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Is Cognitive Dissonance Fueling Conservative Denial of Climate Change?
"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," were the words of GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney in front of about 200 people at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire. The former Massachusetts Governor went on to say, "It's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."
Romney's statement wasn't radical or controversial in least bit. So why did the right freak out and declare Romney's statement to be "political suicide"?
This reminds me of a situation back in April when all but one of the Republican members of the US House of Representatives rejected a Democratic amendment that would have put the chamber on record backing the widely held scientific view that global warming is occurring and humans are a major cause. The following day the GOP-led House voted 255 to 172 to strip the Environmental Protection Agency's power to regulate greenhouse gases. It is remarkable that in 2011, a majority of Republicans in Congress reject the indisputable, scientific consensus that human activity is altering the climate.
Why are conservatives, despite the mounting evidence, so unwilling to accept that climate change is a serious threat caused by greenhouse emissions?
It seems climate change is now part and parcel of America’s “culture wars.” Similar to abortion and other social issues, climate change has become a partisan issue, with liberals backing the science, and conservatives denying it. Often times, when pondering the reasons for climate change denial, we immediately blame the media for allotting disproportionate airtime for industry backed pseudo-scientists to sow doubt in the minds of viewers, in their quest for "balance." Of course this analysis is correct, but incomplete.
It’s been widely proven that fossil fuel interests, most notably ExxonMobil, used the tobacco industry’s playbook and an extensive arsenal of lobbyists and “experts” to manufacture disinformation designed to confuse the public and stifle action to address climate change. As documented by Greenpeace, in recent years this corporate PR campaign has gone viral, spawning a denial movement that is largely immune to reasoned response. While the more powerful climate change deniers have manipulative objectives, such as preserving their vested interests in fossil fuels or political posturing with their constituencies, many on the right actually believe climate change is a hoax. This PR campaign has contributed immensely to denial, but there is still more to the story.
Thus, the question remains: Why is the reality of climate change such a threat to the right? A new study published in the Spring 2011 issue of Sociological Quarterly delves into this very topic. The study finds that conservatives' refusal to acknowledge the very real threat of climate change, has more to do with its implications rather than skepticism of scientific facts. It's a classic case of cognitive dissonance!
Stanford University social psychologist Leon Festinger coined the theory of cognitive dissonance, based on a famous case study from the 1950s. Festinger and his colleagues infiltrated a cult that was awaiting what they believed would be the imminent end of the world on December 21, 1954. When the prediction failed, rather than recognize the error of their beliefs, the cult members' faith grew stronger, so strong that they began to proselytize. People will go to great lengths to rationalize their deeply held beliefs, even more so when exposed to evidence that challenges their worldview.
Climate change poses a profound threat to many things that right-wing ideologues believe in. Conservatives tend to champion individual freedom, private property rights, small government, free markets, and above all else, unfettered industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is an economic system predicated on the accelerating extraction and consumption of fossil fuels for energy, which is driving the climate change we face today. To accept this basic premise, one is compelled to question the wisdom of capitalism itself, which is a terrifying notion for conservatives. And it doesn't take long to recognize that conservative values are inherently antithetical to the desperately needed actions to tackle global climate change.
Seriously dealing with the threat of climate change would require government to heavily regulate corporations and subsidize renewable energy. It would entail a strong international body, most likely boosting the power of the UN. It would bring an end to the inefficient and energy-wasting free-trade agenda, as localizing economies would become necessary to sustain communities. And, most importantly, confronting climate change demands addressing climate justice for developing nations suffering from the pollution of industrialized nations, or more simply, a redistribution of wealth from North to South. Climate change poses a direct threat to the spread of free markets, the maintenance of national sovereignty, and the continued abolition of governmental regulations, all key components of the conservative agenda. These are the types of ideas that cause conservatives to gasp, point, and shout "communist!"
When we recognize the role of cognitive dissonance, it becomes clear that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to dispute or deny the scientific consensus and the claims of the environmental community, in order to defend the industrial capitalist system. It is far more simple to deny science, than to accept that one's worldview is wrong. Unfortunately, environmental organizations are in a kind of denial as well. Climate change is about an economic model that demands infinite growth on a finite planet. However, environmental groups are reluctant to relate climate change to economics and politics, probably because conservatives would see it as confirmation of the right-wing myth that global warming is a socialist plot to redistribute the world's wealth.
