Time to banish Leon Festinger

I’ve always thought that “cognitive dissonance,” the theory that people can’t handle the truth, was as dumb as cat whisker marmalade. An article in today’s online The Atlantic described the maxim this way:

Cognitive dissonance, coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, describes the discomfort people feel when two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior, contradict each other. I smoke is dissonant with the knowledge that Smoking can kill me. To reduce that disso­nance, the smoker must either quit – or justify smoking (“It keeps me thin, and being overweight is a health risk too, you know”). At its core, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.”

Dissonance is most painful when evidence strikes at the heart of how we see ourselves – when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical, competent, or smart. The minute we make any decision – I’ll buy this car; I will vote for this candidate; I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax – we will begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative. Before long, any ambivalence we might have felt at the time of the original deci­sion will have morphed into certainty. As people justify each step taken after the original decision, they will find it harder to admit they were wrong at the outset. Especially when the end result proves self-defeating, wrongheaded, or harmful.”*

This is a theory that has “inspired more than 3,000 experiments.” And it is imbecilic. “The smoker must either quit – or justify smoking.” How about – “I smoke, and I know I shouldn’t.” Or, “I have this idiosyncrasy, where my convictions occasionally evaporate before my urges. I self-sabotage.” Or, “I can’t justify it.” Or, “Lo, I am imperfect.” How in the name of let's-take-a-poll research did a belief in the psycho-struc­tural inevitability of human frailty and the tendency of some people to delude themselves become one of the seminal concepts in psychology? How did the Great Meme that assumes people can’t tolerate “discomfort” and must twist their way out of it not get printed on the back page of Popular Science magazine sixty-three years ago then evaporate from memory with the morning light?

In this time of Trump, when Narcissism, delusion and rationalization have become pandemic, psychologists and other writers must deplore these flaws, not reaffirm their false normality. This is the time to question self-soothing attitudes: We should be applying a new kind of jackhammer to social thinking and personal hypnosis. If you value Conserv­a­tive principles, must you blind yourself to the president’s psychopathy? If I favor liberal ideology, do I have to love labor unions or paternity leave? Do you have to think face masks are bad because you want Trump to be reelected? Do you have to be right? Maybe the new era, post-Trump and post-insanity, should be a Renaissance of brutal realism, not another ascendancy of one homogeneous dream program, one cult over another. Biden will be good, bad, confused and confusing. Some Supreme Court right-leaning decisions will make sense. Liberalism will be recognized to be right and wrong simultaneously: humane yet coercive. “Woke” will disappear when you wake up and think for yourself. We could stand a national birth of personal dispassion and unaccustomed maturity, where a person doesn’t have to be right and comfort­able. Where his integrity will not be a matter of dogmatic faith but of facing the truth. Walt Whitman knew this: “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”**

Festinger’s achievement was to convince people they are so weak that their eyes will instinctively shut before painful reality. Another founding member of Camp Abject is Martin Seligman with his “learned helplessness,” the sorry hypothesis that our character bends and breaks, we become certified losers when we have suffered one too many losses. These psychological researchers and others like them have foisted on several generations “a conception quite unworthy of free men”:*** that principles of human psychology are a matter of cynical statistical trends rather than of complex factors in individual lives.

I picture, in my fantasy mind, a time when most people will be enough to be themselves, will allow truth to be more important than ego, and not have to cling to a flag, or to rage. It really would have to be an evolution (clearly more than one election cycle).

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* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/role-cognitive-dissonance-pandemic/614074/.

** Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version, verse 51. 

*** From Lord Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” from the final section: WHAT WE MUST DO – https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html.