Hey folks.
As this election gets closer and closer, I find myself getting more and more anxious, depressed, frustrated, insert appropriate feeling here. It’s making me suspicious and scared of people.
Not just those on the other side, but of people in general. Because as it gets harder and harder for me to understand why the people on the other side think the way that they do, to the exclusion of fact, common sense and common decency, it gets harder and harder for me to have sympathy or empathy for other people, to accept that we are just on different sides of an argument. It’s changing my perceptions of people, and after more than 45 years of feeling like I know who I am, that is both challenging and frightening. I am finding that people I have liked and trusted, people I thought were friends, are saying some of the most horrible, untruthful, really mean spirited things about one candidate, and supporting the other one, and it surprises me and it shakes me to my core. And the reason, I think, is because of the cognitive dissonance.
I deal with the term cognitive dissonance daily, because I am a social worker. I know it in the context of personal interaction, the inability for someone to see how their deeply held beliefs or opinions affect their interpersonal relationships or lives, and how they can hold two almost completely opposing viewpoints without conflict. For example, believing that abortion is wrong because it is murder, and it’s always wrong to take another life, yet supporting the death penalty. Or how about believing that we have to protect the unborn, yet withdrawing all support for health insurance, good schools, and decent day care that it takes to raise that child well. It’s as though the concern for that unborn child goes away the second that child is actually born. Its implying that making money is a sacred goal, and it’s okay to do anything to make as much money as possible, whether you lie, cheat, steal, or scam to get it, but then saying it’s not okay for the Clintons to try to make money. Its calling your opponent every mean spirited, terrible name in the book, then acting affronted and offended when they say something back, or worse, deny a fact that causes you discomfort because it runs contrary to your deeply held (though untrue) belief system.
Cause here’s the thing. Society is causing global climate change. The earth is millions of years old. Dinosaurs and homo sapiens did not exist at the same time. We can point to these things and show definitive proof that they are true. Just because your religion may teach you something different does not make it true, and it is unfair to try to impose your belief system on everyone else, or to expect that we have to show respect for things that are patently untrue simply because you have a belief. I will refer you to the above. Believing something scientifically to be true in the face of all provable evidence to the contrary is a sign of mental illness. It is called a delusion, and here in the real world, where I try very hard to reside, that is a mental health problem that for me, calls into question your ability to use reason in every other area of your life. It is a disqualifying factor in a leader, because if you make things up and then believe them, you are not dealing with reality, you are Nero fiddling while Rome burns, you are an Emperor without clothing, you are a deranged mental patient with delusions of grandeur. You are not a billionaire because you say you are, you are a billionaire because you can prove that your net worth is over a billion dollars. If you cannot definitively, factually, and concretely prove that you are worth a billion dollars, then YOU ARE NOT A BILLIONAIRE. You do not have “tremendous respect for women” when your actions clearly show that you do not, just by saying “I have tremendous respect for women.”
If a poll says that you are behind in the national vote, this does not mean you are winning. THIS MEANS YOU ARE BEHIND. NOT WINNING.
I have twice engaged in a discussion thread on Facebook, where the other person was being rude, disrespectful and lying about something in the news or in a story. Both times, the pushback was offended, rude, and along the lines of how-dare-i-sully-their-belief-system-with-actual-facts. Cognitive dissonance. Both times, because I try to be a rational, thoughtful, and logical person, I had to step back and evaluate my own words, and both times I chose to step away, not because I was weak, but because I will not engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. That way does lie madness.
I deal with cognitive dissonance every day with my clients, because it is my job to identify the reasons someone keeps having the same experiences over and over, and keeps making the same mistakes over and over, and then help that person realize for themselves what is keeping them from achieving their success in life, how they cannot hold both the belief that they are a victim of a sexual assault, and that they are therefore responsible for that assault. They cannot believe that they were powerless to control their father beating them, and that they were responsible for being beaten. You cannot believe that your candidate is innocent of sexual battery WHEN HE BRAGS ABOUT DOING IT, and his victims come forward to say that he did to them EXACTLY WHAT HE BRAGGED ABOUT DOING.
There are lots of good ways to deal with cognitive dissonance on the individual level in therapy. But the only way to deal with it on the national scale is for all of us who know better to speak up. I think the catalyst for this diary was Jeffrey Lord on CNN last night saying in that smarmy, self-important way of his that he doesn’t see Hillary signs in Florida. Well, Jeffrey, here’s why. My signs have been stolen from my front yard twice. My car magnets have been stolen. Twice. My car has been vandalized, causing my husband to ask me to remove my signs from the back window (my response to the people stealing my magnets was to tape them inside my back window.) Finally, when I asked the local democratic office why there weren’t more Hillary signs, they told me that every time they put them up, they are gone by the next morning, and they get phone calls and emails showing them being burned in somebody’s back yard. So it’s not because there isn’t any support, it’s because every time we show our support, that happens. So the lack of signs is not a lack of support, its self-protection. The cognitive dissonance is, if you truly believed you were right, that your candidate was strong, there would be no need to deny the other side has any support.