Perception 02: Cognitive Dissonance
"...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 following is an exercise in empathy that leads to open questions far greater than the focus of the exercise.
Imagine, for the duration of this article that you are someone who, since the beginning of Covid, was sceptical enough to have rejected the narrative and remained undosed, even though you were a lay person.
For the last three years, most of your suspicions and concerns about Covid have been shown to be true, with some remaining open and ongoing, and a few disproven. Same for the gene therapies. On balance, you’re right. Well done.
Now, add in a solid belief in Christianity with a respectable conservatism that is tolerant of different beliefs, broader vaccine hesitancy that goes as far as actual, generalised anti-vaccination views, and prior personal injury as a result of a non-Covid vaccination.
All of the above is a fully workable, fully credible position. “You” are not irrational. “Your beliefs”, when you express them, are cogent. Even the wider vaccine concerns are well informed on grounds of need, deeper efficacy proof, industry and legal understanding, ingredients e.g. adjuvant concerns, and so on. “You” are not a knee jerk anti-vaxer.
If anything, the last three years have proven and confirmed more of your beliefs than not.
What is Cognitive Dissonance?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes unpleasant feelings of unease or discomfort.
The inconsistency between what people believe and how they behave motivates them to engage in actions that will help minimize feelings of discomfort. People attempt to relieve this tension in different ways, such as by rejecting, explaining away, or avoiding new information.
Signs of Cognitive Dissonance
Everyone experiences cognitive dissonance to some degree but that doesn't mean that it is always easy to recognize. Some signs that what you are feeling might be related to dissonance include:
Feeling uncomfortable before doing something or making a decision
Trying to justify or rationalize a decision you've made or action you have taken
Feeling embarrassed or ashamed about something you've done and trying to hide your actions from other people
Experiencing guilt or regret about something you've done in the past
Doing things because of social pressure or a fear of missing out (FOMO), even if it wasn't something you wanted to do
With CDiss defined, let’s add on your fervent belief in and support of President Donald J. Trump as the architect, conduit and figurehead of the salvation of mankind. “You” fully believe in QAnon, have followed the Q drops etc and see the game in play, and are mindful of the 4D chess game that The Orange Grandmaster is playing for the good of humanity.
Does any degree of cognitive dissonance set in yet between your political allegiance to DJT and any of the earlier beliefs and experiences?
Yep. DJT introduced Operation Warpspeed that greenlighted Covid gene therapies on a global basis. There was literally zero resistance by DJT to them, irrespective of any other stance on any other approach or treatment. DJT may have nominally resisted lockdown for a time and mandate, and called out China’s role, as well as having earlier cut direct US public funding to the WHO, but there’s no denying that Covid gene therapies were spun up on both a policy and practical side by the person you believe to be the saviour of mankind.
How could that be? How did DJT miss that? How did others dupe him? How do you resolve the uncomfortable tension between what Trump did on Covid and gene therapies, and everything you stand for and believe Trump to be?
Now, the ringing, grinding noise of cognitive dissonance begins to build like burgeoning tinnitus.
Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. 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 perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
Force consistency onto your worldview to resolve your cognitive dissonance
Here’s how “you” resolve the above.
Donald Trump has a prior anti-vax stance.
The absolutism of his thundering tweets that disparaged the childhood vaccination schedule — itself meticulously vetted by experts who would, years later, be answerable to him — only hardened.
Now, as his federal health agencies tackle the rapidly morphing coronavirus epidemic and he and his administration come under fire for serious missteps in managing it, Mr. Trump has had to adjust his messaging. He is now all in on a vaccine and the sooner the better, says the man who in 2015 said that he didn’t “like the idea of injecting bad stuff in your body.”
New York Times
According to you, Trump’s genius runs deeper than anyone can fully comprehend, although you have managed to work it out for yourself. Trump, knowing the true threat of vaccines in general, worked out a way to inarguably prove the point to the whole world such that he would eventually cause the world to righteously abandon that dangerous and harmful medical technology. This leadership demanded of him the ability to bear and risk the greatest of costs. Trump initiated Operation Warpspeed knowing that it would result in the global release and use of Covid gene therapies that wouldn’t just prove ineffectual but also harmful and fatal. His actual objective was to use the pandemic to show the world that vaccines should never be trusted or used from that point forth by generating a data set of harm so massive that literally no one could credibly deny the data and continue supporting vaccines in general.
Put another way, you actually believe that DJT deliberately pursued a scorched earth plan of global human injury and murder that potentially affected over 5 billion people, in order to play a longer game of waking the world up to the harms of big pharma and vaccines first and - some possible way after - general industry, tech, medical and scientific corruption, all as part of his grand architectural plan for human renaissance and enlightenment.
