leilla

Leilla and Stella's work-in-progress

Cognitive dissonance occurs when a long held assumption or existing
belief is thrown into question by new or contradictory information,
causing a person to re-interpret this evidence after it has been presented to
justify a falsely held notion. The theory refers to the phenomenon of
the mind's failure to assume its equilibrium after having to accept an
unwelcome intrusion of this kind into its 'comfortably held assumption
zone'. It results in a willful refusal to acknowledge that a shift in
perception has even occurred. When exposed to information inconsistent
with his/her beliefs, such a person remains fiercely loyal to the
original falsehood to prevent an increase in the magnitude of dissonance felt
in the face of a humiliating confrontation with inconvenient facts.

The phenomenon is most often associated with the resulting
psychological struggle of cult members trying to come to terms with the failure of
some cataclysmic event to occur, as predicted by the group's
charismatic leader. Less committed members are more likely to acknowledge that
they had been 'had', and move on from there, while more fervent believers
deal with the potential loss of face by reinterpreting past events to
accommodate a present psychological dilemma. If the end of the world
fails to materialize on schedule, it is thanks to the 'power of prayer',
or newly emerging interpretations of prophecy.

A similarly revealing example of this phenomenon is the insistence of some Bush apologists that Saddam Hussein really did have huge stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, which he planned to use against the US, or that the Iraqi leader was somehow behind the September 11th attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. Despite a mountain of evidence contradicting such claims, a significant minority still cling to the original falsehood of Iraq's 'imminent threat' rather than admit that they've been (neo)conned. Somehow it's better to be wrong - woefully and spectacularly wrong, even, than to admit to a mistake. Truth becomes anathema to the individual undergoing this kind of 'unreality check'. They react to it like a peanut allergy sufferer being force fed the contents of a freshly opened jar of 'Skippy'.

Mainstream 'liberals' are similarly thrown into psychic turmoil when their delusions are dashed up against the rocks in their heads. To this day, they blame John Kerry's stunningly predictable defeat entirely on rigged Diebold machines, conveniently forgetting that their pro-(ish) war, Christian-Lite candidate was little more than a feebly branded knock-off of Bush's imitation Marlboro Man. Dirty tricks and voting machine malfeasance aside, Democratic party loyalists refuse to acknowledge their complicity in sealing Bush's second term. Rather they continue to cry into their unfairly traded coffee and plaster their SUVs with Hillary '08 bumper stickers, defiantly hopeful that their doomed-to-fail tactics will yield a more favorable outcome the next time around.

Sufferers of this disorder will go to extraordinary lengths to
re-arrange reality so it doesn't contradict their original belief, often
employing wildly exaggerated claims to justify their reasons for
believing it in the first place. A hot-headed emotional stance becomes the
weapon of choice against coldly incriminating truth; a tactic which could
be best summed as thus: "If at first you don't succeed in convincing
others of the superiority of your blindly held convictions, overwhelm
them with a barrage of conveniently twisted facts ("Saddam gassed his own
people!"), causing naysayers to lose sight of their basic argument, as
they attempt to put them into context ("True, but who sold him the
weapons?"). This gives you the chance to remain resolutely focused on your
moral outrage ("Rape rooms, Mass Graves, "What about the Kurds?")
as your critics struggle to refute each factoid individually. So when faced with
the reality of an unarmed Saddam Hussein tens of thousands of deaths
later, a firm and stubborn believer will embellish his/her discredited
notions to make them appear more believable. "Saddam Hussein may not
have acquired WMD because he was too busy torturing every man, woman and
child in Iraq and digging mass graves".

When damning evidence proves resistant to 'the Swift Boat treatment',
these individuals will try to downplay its significance. Thus the Valerie
Plame affair is dismissed as 'Nadagate' and the 'Downing Street Memo'
is 'much ado about a little piece of paper'. They cling to a discredited
belief or notion like steerage rats scrambling for a foothold on a
tilted prow, dimly aware that their frantic, squealing resistance is
futile, but hoping against reason for vindication

When such an outcome fails to materialize, these irate individuals seek
to inflict punishment on those whom they believe are responsible for
their disoriented mental state. Predictably, 'Democrats', 'Leftists' and
'The Terrorists' are blamed for every one of Dear Leader's failures:
'Democrats' because they deliberate too long before rolling over and
taking it up the ass, 'leftists' because "they hate America" and 'The
Terrorists" because "they hate our freedoms", or the most chilling of
banalities, "The world changed after September 11th". For the person
experiencing this kind of psychic discomfiture, vapid and meaningless slogans
are comfort food.