For a conservative whose entire identity is defined by faith in the economics of capitalism and free markets, acceptance of climate change poses a danger to their sense of self, and will be avoided at all costs. Therefore, attempts to persuade this portion of the country with science and logic is a lost cause. However, for those of us who truly care about the future of our one and only planet and our species, it is time that we face what we have been loath to highlight in the past: Unfettered industrial capitalism is unsustainable and is causing climate change to spiral out of control. Until we begin to challenge the economics fueling environmental degradation, we are no better than our climate denying counterparts.
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130 Comments so far
Show AllWe’ve already had radical regime change; in the past 30+ years the extreme right and the extreme wealthy have almost completely captured this country. Votes don’t count anymore; the opinion of the majority doesn’t matter; even physical, historical, psychological and ecological reality don’t matter.
Climate catastrophe, Peak Oil and the larger ecological crisis of which they’re a part, if not stopped will lead almost inevitably to every horrible event and condition you mentioned. Continued rule by the right is already leading to centralization of rule, erosion of property rights (and all other rights) by any except the uber-wealthy. The melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens, possibly within a couple of decades, to disrupt water flow into the lands of a billion people to the point where wars of national survival are almost certain. Three of the countries have nuclear weapons. Increasing storms, droughts, fires, floods, famines, ecological collapses and resource shortages are likely to cause chaos and strife beyond anything imaginable. Since the end of the process is human extinction and devastation of the planet, that seems worse than the changes you’re describing, but since they will happen too, I think it’s a pretty sure bet.
So get mad busy switching to efficiency, renewables, and local organic permaculture, reforesting the world, biomimicry in industry, rail, sail, mail (deprivatizing) and scale…
dwat,
Straw people everywhere. Maybe you should stop making absurd, untrue assertions and start asking questions, so you know what we’re actually thinking and saying rather than using what you want to pretend we’re thinking and saying because you have no real arguments against our facts and reasoning.
The fact is, I’m NOT on record saying anyone who questions climate change is a criminal against humanity. Typical denialist argument—blatant lies (which nevertheless contain just enough appearance of truth to fool fools) about facts clearly in evidence for anyone willing to take the trouble to check them out. You make unsupported claims about things you know nothing about it and have made no attempt to discover, then say the argument is over. Please. Science is imperfect just like humans are imperfect, so I think people SHOULD question it. That’s what I did. After spending a lifetime learning related subjects and 3 years nearly full time investigating all sides, I’ve reached many conclusions, most importantly that climate change is real, happening and the most serious crisis humans have ever faced. Another is that climate denialists, even more than Holocaust deniers, evolution deniers and The Flat Earth Society, have engaged in coordinated, overwhelmingly dishonest campaigns funded by coal and oil companies and extreme right wing ideologues to produce the appearance of doubt about the science. This is especially amazing considering climate science is as agreed on and certain as anything in science ever is. Scientists disagree on everything that could possibly be disagreed about, so the fact that they are so nearly unanimous about climate change is instructive to wise people and true skeptics.
I’m not a climate scientist. I am an intelligent person who is trained in psychotherapy (and ecology and anthropology), so the fact that you don’t understand what I said about psychology is a silly reason to try to discredit it with low-class name-calling. You should add it to the list of things you should learn more about.
Likewise, calling my arguments sophistry is like the pot calling the water black. Projection and nonsense.
You use not only an archaic pseudo-anthropological definition of tribe but a racist one, one that doesn’t recognize the incredible complexity of so-called primitive people and cultures, some of which have survived on the same land for tens of thousands of years without degrading it, while “our” ignorance of the world, nature, and our own nature has turned everything it’s touched to death and ashes and brought us and most of life on Earth to the brink of extinction in a few hundred years. The idea that tribes don’t have arts and sciences is so utterly ridiculous I’m astounded even a non-reality based denialist would try to put it across. In any case, I repeat my point in the hope you hear or understand it better. I intend to keep repeating what you choose not to understand until you do, or until they shut the comments down: f-f did not explain the use of the term ‘tribe’ and may have been speaking metaphorically or in many other non-literal, non-anthropological ways. Making unwarranted assumptions about it in order to try to make a point is dishonest—and not very effective here.
Thanks, Mairead for your points about the wait and see attitude. Waiting and seeing when the stakes are literally (and unlike some when I say literally I literally mean literally) the possible extinction of most life on Earth, is insane.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ
"This is especially amazing considering climate science is as agreed on and certain as anything in science ever is." Indeed. Is it as agreed on and certain as, say, the Newtonian laws of motion? The fact is that there is no experiment properly speaking that can prove the claims of the climate change lobby. One could say that we are the experiment. We will have to wait and see. As has already been pointed out by another poster, you can't go by computer models - you have to have real empirical observations, and, in the case of climate change, over a long period. A few decades of weird weather is not enough.
