Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the opposite of intellectual honesty. To define it succinctly, it is when incompatible ideas are entertained as synchronous. This most often occurs when people commit themselves to a particular belief for too long. When examined, the legitimacy of the belief is obvious to the believer, and everything else is mere coincidence or triviality. The evidence presented by the belief is more often than not valid in and of itself. It is instead, from my perspective, the belief that is what needs to be questioned. Just keeping an open mind at all times lets us change beliefs as we live, instead of letting beliefs change the way we live.

"If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief."

- Terrence McKenna

Beliefs are all fine and good and all that, only, that when one commits too wholeheartedly to a particular belief, that outlook gets rendered askew. It boils down to a simple dichotomy; in facing the mystery that is the human condition, one can entertain the perspective that the mystery has not yet sufficiently been elucidated, or that the mystery is explainable enough by the current dominant paradigm. I consider myself a member of the former party over the latter, yet, there are particular mysteries that I assume to be explainable enough. My beliefs might just as well be false, same as all other beliefs. There is too much mystery for me to adhere to any specific perspective.

To be able to entertain an idea like statist based capitalism and consider that some idea of justice can coincide, as in both capitalism (or any other tyrannical system for that matter) and justice can exist simultaneously is called cognitive dissonance. Holding and apple and an orange while thinking you're holding two apples is cognitive dissonance. The experience and conceptual structure to explain the experience are inharmonious. As far as statism and authentic freedom can be compared, they are incompatible in my view, and I call to anyone who wishes to comment to see my post written on the matter, here.

If you believe in something called statism, you're automatically precluded from believing in its opposite, that is, a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in this act.

This paraphrasing can be demonstrated very quickly and easily: if you approve of statism you authorize a system of domination in one form or another that will eventually lead to violence against sovereign individuals. By complying with the status quo everyone is abdicating that inherent sovereign freedom which all individuals possess in favour of being coerced into hierarchically regimented systems of violence. The people in question here are not even aware of the situation. The relationship of individuals with the world has largely been programmed into our behaviour by social models and other factors to be developed further under the topic of mind control. Nonetheless, to be subjected to these states of mind control is to be satisfied with a state of cognitive dissonance. That's the point I wanted to make here.