Today's Cognitive Dissonance Lacks the Dissonance

Time to reignite critical thinking

Readers will no doubt be familiar with the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance, which is a conflict in one’s mind as a result of trying to hold simultaneous contradictory beliefs or ideas. It is intended to explain one’s feeling of discomfort when this situation occurs. For example, I might feel uncomfortable or confused trying to understand how in math 2 + 2 = 4, but two raindrops added to two other raindrops will make one raindrop.

This concept is important because it signals to us that something is amiss in our understanding or processing or in the ideas themselves. It is like a warning sign that we should heed to avoid becoming victims of faulty reasoning.

However, today, it seems that many people have become comfortable with so many conflicting ideas at once that cognitive dissonance has lost its dissonance—and that is dangerous for all of us because our ability to make sense of the world requires discomfort to alert us to mental or cognitive problems (with which we can then wrestle) in the same way pain indicates physical problems to us.

Hopefully, if we can examine some of these conflicting ideas more closely, we can start to unravel them and to wrestle with their inherent conflicts so that we can think more clearly and consistently.

Democracy Is Freedom

We’ll begin with a biggie—the idea that freedom and democracy are somehow interconnected and even interdependent (or at least that freedom is reliant on democracy). For example, in a speech earlier this year, Joe Biden warned that in the upcoming election, “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.” This equating freedom and democracy is a common tactic and belief in today’s world, but it is also a contradictory one once we examine it further.

For one, what is democracy? We can discuss its etymology or the lofty ideals of history’s great democratic thinkers, but instead, let us focus on the everyday reality. As Doug Casey has eloquently stated, “Democracy is mob rule in a sportscoat.” It may look and sound good, but it’s still rule by math. It is the idea that if a large enough group of people decides something, you are forced to go along with it. Notice, too, that it is not even necessarily the largest group that forces others to follow their will: In recent national elections in the U.S., the largest group of voters has often been not Democrats or Republicans but non-voters, and they are still held to the decisions of a so-called representative of a voting group.

Quite simply, one cannot be free if he or she requires the permission of a certain portion of society to do something, especially if that something does not impinge on anyone else’s freedom. Is anyone today arguing that slaves in 1840 would have been free if only they had been able to hold elections and choose between two (or even three if things got really wild) masters every four years? Ridiculous, of course.

Moreover, if we learned anything from 2020 and the catastrophic responses to Covid, it is that even so-called freedoms can be curtailed quite promptly when the ruling class deems it necessary. Can you be free if freedom can be pulled out from under you like a rug in a Vaudeville act by the very people who supposedly represent democracy and freedom?

The dissonance should be growing stronger now.

What about referenda? If Jane votes to legalize marijuana, but John and Jorge vote not to, can we say that Jane is free? She was free to vote, but she certainly is not free to use the plant of her choice without legal consequences.

Let us also consider the machinations before we even get a chance to vote in the final election. First, there are debates for each major party, and the participants are selected by their results in certain national polls and by their numbers of donors (numbers that are arbitrary and sometimes disputed). These candidates are then winnowed down via primaries and caucuses to the final candidate who is chosen by the party’s leadership.

Did you get to vote on all of that? Then, once the candidate is in office, do you vote on all of his or her decisions as your “representative”? What if you morally disagree with the politician on an issue? Can you opt out?

If one cannot choose to refuse without the threat of violence, then one cannot be free.

Thus, equating democracy with freedom ignores the very real fact that democracy is often simply violence via voting rather than at the behest of a king or dictator.

Government Is for Your Protection

A second idea seemingly rife with cognitive dissonance is that government and the people therein somehow exist and work to protect us. As many others have pointed out, such an idea is no different than believing a local mafia or gang exists mainly to protect us—want your store to stay open? Pay us. Don’t like our service? Pay us more. Let us begin, though, by asking from what government protects us.

Many of us may answer that government protects us from those who wish to harm our persons or property or defraud us in some way. This notion is the one most often propagated in schools, so it is one that many of us believe to some degree throughout our lives. However, we need only a cursory analysis to see that not only does government not actually provide such a service but also it is often the most common and egregious perpetrator against us.