Yes, tribal people can make things, but to compare, say, Navajo handicrafts with the arts and sciences of Periclean Athens or the European Renaissance is absurd on the face of it. Who is the Native American Benventuo Cellini? I have seen Aztec ruins and I have seen Westminster Abbey, and there is no comparison. "We've been here for 10,000 years and haven't done any harm" is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the human spirit, imo. It is interesting (speaking of name calling) that you call my understanding of the tribe "racist," since I learned it from your man Carl Jung - I am sure that you are familiar with his analyses of primitive psychology (I now await the standard rejoinder that , yes, Jung was brilliant, but still just a "man of his time," and we know so much better now).
If f-f is speaking "non-literally," let him say so - otherwise, I will start with the surface and assume that he means what he says, in ordinary language.
Waiting and seeing is the thing to do when you don't know what to do. It is not as though, even if we were certain that the worst case climate change scenario is true, we would know what to do for the best, or that there would be any consensus about what was to be done. You would not imo get people to agree even then to a sort of a permanent, worldwide WWII rationing scheme. Many people, and I might be one of them, would think it better to let nature sort it. If hybris got us into this, how likely is it that more hybris will get us out?
Sorry rushed, have an appointment.
dwat,
Not sure if your Newton thing’s because you’re saying Newton’s been accepted for centuries, or was proven wrong. Either way, not the best example. Newton’s laws still hold true under observation, despite deeper post-Einstein physics. After hundreds of years of advances in technology, experiments galore and building on the principles Newton himself formulated, his work has since been put in perspective in a much larger universe. Comparing the work of a 17th century scientist—the very beginning of the scientific era—to the current state of science is a dumb argument. Experiments and observations all over the world for a generation, based on principles developed ever more deeply ever since Newton’s time, confirm climate catastrophe. The theory is made of many links—chemistry, atmospheric science, ecology… and every single link’s been confirmed and reconfirmed. It’s further bolstered by data sets from hundreds of thousands of scientists in fields as diverse as biology, botany, entomology, ornithology, ecology, palynology, glaciology, physics, chemistry, and on and on.
All my life I have appreciated Western art of every era. But who are we to say Navajo handicrafts and the intellectual achievements of the Kayapo (which we don’t even begin to understand yet) are not as good as the fascist thoughts of Socrates and the paintings and statues of a few elite artists in a society that has also brought itself and the rest of the world unending horror, destruction and oppression? If there’s any non-subjective criteria at all shouldn’t it be whether the art makes its society healthier? The democratic art and sciences of indigenous people have helped them far more than Europe’s elitist art has helped the vast majority of people who have lived and died under its sway.
Living in a place for between 40,000 and 125,000 years without damaging it is a feat incomprehensible to most of us, and the wonder and amazement with which we should contemplate it cannot even be properly begun until we understand it a thousand times better than we do. To take a religion, an art, sciences, technology, child-raising practices, psychology and all other human knowledge and create with them a seamless web that meshes so completely with the ecological matrix in which it thrives is an astounding accomplishment of thousands of generations. WE are rootless, unhappy, rageful, destructive and ignorant of almost everything important, and our creation of civilization, however clever and pretty its manifestations, is essentially an attempt to ameliorate the horror and emptiness of our lives within it. They (speaking in generalities—and I’m not talking about the imperial Aztecs) have a way of life, art, feeling and thought that makes them satisfied, ensconced in the natural world in a way not one in ten million “civilized” people are, and deeply, deeply connected to themselves, their fellow humans, their society and their world.
That is not trivial, as you seem to think. It is everything.
It is not only everything to have it. It is the loss of that, and the attempt to get it back, however misguidedly we do it, is what drives everything “civilized” humans do. You can start with Jung, and yes, of course he was a person as we all are, irretrievably damaged by his society and his childhood. He did amazing things to recover his true humanness (living in the tower at Bollingen, eg; see the movie Matter of Heart), and made remarkable progress, and it is largely building on his progress and that of Wilhelm Reich that we have the wisdom of Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, James DeMeo (Saharasia), Mary Daly, and millions of others. Flawed humans, all. Damaged by the type of life, policies and directions that you champion, but some glimmers of wisdom anyway.
“permanent…rationing scheme?” Crap and nonsense !
How bout we just return to the tax levels of the Eisenhower administration?
“…the thing to do when you don’t know what to do.” Crap and hokum!
We know what to do.
Huge corporations and people like you are stopping us.
