“Cognitive Dissonance” is the difference between facts and the reality one can accept.  If the facts are too far from the reality, and too uncomfortable to accept,  people cannot accept them, at least at first.  It generally takes suffering to convince someone that the facts are true.

There are many applications to this.  The doctor can advise a patient to lose weight, for example.  Well, maybe the person wants to keep on in the same lifestyle, maybe that would create too much “dissonance” with their current reality, so they don’t accept the message.  It would be too uncomfortable to change the lifestyle, it would involve too much discipline, and is not the message the individual wants to hear.  So perhaps the message from the doctor to the patient falls on deaf ears.

Fast forward that same scenario by ten years.  Perhaps the doctor has been faithfully each year saying the same message…you got to lose weight…for nine years and the doctor has been ignored.  This year, though, things are different.  The patient, “You know Doc, my clothes don’t fit well, I struggle to breathe, I have trouble bending over to tie my shoes, my joints ache,  I don’t enjoy my life as much as I used to, maybe I will start a program to lose weight.”

The patient has had a mental switch and there is not as much dissonance as there was before between the doctor’s message and the willingness of the patient to make a change.

We are nationally in a state of cognitive dissonance.

It is a state of denial to remain focused only on the election, when there is “an elephant in the living room”.

We have a person holding the reigns of power in the United States while a number of highly qualified and highly educated professionals and attorneys  have gone to the expense and trouble of investigating this same individual’s birth certificate and found it to be a fraud, yet, there is not yet a popular movement to remove this individual from public office.    I mean, if the local elementary teacher were exposed to be a former pedophile, don’t you think there would be an outrage among the community to remove him?  Even the mainstream media might get on that bandwagon.  However, in this case, the game continues to be played “have an election, it’s more comfortable than dealing with the truth.”

When it comes to highly powerful people, the game that is played is the game of  ”The Emperor’s New Clothes”.  Basically, at the end of that story, the only one who could say the truth, that the emperor was parading around naked, was a little boy, who didn’t have his livelihood at stake for telling the truth.  ”Mommy, the emperor has no clothes on.”  All the King’s men, and if there were today’s media there they would have been included, were hush-hush, and did not said the truth, because they would have been fired on the spot for exposing the truth.

This is a massive case of cognitive dissonance.  The majority of people, including people of power in politics and the media, are afraid of looking at the reality of what is going on…there is too much cognitive dissonance with their current comfort zone.

However, what if things get massively uncomfortable under Obama?  Will that crack the shell of fear that the public, politicians, and media alike have of dealing with this issue?  Like the fictional example above, after ten more years of suffering the patient was willing to begin to think about a new direction.

G. Edward Griffin, who wrote The Creature From Jekyll Island, discusses the fact that over time, people are more open to looking at things they first discounted.  Things he said years ago have come to pass and while he was discounted years ago, well, not so much any more.  If you didn’t see the interview, you can view it by clicking on a former post, The Author of The Creature From Jekyll Island.