For one, police officers’ job is not protection but law enforcement. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that police officers have no constitutional duty to protect people. So, even if our local police officers are kind and caring, their primary duty is not to protect us. We can also see this fact exemplified in the resources expended to solve/prevent certain crimes and the success rates of solving others.

In 2022, the national clearance rate for violent crimes was only 36.7% while the clearance rate for property crimes was an even more abysmal 12.1%. In both small and large police departments, we see less of a focus on security and protection and more on selective law enforcement.

For example, in 2022, the police department in Buckingham Township, Pennsylvania—a semi-rural township in the eastern part of the state—reported 62 “Part I” crimes that included murder, rape, burglary, theft, and assault. Only 12 of those resulted in arrests, a rate of 19%. However, the department’s officers managed to make an astounding 2,648 traffic stops, or over seven per day, while issuing 460 citations.

In terms of resources, even in a large city like Baltimore with a rate of violent crime, especially murder, far above the national average, only 3% of the city’s police officers are assigned to homicide investigations. But even when officers do make arrests, only about 5% of those arrests are for violent crimes—the majority of the other arrests are for nonviolent crimes such as “drug abuse violations.”

So, the simple truth is that, in many areas of the country, government cannot or will not protect its citizens from violence. But the one thing it will do quite efficiently and effectively is commit violence of its own. You may be concerned about a thief’s breaking into your home and stealing your possessions, but you are guaranteed that the government will steal from your paycheck or your bank account if you fail to pay them the requisite tribute for the above services that they are not obligated to provide.

In fact, as Jim Bovard notes in his book Last Rites, government agents are more adept at theft than are their private counterparts: “Federal law enforcement agencies arbitrarily confiscate more property from Americans each year than all the burglars steal nationwide. The IRS pilfered more cash from private bank accounts because of alleged paperwork errors than the total looted by bank robbers nationwide.”

If anyone is out there protecting you, it is certainly the IRS.

Also, let us not forget the “protection” wrought by the federal government’s overseas adventures via our young men and women in the military and nearly $1 trillion in spending. As of 2023, we the people pay to build and maintain over 750 overseas military bases, without which we would surely be invaded and subjected to cruel and arbitrary theft and violence at home.

Likewise, did the military’s post-9/11 wars across the Middle East that killed over 400,000 civilians protect us here at home? On the contrary, it is widely acknowledged that such violent interventions tend to create more violence, not less, as General Stanley McChrystal pointed out in his famous “insurgent math” comment in which he noted civilian casualties, in particular, tend to exponentially increase the number of insurgents or combatants who join an opposing force.

Finally, let us not forget the U.S. politicians’ largesse towards Ukraine and Israel, certainly two locations that are paramount for our daily safety here at home. Can you even imagine what your life would be like if Ukraine did not have a democracy (ranked 127^th in freedom prior to the war)? Or how you could possibly go about your day if the Israeli government did not receive weapons and funding from the U.S. in order to attack a terror group they helped fund in order to prevent negotiations for a Palestinian state? Thankfully, for our protection and the protection of military contracts…I mean, democracy, our noble leaders continue to arm and fund these conflicts.

Of course, sarcasm, aside, such actions simply belie the claim that government protects us when, in fact, government and its agents perpetrate violence and theft each day and have no legal obligation to provide anything in return except platitudes and “requests” for more funding.

Conclusion

Cognitive dissonance is a crucial biological response that warns us to pay closer attention to something that seems amiss. Unfortunately, thanks to ubiquitous propaganda in government schools that is then reinforced by the corporate media and the relative comfort of our lives, many today have learned to ignore this warning. It is not until something resuscitates that long-dormant response that most people start to question the system and its underpinnings, and many of the catastrophes brought to us by governments over the past few years have served as those catalysts.

From Covid lockdowns, vaccine mandates, multi-front proxy wars, and monetary manipulation and price inflation to increasing government spending (no matter the president), gender debates, and politicians’ collusion with social media companies, there has been no shortage of catalysts to reignite the cognitive dissonance in all of us. If you bite into a piece of fruit and it tastes rotten, but your local representative tells you not to worry, maybe it’s time to trust your instincts and your own mind instead of those with a vested interest in dulling our senses and obfuscating the truth.