Efficiency, solar, wind, fiberoptic smart grid, local organic permaculture, reforesting the world, rail, sail, mail (deprivatization) and scale (smaller), biomimicry, ecological lives, an economics based on preserving real wealth (physically and psychologically healthy people in thriving ecosystems constituting a functioning biosphere) rather than what ours consists entirely of—turning living beings into dead trash.
We have to reduce the harmful effects of our lives. Doing so will help us heal and become more in tune with nature. That will teach us the next steps, and those steps will further heal and educate us...Stop blocking useful action that will help us survive.
I totally agree. Party on dudes!
Kewl. Bitchin', in fact. The political philosophy of Jeff Spicoli :-). No hot rods, though - no cruising vessels. That would be bogus.
Wonderful essay, Rania.
You write coherently and logically.
When you say,
" Unfortunately, environmental organizations are in a kind of denial as well. Climate change is about an economic model that demands infinite growth on a finite planet"
... I found myself reflecting that this is now changing.
I think that the consensus most of the environmental leaders are reaching is that the entire greed-infected capitalistic patriarchy itself must transform if anything resembling sustainability can even be birthed, let alone nurtured.
But I agree with you that while it has to alter at its core if we are to change ---- most of the environmentalists haven't yet gotten it.
Pulling corporate greed out of legislation HAS to happen.
I still believe that the quickest route in the US would be to mandate gender parity in government (50-50 Senate, 218/217 House female) ......'tho the good ol' boys aren't going to allow it.
We need to empower women, dis-empower men.
And we need to corral the corporations by taking away their "personhood" if anything is to shift.
Quick question. What insanity *doesn't* the cognitive dissonance of the GOP fuel?
Epicureans of the world, Unite!
-30-
Epicurus was one of the original Materialists. Karl Marx did his doctoral thesis on Epicurus. He is known as a sensualist, because he believed in that which the senses could ascertain as opposed to the Idealist, a priori "truths" of divine right or capitalism as vehicle for freedom. Empirical reality (the senses) shows that capitalism is only a vehicle to servitude. Under capitalism, work sucks the creative life out of our souls and bodies. Marx was not into partying or sloth. He thought that work ought to be fulfilling, that we should want to work like an artist wants to work.
Conservatives aren't denying climate change, the data is. More and more hard evidence is coming in. Here's an example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/
"What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age."
When you have to "hide the decline" and the actual code used by the global warming advocates shows that they were faking data:
"Now, here is some actual proof that the CRU was deliberately tampering with their data. Unfortunately, for readability’s sake, this code was written in Interactive Data Language (IDL) and is a pain to go through.
NOTE: This is an actual snippet of code from the CRU contained in the source file: briffa_Sep98_d.pro
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)"
Then the proper conclusion is that believers in AGW are the ones denying reality.
Dear readers,
Please take a look at this: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/.
I don't know if mcs is lying or has been lied to and has fallen for it because s/he's not very well educated about science. If the former, s/he should get a decent job and get into therapy; if the latter, s/he should think and read before s/he speaks again. The mounting evidence--the OVERWHELMING amount of mounting evidence--is that we are well on our way to a climate catastrophe, and arguments to the contrary are close to becoming crimes against humanity, (if they have not already passed over into that category) since they are keeping us from taking rational action as a species to protect ourselves and the biosphere from the greatest disaster to befall it for millions of years.
Distortion of the debunked and redebunked CRU story is absurd and at this point, amounts to criminality, whether through malice or malicious ignorance, piling slander on top of theft on top of misrepresentation. S/he should stop.
Actually, I'm extremely well educated in Engineering and have wide experience in computer modeling. It is extremely difficult to model even a complex well-understood process. So difficult, that multimillion dollar test articles, such as ion-implant machines or aircraft, are fabricated as the final go-nogo before the design is placed into production.
Attempting to model poorly understood open systems is simply a recipe for disaster and has produced little in the way of actual scientific results. This is not surprising, since a model can only reflect what we know. It cannot produce new knowledge. For a lengthy discussion of this see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q3/view634.html#globalwarming
The evidence is very far from overwhelming http://www.drroyspencer.com/ has numerous observations on this. He's even written a simple article: http://climateobserver.blogspot.com/2010/07/dr-roy-spencers-global-warming-for.html
And there is one further piece of evidence that is absolutely overwhelming - the earth. Since the first prokaryotes formed some 3.8 billion years ago, the earth's temperature has remained in a fairly narrow band. This in spite of the fact that the sun's irradiance has changed by over 30%, in spite of the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide that the Deccan traps released, in spite of major asteroid impacts and so on. This is evidence that there are extremely powerful feedback loops that we haven't found or understood yet.
