💾 Archived View for spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › humor › cogdis.txt captured on 2023-06-14 at 17:08:20.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The message for today is an explanation of a very interesting phenomeno in social psychology, Cognitive Dissonance. The reason it's important that those valuing their liberty understand this phenomenon is that by use of situations employing cognitive dissonance, an individual's attitudes and opinions can be manipulated by others, even without his being aware of the process; and as I'll show, the government and social activist groups understand and use this technique to good effect. By understanding how it works, you can largely immunize your mental processes against this sort of manipulation. Cognition is the process of conscious perception. Dissonance is conflict. Cognitive dissonance is a state of one's perceptions being put into a state of conflict, which must be resolved to regain feelings of calm and harmony. A point that must be under stood about the functioning of the human mind is that attitudes influence actions (no surprise there), but also that actions influence attitudes. If a person is overtly forced to perform some action, he may be distressed, but he will not be put into a state of cognitive dissonance, because the coercion involved is clearly apparent to him. If this same individual is, however, subtly coerced into performing some action contrary to his inclinations, the source of the coercion, in fact the coercion itself, is not apparent to him. The conflict between his conscious attitutudes and his (apparently) inexplicable actions cause the all important dissonance. This mental conflict must somehow be resolved for the subject to alleviate this conflict. The solution to this dilemma is, very reliably for a naiive subject, to alter his attitudes so that they no longer conflict with his actions. This may become more clear by relating a classic experiment in social psychology. As background it should be mentioned that part of the experience of being a college freshman is to be offered a few dollars to participate in mild psychological experiments. Ads are posted all over campus on a routine basis, and some of these "experiments" may consist of nothing more than opinion polls (perhaps combined with mysterious but meaningless tests such as word-association or short term recall tests in the presence of blinking lights or buzzing noises). By means of such phony "tests" the homework for real experiments can be performed. In this classic experiment, the homework consisted of determining, to good precision, the statistical breakdown among freshmen regarding their opinions on the desirability of decriminalizing marijuana. The test group of subjects was divided into two groups and separated to create a control situation. The two groups were told that their task was to write an essay, the control group was given a meaningless, emotionally neutral topic to write about. The test group was told to write an essay about why marijuana should not be decriminalized. (Note that at the time, the early 70's, this was an emotionally charged issue, and this opinion was contrary to the opinions of the majority of the students.) It was also announced that due to budget cuts, the pay for this "experiment" had been reduced to the token amount of one dollar. They were told that since this was undoubtedly a disappointment to them and contrary to their expectations, that in all fairness anyone who felt cheated could get up and leave right then, no one would hold it against them, and the dollar would be paid anyway. Naturally, no one left, as social pressure in such a situation would dictate. This was the subtle coercion involved. Everybody had, in effect, been coerced into writing an essay contrary to his opinion, but certainly not for the money because there wasn't much, and they didn't have to write it anyway, they could have walked out. But they wrote the essay anyway. "Why?", their unconscious thought processes asked. The way out of the dilemma was to alter their opinions to fit the essay they had written. Note that they were not asked their opinion on the issue before getting the essay assignment, so they weren't honor-bound to keep their stories consistent with what they might have said if so questioned beforehand. After the essays, both groups (the test group and the control group) were anonymously surveyed on their "real" (in fact, after-test) opinions on the topic. Sure enough, the group with the meaningless essay responded about as statistically expected, but the test group expressed opinions much more opposed to decriminalization than they, statistically, should have. By being subtly coerced into expressing a particular opinion, they had been heavily influenced in favor of that opinion. As a final check, other groups of students, well paid to write their essays, displayed no alteration in their opinions, as the reason for their writing the essays was obvious, the money they were paid to do it. We can see the same sort of mechanism at work, for instance, in that most rigorous mind-control regimen in the free western cultures, military bootcamp. The technique is to present the subjects with a difficult task, say, crossing an obstacle course in a short time, or better yet, a frightening one such as making their first parachute jump. The troops are lined up in a very public, large group, and told that if anybody had cold feet, he can back out now, and no one will think the less of him for it. Of course, that last is total nonsense, and everybody there knows it. The one who backs out will, by doing so, be publicly humiliated, and looked down upon by all his buddies. No one backs down. Afterwards, the troops, after being scared half out of their minds by the jump, cannot believe they would do such a crazy, dangerous thing simply to avoid a little embarrasment (which, of course, is exactly what they did it), so they alter their attitudes to fit their actions. They decide that they're rough and tough and they really like jumping out of airplanes. Another example, this one in civilian life, should show how the same principle can be applied to entire populations without the concentrated manipulation apparent in the military example above. In the 60's and early 70's, many school districts were forcibly desegregated by federal court-ordered bussing. Both blacks and whites opposed this, as neither group wanted its children shipped twenty miles away from home every day to attend school. Rather than engage in armed confrontations and police-state type tactics to overcome the parent's objections by force, which would just have hardened opposition to the already unpopular plan, federal officials, using the principle of cognitive dissonance and the advice of psychologists well versed in the technique, got subtle. They announced the bussing, but, to avoid widespread noncooperation, they announced that anyone who was strongly opposed to the idea could have his children exempted, and allowed to remain in his neighborhood school. The kicker was that, when parents attempted to do so, they encountered a deliberately contrived paperwork tangle of forms and applications which had to be filled out to get their child exempted. The system was designed so that several trips to various offices in different parts of town were required to complete the process. Naturally, few parents went to the great amount of effort necessary to get all the way through this process. They did not, however, realize that the paper tangle was the subtle coercion component of a cognitive dissonance-based scheme. Therefore they didn't explain their failure to keep their kids from being bussed by saying that it was too much trouble to fill out a few forms, (which was, in fact, exactly the case), but rather resolved the conflict by deciding that bussing for purposes of desegregation wasn't a bad thing after all. Through subtle coercion, thousands of members of the population were manipulated away from a very firmly held prior opinion. When the Communist Chinese did this to our GI's in North Korea, we called it brainwashing. When we do it to our own population at home, we call it social policy. The good news is that once you understand the process, you can spot the subtle coercions being applied to you, do what's required of you, and avoid the trap by correctly attributing your actions to that subtle coercion. In this way, you can become virtually immune to the technique, so your mind remains your own. Understanding the technique will also allow you to understand the cause of your friends' and relatives' changes of opinion to conformity with what the puppetmasters want them to think, even though they don't. The bad news is that, as government and other molders of opinion become more skilled in the use of this method, they will succeed with most of the population. The numbers who've been psychologically innoculated against this form of control (hopefully including you, if you understand and remember this explanation), or just too strong willed (read pig-headed) to be influenced, will be a dwindling minority. Your survival in the future may well depend on your ability both to resist such mental manipulations, and to understand their effects well enough to pretend convincingly to have been influenced just like everybody else. Once social control reaches a critical point, the last few heretics are always hunted down and either killed (as in Nazi Germany) or enslaved through less subtle methods (as in the Soviet gulags). Stay aware, stay inconspicuous, and stay alive! Good Luck.