For example, when people smoke (behaviour) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive Dissonance is a condition, or state-of-mind, which a large portion of the U.S. population clearly suffers from today.
By Kieron Kead:
The coverage and context of Fox News is a 24/7 exercise in Cognitive Dissonance. Fox projects to an old, scared, and very white audience, an imaginary wish that life in America should return to the 1950’s.
The hugely successful candidacy of Donald Trump as GOP nominee lies in the falsehoods and impossible promises of that messaging. Harking to a world that has changed dramatically over the past half century since Nixon was around.
Some examples: -Ed.Being Republican is supposed to mean one believes in minimal government, low taxation, sensible regulation of commerce, and personal responsibility. Add to that an underlying belief that Republicans are more patriotic than other citizens, and that they can exercise fiscal prudence without a cap on military spending.
Every time Republicans open their mouths this summer, it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity. If you try to apply logic to a political party that believes contraception leads to out-of-wedlock births, then you’re just going to give yourself a migraine.
Republicans believe that government spending causes unemployment. But we can’t cut the defense budget, because that would put people out of work.
Republicans say that the wealthy need the incentive of massive tax breaks to create jobs, but the same logic does not apply to the people doing the jobs. According to Republican logic, abolishing the minimum wage would unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of the working class.
In Texas, we’ve got a lot of Republicans who work all week sucking dinosaur juice out of the ground and then go to church on Sunday where they learn Earth is only 6,000 years old. They might spend the afternoon trying to keep their lawns green despite record-breaking temperatures, secure in their belief that global warming is just a liberal hoax.
On Wall Street, investment bankers rail against new regulations that stifle innovation while we’re still cleaning up from their financial Katrina. These same bankers demand they be allowed to use the bailout to give bonuses to the jackwagons who ruined our economy. Otherwise they’d quit.
The Republican Congress just passed a new farm bill that increases farm subsidies by $9 billion — and pays for the increase by cutting food stamps. Under Republican logic, you pay people to grow food by making it harder for people to buy food.
Republicans think it’s OK to invite Indians to come to America for well-paying high tech jobs. But it’s not so bueno for Mexicans to sneak over the border to pick our fruit, scrub our toilets and do our dishes. Somehow those are the jobs worth protecting.
Today one can’t really vote Republican anymore if you also believe in science, the art of compromise, that women have brains of their own, in the sensible use of our armed forces, in staying out of another nation’s business unless absolutely necessary and that America’s founders had it absolutely right with the Constitutional separation of church and state.
That separation has stood the country in very good stead for the past 240 years.
None of these things jibe with the GOP message since 1968.
This year take a look at history over the last 50+ years. And remember that the last GOP president who actually practiced Conservative principles once elected – leaving the nation and the Treasury better off than when he took office was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Ike left the White House in 1961. Somehow, it all got perverted after that.
The way I see it anyway!
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