To say that a 3.8 billion old existence proof is about to be overturned is an extraordinarily strong claim and therefor requires extraordinarily strong proof. Think Progress is not a good source to use in the face of those requirements.
A final note - I presented the CODE that came out of the CRU data dump, NOT the emails or anything else. I have examined their published temperature records and the steps in that code are in those records.
Quite right - it's very difficult to model any multivariate process.
Which is why the climate modelers have been BEHIND the curve, and why Dr Lovelock's predictions are so far, Goddess help us, right on the money. He's pointed out that he doesn't rely on modeling, he goes outside and looks at what's actually happening. And he predicts that there are only going to be 1G humans, max, left alive on Earth in 2100 because we will have made Earth an inhospitable place for humans and other high-order lifeforms.
That snippet of code you reproduced is, effectively, gobbledegook since we don't have the source for those functions, the source for the data, or anything else. Nor do we know why they're applying whatever fudge factor the comment suggests they're applying.
"Earth's temperature has remained in a fairly narrow band" because of homeostatic drivers. We have been deforming those drivers for a thousand years, and GROSSLY deforming them for the past 100-200 years. To confirm that, you need only examine the data for human population growth vs forest clearing.
We are re-creating conditions in the world that last existed long before we modern humans were in the picture, and in some cases (e.g. ocean acidification) long before any member of genus homo was around.
We and all other current forms of high-order life evolved under conditions similar to those that prevailed until perhaps 100 years ago. Conditions that we have been changing for the worse, and at a rapidly increasing rate.
We cannot adapt fast enough to live in the world of low oxygen, highly acidified oceans, and cataclysmic weather events that we're creating. Unless we quit screwing around tout de goddamn suite, we will force Mama to create a new homeostasis in which high-order life will have no place at all. Anyone who wants to risk that is diagnosable.
Be careful Mr. or Ms. Sandberg, J4zonian is likely to haul you before the ICC.
Perfectly perfectly stated. Right to the core of the problem...
So, will we be able to bring about such a dramatic and traumatic transformation of our world, our culture, our political system and the economic night mare that we are in? I have to say I don't think so. Not in time to keep many, many many people, including my self, from sliding down the drain of climatic, peak oil, and economic sink hole. I can feel it already. My husband was let go from his job, my job gets more and more complicated by the month and year because it's tied to medicaid and state funds. The nightmare is just starting for us and I am feeling terrified.
This is where real leadership would help. help all of us out here trying to educate people in general.... Also, the media could help, by putting scientist on instead of delusional, power hungry politicians.... They state their case for solutions to our problems, like oh yeah, we need jobs, okay we will make jobs.... sure, more manufacturing and people traveling miles up on miles by car to get to work... EVEN MORE CO2 IN TO THE AIR...
There really is not solution at this point. Call me a defeatist..... tonight I'm depressed, yeah, me the one everyone always looks to to come up with the bright side of things....
Between depression and euphoria there is energy. A physical chemist might call it disequilibrium; a mathematician or physicist might refer to the second law of thermodynamics...
Too many fancy words - like cognitive dissonance -
People wallow in luxury, thinking they are hard-pressed -
They wallow in denial - because, as the mountain man said - 'they don't have the sense God gave geese.'
Hundreds of years of living the wrong way has consequences - payback is nasty.
Am I raining on your parade? You bet -
And everyone else who buys into hokum.
Western society is scientifically illiterate - too much time spent killing time, "as if one could kill time without injuring eternity."
The two job household - a mistake -
Take a swing at me - you'll feel better -
Manysummits
======
Adorno’s two volume work, entitled The Authoritarian Personality, was published in 1950.
Such people can be predicted to display a number of attributes which include, but are not limited to: intolerance of ambiguity, dichotomous thinking, rigidity of thought, punitiveness, anti-intellectualism, militaristic patriotism, conformity, and ethnocentrism.
One can see how these traits would be mutually reinforcing, and create a closed, "self-sealing system." A person with this kind of character structure will, of necessity, be rigidly attached to a view of the world which has no room for doubt or debate.
In the long-term it is clear that we, as voters, need to be able to recognize this syndrome in would-be "leaders," and see the dangers involved...
A few traits of such cursed folks:
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING:
Authoritarians exhibit a compulsion to divide everything and everyone into mutually exclusive groups - good/bad, right/wrong, friend/enemy - without taking into account the subtleties, qualifications or even downright mistakes that may be involved. “Dichotomous thinking” can be considered an outgrowth of intolerance of ambiguity; it is a sort of “rush to judgment” which serves to provide an immediate (but illusory, and generally false) sense of certainty.
