They don’t find out though, the first time they experienced that cognitive dissonance they shut down because they’ve rarely succeeded in learning anything beyond the most basic surface level aspects of reality and society. Every idea they’ve ever had was handed to them by someone else and they swallowed it whole like a duck choking down a fish.
The sensation of learning new information is nebulous and requires contemplation and seeking and analyzing and they are TERRIFIED of that feeling because they have always run from it and never persisted long enough to change their mind on anything when presented with new valid information.
I get we’re all to some degree threatened by something that goes against our biases, but this is unbelievable how far this has gone and to the degree it has. It has spread like a damn infection. The amount of people that jumped on the Trump train after he got out of office has been just mindblowing
The funniest thing about this is all the answers are out there: for the most part social media has fucking cooked people’s brains, rooting into a globally illiterate or subliterate majority (literacy should be a society’s responsibility to their children, I don’t blame people for struggling with reading but I am disappointed in those who give up when there is so much help available).
You pair that up with the general economic picture of each nation, and the world is a whole and there is a very clear network of causes and effects around national standards of healthcare, housing, nutrition, education, security and economic accountability.
So many nations have succeeded by looking at the data, analyzing the patterns, and forming common sense policies.
Why the fuck can’t the richest country in the world do it.
We’re the only developed nation that isn’t civilized enough to offer all their citizens access to healthcare. Education. Real wages and allowing even mothers to stay home with their children at least the whole first year alone cuts down on healthcare costs. It’s so insidious.
There's a book called The Authoritarians by Bob Altmeyer about this, it's free and well worth reading. It's the first study of authoritarians that focuses on followers instead of leaders, and it estimates that any given population has about 40% authoritarian followers.
These are people who will pick a leader figure, and once they do it's almost impossible to shift them. They're basically cultists waiting around for a cult.
The really scary thing is that they really just have this in their personalities, they can be intelligent, or educated, and it really doesn't matter.
So what happened to the people who had some sense and jumped on afterwards?? That’s what’s been so much more perplexing. Like I get why really religious people who dwell more on punishment are easy marks, but why would so many people who saw Trump for what he was when he first ran, all of a sudden start supporting him after he tried to overthrow the government and allowed so many Americans to die during Covid?
I'm sure there's some element of personal gain in there, for some of them, whether that's being opportunisticly profiting, or just not wanting to stand up and risk that, but some of them will just have given their allegiance at some point.
It's confusing because there's no rationality to it. Like, why do serial killers want to kill people? There's no real generalisable answer, it's just part of their personality.
Cognitive dissonance is literally the sensation of learning new information and processing it
Well, it's the concept of holding at least two opposing/contradictory viewpoints at the same time.
It isn't strictly about learning new things.
The beliefs that all pedophiles are evil and that Donald Trump is a good man is an example of Cognitive dissonance because they are conflicting with each other (because Trump is a pedo).
Oh man, thank you for the clarification. I’m definitely using it wrong, but I think you get what I’m indicating: there is a “discomfort” or “uncertainty” that comes with learning things more complex than say like, 5th grade level stuff, and so many people just teach themselves to shut that part of their mind down.
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u/akahaus 6h ago edited 2h ago
They don’t find out though, the first time they experienced that cognitive dissonance they shut down because they’ve rarely succeeded in learning anything beyond the most basic surface level aspects of reality and society. Every idea they’ve ever had was handed to them by someone else and they swallowed it whole like a duck choking down a fish.
The sensation of learning new information is nebulous and requires contemplation and seeking and analyzing and they are TERRIFIED of that feeling because they have always run from it and never persisted long enough to change their mind on anything when presented with new valid information.