Nonetheless, cognitive dissonance is by definition, an uncomfortable
psychological stance, and a political ideology that entails such
dissonance is not easily sustainable. Sooner or later, the ego that is
constantly rubbing up against the jagged edges of reality will question the
psychic benefit to be realized by clinging to an indefensible belief. In
order to maintain at least a semblance of equilibrium, the initial
belief must not only be profoundly seductive, but its attractiveness must be
constantly emphasized and embellished. Herein lies the key to G.W.
Bush's political genius.

Indeed, the President has managed to transform an obsessive insistence
on the rightness of one's own primitive convictions in the face of
inconvenient and contradictory facts from a liability (that of delusional
thinking) into a virtue, variously known as "resoluteness," "moral
clarity," "faith" and "inner strength." Within the framework of
Bush-thought, the truth and virtue of one's convictions is proved by the extent to
which those convictions defy empirical facts with the sort of exalted,
sublime indifference that is characteristic of a prophet. ("It's not my
job to nuance (sic)", says the 'Commanderin'Chimp', unintentionally
admitting that his throwback brain is stuck somewhere between the
dinosaurs and his club-carrying, knuckle dragging ancestors who roamed Eden's
lushly tended golf courses six thousand years ago.) America's mass
outbreak of Cognitive Dissonance might very well mark the beginning of
Mankind's de-evolutionary return to the sixty dollar a barrel primordial
swamp.

When Bush repeats the proposition that America had no choice but to
invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a "very bad man" who was
threatening the free world, or when Dick Cheney insists that the insurgency is in
its "final throes," they are not appealing to empirical reality to
verify their statements; rather, they are offering statements that are
self-evidently true by virtue of being said, the way they are said. Saddam
was a "very bad man" who was threatening the free world because that's
what very bad men do, and this is true because it is being pointed out
by a very good man, a man of resolute conviction -- the Sheriff of
Dodge or Carson City. The rightness of Bush's policies is confirmed not by
friendly facts, nor is it refuted by inconvenient facts; rather, it is
confirmed by the resoluteness with which Bush believes in and
articulates their rightness, and this resoluteness is enhanced rather than
damaged by merely empirical evidence of error or even dishonesty.

Thus is Bush able to exploit Americans' native idealism, their
reluctance to believe that their leaders might be a gang of marauding
Sociopathic criminals, like the Gambino crime family. American culture has
always embraced a strain of narcissism, which expresses itself in our
literature as naïve idealism (Whitman), or self-destructive obsession (Poe -
think "The Imp of the Perverse"), or as a hybrid of both in our
culture's highest achievements (Moby Dick). The original beliefs described
above (in Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's connections to al
Qaeda, etc.) gain their power by being aligned with Americans'
fundamental confidence in their supreme and exceptional virtue, exempt from
history or global opinion.

We note in concluding that the cognitive dissonance we have described
is perhaps symptomatic of a deeper disorder of the digital age, when
knowledge - one's relationship to the modern (skeptical) world - is coded
as an endless series of interchangeable 1s and 0s in the perfectly
weightless ether of cyberspace. In that space, the distinction between
relevant and irrelevant becomes itself irrelevant, such that the issues
affecting Americans' lives (e.g., the budget and trade deficits, support
for Israel, the number, location, cost and geopolitical consequences of
our offshore military bases) are considered taboo in public discourse,
and Brad Pitt's romantic meanderings are considered more newsworthy
than invading another country based on lies. Honesty itself is irrelevant
when nothing matters so little as truth and lie; Bush-speak populates a
world in which one's words are valued less for their truth-value than
for their capacity to engage in bullshit, the language of jokes and of
pure power politics.

We close with a remark from Adorno's Minima Moralia that anticipated
the cognitive dissonance that is characteristic post-modern Bush-speak:

"Things have come to pass where lying sounds like
truth, truth like lying...The confounding of truth
and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a
distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to
the simplest piece of knowledge...[marks] the
conversion of all questions of truth into questions
of power."