RIGIDITY OF THOUGHT:
The rigidity in the way an authoritarian perceives the world and himself is often exhibited as a generalized unwillingness to consider perspectives that conflict with his (or her) own preconceived ideas. When faced with such a situation, the last thing such a person will do is to listen, evaluate, and be prepared to change his/her position if it seems warranted.
It is virtually impossible for a person with this character structure to genuinely admit having been wrong or having learned anything from anyone with views different from their own. You should not expect to hear him/her say (and mean]:
‘Well, you have a point there.’” With true, “dyed-in the wool” authoritarians - rational discussion regarding emotionally laden issue is seldom a cooperative effort to reach agreement, beginning with mutual respect on each side…
The most frustrating thing about authoritarians is their inaccessibility: most of the time, there is literally no way to reach them.”
part 1 of a theory of not everything, but a lot
The communist model is like the capitalist in a more important respect than those folks way back at the beginning of this remarked on—integrity. By that I mean the wholeness we perceive in ourselves/the world, and with which we perceive. Parts of us are unacceptable to parents and a society limited by fear, grief and rage. Which parts depend on their responses to their lives; those can be anything. Our neediness may be unacceptable, our independence, anger, tenderness... We depend on our caregivers so much (not just for physical care but to actually create ourselves in relationship to them) that we do whatever it takes to be acceptable to them, including denying those parts ourselves. We split, both psychologically and physically. We reduce our breath, tighten our muscles, lose energy…also in many ways. (This happens unconsciously, and only with great effort and insight, and excellent help, can we make it conscious.)
The rejected parts are called shadow (by Carl Jung) and they don’t go anywhere; they stay around and show up in odd ways. We act on their impulses (again, unconsciously), we project them onto other people, seeing anger in someone else when it’s actually ours, for example. Some people become one-sidedly physical and brutish; some people become hyper-intellectual. Each comes to mistrust their own rejected parts in the other. Again, infinite responses and combinations of responses. Groups, countries, even the species projects onto other beings, objects, nature and concepts.
Our problem may have started with climate problems six thousand, or tens of thousands of years ago (James DeMeo’s Saharasia, Kirkpatrick Sale’s After Eden…); it may have been caused by loss of nature and mother at the same time (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness)… For whatever reason, and those were all probably factors, here we are. Our fear, grief and rage makes us unaware. We retract our perception from parts of ourselves and the world, and this precursor to dissonance, this deeper dissonance, is not just cognitive. It’s in the body, as emotions are, as all reality is.
We are born into a paradox—we are separate beings (each of us is a community, actually—an aggregate of bacteria and proto-bacteria dominated by an ego—the idea that we’re one and separate). We are also connected—even united—with the whole world, in physical reality and every way that proceeds from that—perception, religiously, etc.
Breathing, growing, physically, perceptually, we pulse—relaxing and expanding into largeness and awareness, contracting into lack of awareness and dense smallness. We call these liberal and conservative, respectively.
(George Lakoff’s ideas about the 2 are applicable here.)
Part 2 of the theory of a lot
The function of fear is to warn us of danger, that of anger to summon energy to protect us from the threat our fear warns us about, and when we grieve, we react to the loss of parts of our selves (limbs, time, missing people and pets, safety, nature…). These emotions are part of the protective (and eventually-healing) response. But when we reject them because they scared our caregivers, we contract, keep them stuck inside us, and little by little become black holes of emotion, too dense for anything to escape, especially perception. So we can’t perceive the emotions, we can’t perceive the not-perceiving, and so on. We know on some level that we used to be connected—to something. But that’s gone, we come to perceive everything— ourselves, our world, other beings, nature... as a Black Box, an object we can’t see or feel into, understand, feel connected to, empathize with. Life becomes dead to us. You could say we lose a sense of the sacred, which is, after all, just the awareness of the unity of all. And it’s then that we begin to exploit the Box, and try to destroy it, since we fear and hate everything we can’t feel or understand.
And that is where capitalism and communism come together, are the same in a way that means neither is the problem, and neither the answer. Not to the other, not to the larger question, not to anything. They are both incomplete, split-off parts of a somato-emotional question/feeling/loss we have long-since forgotten needs to be asked—that is, felt. Neither one matters.
