Cultural dissonance is the largest problem facing the United States. It is not fake news or shallowly branded politicians nor is it Russian hacking, and it is not Donald Trump as a President. Although, his foreign policy might really put us in grave danger. Cultural dissonance is the underlying diseases with fake news, shallow politicians, propaganda hacking, as well as many other visceral fears we hold as a society representing the symptoms. But do not forget, cultural dissonance has to have a population willingly believe in falsehoods (yeah, it’s just as much our fault at this point). Many of you are going to say that you don’t buy into a lot of the falsehoods out there. Well, good for you, but we’re a nation, not only a group of different states and communities and we are all in this together. So, if my neighbor is stupid, so too am I, at least in an attempt to relate and understand.
Sad day, I know
A script of stupidity.
Assbag says, “if it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, sometimes walks like a duck, but is not a duck, we can just brand it as a duck, right?
D-bag responds in saying, “won’t that then kind of make it into a duck?”
Assbag continues by saying, “hopefully, right?”
D-bag finishes by pondering, “it at least looks like a duck.”
Simply put, it is kind of like throwing expensive wrappers on cheap-ass chocolate and charging an arm and leg (yes, Mast Brothers, I am talking about your fake-ass man buns). Those chocolates do look splendid on coffee shop counters, so they must actually be really good chocolates cause coffee shops are good (OMG.. dissonance and appropriation all-in-one).
I digress, but we’re really fucked.
To name a few.
– Cultural dissonance caused a demagogue authoritarian to be viewed as a safer, smarter and all around better nominee than a person with countless years of experience. We believed the hype about Clinton; we thought we were in danger inside and out and needed a man to protect us (fucking sexist election, indeed).
– Cultural dissonance has warped any political spectrum into a loop where Bernie supporters hold a lot of similarities to Trump supporters; both are populist, but we really only wanna believe Trump’s the dangerous one.
– Cultural dissonance causes us to seriously question counter-productive methods like divide and conquer as holding particular merit. Ivanka Trump says split planned-parenthood, so let us at least talk about the possibility of splitting it up. Or, the Trump administration won’t hire a full staff, must be problems finding people and not an easier way to clear house.
– Cultural dissonance allows a president who campaigned on healthy obstruction of the system to now complain about obstruction of the system; he’s already talking about reforming courts, the 1st amend (or just doing away with it), and all kinds of systemic shit. And we take him at his word and play along with the narrative in the news.
– Cultural dissonance causes incorrect statements said about our civil war to be a narrative of stupidity and not a notification to look back at a time when the nation was arguably more divided than it is now. Yesterday was quite a shame for us all. We only talked about how stupid Trump was, nothing about what we can still learn from the Civil War.
Conclusion, if any.
The problem that is more critical now is the ‘make it into a duck anyway’ scenario. Because of all the dissonance in the system, it is entirely too easy just believing the branding and believe it with all out abandon. Things seem so stupid and overwhelming; an easy solution just feels really fucking good. BUT WAIT! This is what cultural dissonance creates – things that are not real are thought of as real because they are cleverly seen as real, and we desire them to be real.
Confusing, no? Hence why cultural dissonance completely sucks. It’s a crapshoot, first-come-first-serve at making truth despite the reality on the ground. Worse for wear, in our hollowed out digital age, the art of cultural dissonance might actually be seen as a desirable method of business and governance. The more we allow divide and conquer the more dissonance is spewed into the system. It is not them lying; it is us willingly believing in their lies. Everyone lies, and everyone can get to an advantage lying unless we stop them and make them quit. We have to have justice as much as order; MLK was right in his thinking on this.
Go look up cultural dissonance yourself; it is legit. I am kind of telling you to get up and read between the lines on purpose and for at least a second just disbelieve for the sake of disbelieving. Disbelieve me if you will, but don’t stop there, go find out for yourself. Please, quit stopping at just disbelieve or believe, the shit has to be confirmed, it is just logical (DUH). Stop just looking at the cover already, at least read the introduction (they can be the best part anyway).
Academic findings.
Cultural Dissonance definition @ http://open.tean.ac.uk/handle/123456789/492
Cultural dissonance is the term commonly used to describe a sense of discomfort, discord or disharmony arising from cultural differences or inconsistencies which are unexpected or unexplained and therefore difficult for individuals to negotiate.
Jonah Lehrer on Robert Keohane (writing in the Boston Globe Ideas Section and in How We Decide) @ http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/07/13/political-dissonance/
A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”Partisan voters are convinced that they’re rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we’re actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990’s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯were
Partisan voters are convinced that they’re rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we’re actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990’s to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What’s interesting about this data is that so-called “high-information” voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren’t better informed than “low-information” voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn’t erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn’t follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton’s deficit reduction didn’t fit the “tax and spend liberal” stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. “Voters think that they’re thinking,” Bartels says, “but what they’re really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they’ve already made.” Once we identify with a political party, the world is edited so that it fits with our ideology.At such moments, rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to justify practically any belief. We use
At such moments, rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to justify practically any belief. We use the our fancy brain as an information filter, a way to block-out disagreeable points of view. Consider this experiment, which was done in the late 1960’s, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. They played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static⎯a crackle of white noise⎯to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.
