Ok people are misusing the term "cognitive dissonance" again!
I meant to do this rant years ago. So here goes.
Phrases like, "Boy, MAGA must sure be feeling cognitive dissonance today!" are not only using big words with total ignorance about what they mean, but they're helping promote the kind of ignorance that helps cults retain followers.
Manipulation of the natural mental balancing act between cognitive dissonance and consonance is the core of how people get trapped in cults. People stay stuck in MAGA *because* MAGA influencers have created a complicated maze in their followers' minds that wards off THEIR ABILITY TO FEEL the dissonance one normally would when confronted with facts and basic human empathy.
Mind control completely subverts the mind's natural process for righting itself in the face of disconfirming information.
Events like this assassination (and all its surrounding discourse) have been pre-primed in the MAGA mind to cause them CONSONANCE. Almost anything you say or do to point out what to *you* feels like dissonance, will to them only enforce the reasons they are correct in their worldview.
This of why it's so incredibly difficult to get someone out of a cult, and why folks who leave cults find it so difficult to decondition from the cult's influence, even after they stop believing in its core ideology.
And why I wrote a book to help people do that.
And why one of the first things I explain in Recovering Agency is how cognitive dissonance/consonance theory works, citing Leon Festinger who developed the theory starting in the 1950s.
I will explain this theory in the next post... right after breakfast.
Because it explains how your mind works to accept and reject beliefs. Knowing this gives you awareness of your own mental processes, and can maybe empower you with Fox-watchin' Uncle Bob, who used to be a guy who cared, way back in '98.
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#AbuseCulture #cults #MAGA #psychology #ReligiousTrauma