In our world, coming out of the trauma of that early (ontogeny/phylogeny) rejection by mother/nature, we are stuck in reactive fear/rage/grief, that is, we are skewed toward the conservative. Even liberals— thus punitive welfare, destroying a village—or country—in order to save it, and the arch-conservative horror of the supposedly leftist Soviet Union. We avoid feeling what’s real, since reality is the unacceptable self. We put our faith in thinking, and then split that—some become intellectual, some anti-intellectual. (while often staying paradoxically focused on ‘head stuff’ to keep avoiding those feelings. Being against such things as thoughts, anti-intellectuals don’t think very well, but they remain stuck there, the same non-sequitor, illogical, unconnected thoughts repeating relentlessly.) Meanwhile, hyper-intellectuals, also divorced from feelings absolutely crucial to the full, clear thinking known as wisdom, don’t ‘get’ the antis, think they can just explain things and win, and so we go on, arguing about angels dancing on a pinhead.
Everything splits, then splits again, infinite regression to the meanness, as we keep trying to answer something that’s not a question, as we look for wholeness in half of ourselves, then a quarter, and then an eighth… Once in a while we patch 2 little bits back together and heal just a little on the surface. But we remain deeply split.
The dissonance this article talks about is part of the black hole. People who are stuck in contraction are unaware of it, and of the unawareness, etc. So they confabulate—they make up stories like Alzheimer’s patients do, that explain their (barely feelable) feelings, thoughts, history, etc. The stories especially explain the rejected, projected parts of the patients, but necessarily as if they really were outside. They explain the world in a way that justifies their feelings. (sort-of, if they don’t look too closely. Which they don’t, of course; that’s the Black Holiness operating. ) If they were thinking and feeling clearly, what would need ‘explaining’ (sensing, actually, but remember we’re all hyper-intellectualizing) is their inner world. But that’s off-limits, so the confabulous explanations all comment on the outer world—we’re all alone, they hate us, we need to be strong, it’s every one for him(sic)self. The conservative mantra. Faith in the market, the military, the leader (daddy, god, minister…all one, but split, like the Black Holey Trinity).
That kind of deep, unconscious defense-in-depth is not easily changed in a political forum. Only by helping conservatives feel safe and able to express freely will they be able to confront their shadow, as we confront ours. (a topic for another time) We cannot solve the psychological roots of this problem in time, except by chance or genius not in evidence anywhere I’ve seen. What we can do is pick low-hanging fruit, make as much progress within the bounds of progressive society as possible, and be ready to expand. If all progressives grow substantial parts of their own food, travel by bike and train, use solar and wind and gray water and rainwater and conserve everything ferociously, we might give ourselves enough time to get conservatives to make practical changes, and enough time after that to help them and us heal together.
Not likely, mind you, but possible. We're going to spend our lives doing something; it might as well be that.
There are at least ten such trait clusters.
One of these, which is particularly relevant to Rania's thesis regarding "cognitive dissonance," is a rigid attachment to avoiding introspection. Once again, such a person is fixated on the assumption that only the external world is real, while being utterly unaware that they are sick with a malady we can call "inner blindness."
Authoritarians tend to resist looking into their own motivations. One of the things such a person seems most afraid of is admitting (to others or themselves) that they are not always “right."
Deep down they are terrified of the world, and being wrong is equated with weakness. Another reason authoritarians reject looking inward is because they have come to rely almost exclusively on external supports (top-down authorities and systems) to convince themselves of their own worth and the validity of their beliefs. As such they can appear to others as "soul-less" beings - and at some levels - this is the truth.
This extreme level of self-alienation creates a profound inner fragmentation or splitting; some tell-tale symptoms of this predicament include deep resentment, a form of "madness" (in both senses of the word), and the concurrent need to find victims upon whom they can vent these very disturbing emotions.
Denial of inner and outer realities creates a situation in which the individual's motivations become increasingly dark and grandiose; however, his/her unwillingness to experience self - or be seen - as imperfect leads them to cover the awareness of their ever-growing shadow by presenting a rigid posture of outer righteousness (much as Jesus described the Pharisees). All negativity is projected and seen "out there."
Meanwhile, their practiced inability / refusal to discover their own "nature" - their core of humanity, compassion, and feeling - keeps these people focused on dominating nature, animals, and other human beings - no matter what the cost.
The unwillingness of individuals and groups to own their abject fear becomes both a cause and an effect of a variety of assumptions: that cooperation is a joke, others are not to be trusted, and only the strong and imperious will survive. The compulsion to split off from - and seek to dominate - Nature also mirrors the need to subjugate their own (now twisted) "nature" - lest the truth of their terror, hatred, and rage be revealed.
