Cognitive Dissonance: Using doubt and discomfort to acknowledge reality

"We are all born ignorant, but it takes hard work to remain stupid."
- Nietzche

Cognitive Dissonance is a term in psychology that describes the feeling of conflicting tension experienced by a person when they hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

Since both beliefs or ideas cannot at the same time be true, a person will feel uncomfortable and start trying to figure out a way to reconcile the beliefs so they don't seem to be in conflict anymore or until the discomfort seems to be relieved.

Dissonance is more likely to happen if the major idea is about who we are or concerns a belief system or worldview that we embrace. Dissonance increases with the importance of the subject to us, how strongly the dissonant thoughts are in conflict, and our inability to rationalize and explain away the conflict given how we know the real world works.

The "ideas" or "cognitions" in question may include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one's behavior.

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors even if this justification is itself irrational, illogical, or embraces superstitious and/or 'magical thinking'.

Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people's ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony, or consonance.

A powerful cause of dissonance is when an idea conflicts with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as "I am a good person" or "I made the right choice." The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization, the tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one's choices.

Dissonance can also lead to confirmation bias, the rejection of disconfirming evidence, and other ego defense mechanisms like denial, intellectualization, altruism, introjection, and suppression.

ED NOTE: More on this subject later. . . it is important to spreading the Truth of 9/11