like cognitive dissonance, that is dismissed as psychological gobbledegook from “pseudo intellectuals.”

The guy who barely managed to graduate from high school is the new, real intellectual, because while he has grease under his fingernails from working on a car engine, the thought that pops into his head (which came to him because he heard it on talk radio) is the by god truth. And there is nothing you can say to shake his conviction that he knows what’s real and everything on every legitimate news channel is the real “propaganda.”

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

The term is a noun from the social science field of psychology, and can be defined simply as “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.”

But as is often the case in scholarship, the dictionary definition is not enough.

This state of mind occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and is typically experienced as an increased heart rate, heightened blood pressure and stress when coming into contact with a contradictory thought.

Try this with someone you know to see what I mean.

As they say the schools must be reopened, try questioning them about it. If it’s so important for the kids to get back in school, why is the knowledge they gain in school so objectionable?

Watch their faces and body language. They stiffen up, their heart rate increases, their pupils dilate, and they react with anger.

What if going back to school might increase the spread of the coronavirus?

That’s just a hoax, they say, now wild-eyed with their skin turning red. In their and Trump’s reality, only six percent of those who died from COVID-19 actually died from COVID-19. It was the diabetes that killed them.

Right.

Never mind that they had been living just fine for many years being treated with insulin.

It was the COVID-19 that killed them. Period.

Before Trump, these folks would have been the first to mourn the death of a loved one in a nursing home and bow their heads and pray at the funeral. Now they are more than willing to insult and disrespect every mother, father, son or daughter who has lost loved ones to this horribly deadly virus.

You see the contradiction, right?

No wonder they are going crazy.

According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information. They try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their mental and even physical discomfort.

In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, published in 1957, incidentally the year I was born, Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world.

A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable and is motivated to reduce the troubling state of mind. They tend to make changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance or by avoiding circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the condition.

Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite thoughts that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve dissonance by blindly believing “whatever they wanted to believe.”

We hit the wall on this about the time Trump won the election of 2016, when it finally became quite obvious that so-called alternative facts or alt-facts became the norm.

We used to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Clearly that is no longer the case.

I learned in my first Philosophy class at the University of Alabama in the fall of 1981 that there are matters of fact, and there are matters of opinion. Facts are objectively obtained. Opinions are subjectively acquired.

This is not taught in Christian schools, like Liberty University, where oh yeah, the president and Jerry Falwell’s son Jr. was ousted when it became known that his wife had an affair with the pool boy, and he not only knew about it, but liked to watch.

That news was so disconcerting and so contradictory to everything they believe that the only response that would keep them from having their heads explode was to respond: “That can’t be true. He was a good Christian. That’s fake news from the liberal media that made it up to bring down a great leader.”

But wait. It was even reported on Fox News and talk radio.

Never mind. It still can’t be true.

Dog help us all every one. Will we ever get quantitive measures of truth back?

Or must this Biblical self-fulfilling prophesy of the end of the world really have to come true to prove to these people that Trump is wrong, and that this story about a sky god who will come back to save us from plagues and tribulations is nothing but a man-made myth?

If there is a such thing as a messiah named Jesus, he better return to the flesh on Earth soon. Otherwise we are all about to go straight to hell in the fires and floods of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.

Either we get enough people to vote in November to turn back this Trump tsunami tidal wave. Or life is not going to be worth living on this planet for much longer.