J4zonian,
I was composing my latest post and just now discovered your two - which clearly move in a similar direction. I look forward to reading and digesting what you have written.
any thoughts?
Global Warming deniers are wrong on several points: 1) They really believe the planet is not warming and 2) if it is, it is the result of some natural cycle that is about to reverse itself. 3) They certainly do not believe emissions of man-made gasses into the atmosphere could change the atmospheric temperature. 4) Even if it raises the ambient temperature of the planet, it will have no effect on weather patterns or growing seasons or anything else. 5) There is no other reason to believe that pouring pollutants into the atmosphere causes any damage. There is no proof that air pollution causes disease. 6) Even if any of the previous statements are wrong, there is some magic, invisible, "man in the sky" who will come down and fix it if we pray hard enough.
One would think that the American people would notice that these lies are perpetrated by the polluters who make billions of $$$ by their polluting. But, FOX News wins again.
The issue of global warming is far from being our only problem. I believe it is a mistake to not see the climate change issue in a much larger context.
Many of today's leading thinkers, scientists, and visionaries (including Ervin Laszlo, Joanna Macy, and Riane Eisler to name a but a few) are warning us that the next ten to twenty years will be a testing time for the human species. They are suggesting that our world is in the earliest stages of massive, planet-wide crisis. By 2020 at the latest, the human species will be facing a very serious "evolutionary test."
Currently (and into the foreseeable future) we are confronted by four primary "adversity factors: global climate change, world population growth, mass extinction of species and ecosystems, and wide-ranging depletion of natural resources (including oil), along with increasing poverty and its consequences.
At a different time and place all of these factors could develop individually, but what is unique about our time is that the world has become a closed system, and all of these powerful forces are beginning to intensify and reinforce one another.
Our human hope can and should be that the complex web of political, economic, ecological and moral crises in which we find ourselves entangled will act as an evolutionary catalyst: motivating the human species to move to a higher level of awareness by “forcing the issue.” This process has a long and honored place in the history of evolution. It can be termed “emergence through emergency,” and may act as a powerful stimulant: one capable of inducing a form of labor which will aid us in giving birth to new ways of seeing and being with each other in the world.
Peter Russell captures our predicament well:
"If, however, humanity does find ways to resolve the various problems and conflicts facing it, it will have proved it can adapt successfully. In this respect crises not only serve as evolutionary catalysts, but also as evolutionary tests, examining the adaptability of the system.
"Indeed...we may have reached the final test of our viability for further evolution. This test, of course, is not a physical test. It is a test of our consciousness. It is an assessment of whether or not humanity is psychologically and spiritually fit to live on the planet Earth, whether we can change at a very fundamental level the way we relate to others and to the environment, whether we can work in harmony…whether we can balance centuries of material progress with an equal amount of inner growth.”
From this perspective the issue of cognitive dissonance can be seen as a form of resistance to facing the realities at hand. The sooner we find a way around folks who are clinging to denial, projection and the like, the sooner we can get on with the business of choosing life, rather than death.
I would say that physicist Fritjof Capra, hits the nail on the head in his discussion of our current predicament:
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“The starting point is the recognition that the major problems of our time are all part and parcel of the same crisis - a crisis of perception. By major problems I mean the threat of nuclear war, the devastation of the natural environment, and the persistence of hunger and poverty around the world.
"Our social institutions, our politicians, business people, and so on are using an outdated worldview to solve these problems, a worldview which is no longer appropriate. At the same time we are seeing a change in consciousness, an emerging new vision of reality. Our dominant culture is in decline because it subscribes to outdated concepts and values.”
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In other words we need to become open to changing some of our most basic assumptions, as well as our ways of perceiving, conceptualizing, and acting in the world.
Whether we can do so in time remains to be seen.
Martin Luther King Jr. starkly framed one of the core issues, saying:
"It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world: it's nonviolence or nonexistence; that is where we are today."
Elsewhere, he revealed more of the context out of which his conviction emerged:
'It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality."
There is nothing in this article that I disagree with, but like Elizabeth herself I think there's yet more to it. This is due to a book I recently read called "Moral Politics" by George Lakoff, which delves into the "worldview" behind the "cognitive dissonance". There I read about the "strict father" viewpoint, grounded in the old testament, which sees punishment as the only way to instill virtue. And capitalism as the impartial judge. Lakoff says a lot more a lot better, but my main takeaway was that to argue effectively with a conservative you've got to make them see why their moral values, which they take for granted, don't work in the real world. Maybe that won't usually have much effect either, but it still strikes me as a more constructive approach than accusing them of "cognitive dissonance" would be!