Someone points out that to have actively designed and pursued such a plan, DJT would be the world’s greatest murderous despot, bigger than all others before him, on a collective basis. You acknowledge this but you justify it as being a necessary evil in order to take down the bigger horror of the “system” and the evil forces running the world. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a lot more than eggs.
Someone else points out that Trump is, in your mind, the same as Mr. Glass from the movie, “Unbreakable”, who deliberately manufactures destructive, tragic events in order to fulfil his objective (discovering his counterpart to team up with for some other notional outcome).
Your fully realised worldview also hinges upon Trump winning 2024, otherwise QAnon isn’t correct. Also, the world literally must, within a reasonable timeframe of circa 8 years need to be radically re-engineered in ways directly attributable to Trump’s second term policies. These are significant, hard and measurable dependencies that, should some or all of them not emerge, will literally destroy a huge part of your strongly held and tightly woven world view.
How much cognitive dissonance does this article ask of you?
In order to continue reading this article, how much cognitive dissonance are you now having to tolerate? This last attribution of planned global democide for a “greater good” to DJT is, we admit, to quote Dr. Robert Malone, “nucking futz”.
VST didn’t make this up.
The above was put forward by someone as their fervent and genuinely held belief of DJT in Covid. They claim to have worked out the last bit about democide themselves, and they are comfortable with DJT having done all this for the above reasons. They believe in DJT and his necessary return to the White House more than ever before. Yet, they do not support the Nazis in WW2 or since, or communist China or the USSR. It’s only DJT’s vision and methods that are righteous, even though their horror dwarfs any and all others that went before.
Points to consider
Someone who is on your side of the fence managed to overcome their inherent cognitive dissonance of Trump’s role in Covid by turning him into a benevolent Supervillain whose horrendous plan nets out at some form of humanitarian good in the long term, but could have radically reduced the human population.
This is the very definition of cognitive dissonance, and it’s occurring on your team. It was also self-induced and the person admits this is all their own work.
Someone chose to cope with the conflict between their correct concerns about Covid and their belief in DJT and QAnon by rationalising global democide as a visionary, beneficial-if-painful genius masterplan that only someone of DJT’s exceptional qualities could invent and implement.
The human mind can literally tolerate and justify any act on any scale in order to cope with cognitive dissonance, discomfort and horror. Mattias Desmet talks about Mass Formation wherein large numbers of people can come together in a collective delusion as a result of being individually rendered vulnerable then influenced and guided by external forces and deliberate narrative. Contrast that with this individualised form of self-radicalisation towards the justification and rationalisation of global democide by your self-selected demagogue.
Now, combine the two phenomenon. In this person’s world, you get: a landslide Trump victory in 2024; the wholesale destruction of the US deep state, military industrial security surveillance complex; the collapse of the wider WEF/WHO/Gatesian plan for humanity; and a US led renaissance, irrespective of the realpolitik that is actually playing out in the world on multiple, interdependent fronts. But, by contrast, if you’re on the extreme of the other side, what might you believe? That Covid is and always will be a deadly threat that requires the top-down draconian management of human behaviour and all environments to minimise whatever illnesses are on the list? That all humans require constant schedules of medicinal intervention forever? That all forms of surveillance that reinforce this are justified and necessary for the greater good? And the same applies to the existential threat of climate change. Gulp. You’re a member of British state and intelligence cut out, Independent Sage.
In real terms, from what we can tell of human behaviours and demand at the lowest level, people are abandoning the latter view of Covid and gene therapies for the time being, in the absence of another convincing and continuous dose of medical fear porn. But rest assured, another dose is on the near horizon and the legislative means to reinforce it are being increasingly strengthened right in front of the faces of supposedly “awake” people who aren’t so cognitively dissonant as to believe Trump is the second coming of Jesus Hitler Mao Stalin on PCP, crack and meth. Between now and the next pandemic, there are several other managed narratives to cope with. The ramifications of actions taken and claims made in just the Ukraine conflict are as big as Covid. Citizens of the west are dealing with deprivation induced by political decisions around Ukraine that are as big if not bigger than Covid. The key dissonant part of the Ukraine narrative is that the entire conflict was unnecessary and fully avoidable and that Nord Stream was our leaders choosing to kill us. Exactly what kind of mental gymnastics are required to cope with that?
On the global economic front, what kind of mental gymnastics are required to either block out entirely or believe the narrative of FTX, SVB and the burgeoning banking implosion? If you actually, for a second, believe anything any government or state level actor publicly says about the resilience of the banking and financial sector, you are akin to the aforementioned, self-radicalised Trump fan.
If you are hearing increasingly loud ringing, you need to ask yourself whether it should be tolerated or whether you must suppress it by convincing yourself that “everything is OK because [insert fiction here].”
Thank you for this! I need to share this with family and friends who are still struggling with CD.