Chapter 4.          Part B  

         Aronson was Festinger's student, who went on to win much acclaim in his own right. What they both worked on the most was cognitive dissonance theory. Cognitive dissonance theory says something fairly simple, but its consequences are profound and far-reaching. Basically, it says that the inclination of our human minds is always toward finding what sound like good reasons for doing what we want to do anyway, and even more vigorously argued reasons for the things we've already done. (See Aronson's "The Social Animal".) (1.)   

               

        What it says essentially is this: a human organism tends, actively, insistently, and insidiously, to think and act so as to perceive and affirm itself as being consistent with itself. The mind shows in every action that it directs the body to do, and especially in every phrase that it directs the body to utter, the desire to remain consistent with itself. In practice, what this means is that humans tend to find and state what appear to themselves to be good reasons for doing what they will have to do anyway in order to maintain the conditions of life with which they have become comfortable. The mind strives constantly inside the individual human brain to make theory match practice or practice match theory – or to adjust both – in order to reduce its own internal "clashing", i.e. what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance".

       The novice investment counselor who used to speak disparagingly of all sales jobs will soon be able to tell you with heartfelt sincerity why every person, including you, ought to have a carefully selected portfolio of stocks. The physician adds another bank of expensive tests and therapies – both of doubtful effectiveness – every year or so to his repertoire. The plastic surgeon can show with argument and evidence that all of the cosmetic procedures he performs should be covered by the state's health care plan because his patients aren’t spoiled and vain, they are "aesthetically handicapped".

     The divorce lawyer is not setting two people who used to love one another at each other's throats. He is merely vigorously defending his client's best interests, while his client's misery and despair – at the depths of cruelty to which he and his former spouse have sunk – grow more profound every week. The cigarette company executive not only finds what he truly believes are fundamental flaws in the research; he smokes over two packs a day. The general does indeed send his own son to the front. Even his mother-in-law's decent qualities (not her rude ones) become more obvious to him on the day on which he learns that she owns over ten million dollars worth of real estate. (All that worry! No wonder she’s rude.)

     And the Philosophy professor, whose mind is trained to seek out inconsistencies? He once said that he believed in the primacy of the rights of the individual citizen over any group rights. He sought to abolish any taxes that might be used to pay for social services. Private charities could do such work, if it needed to be done at all. But then his daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder, sometimes secretly goes off her medications, and periodically runs away from all forms of care, no matter how loving, ran off and became one of the homeless in the streets of a distant city. She was spotted and saved from almost certain death by alert street workers, paid (meagerly) by the state government. Now he argues for the responsibility of citizens to pay taxes that can be used to create social welfare programs and to hire workers whose job it is to look out for, and to look after, the destitute and unfortunate in society.

     He once considered euthanasia to be totally immoral. But now his aging dad with Alzheimer's disease has been deteriorating for over five years. Professor X is broke, sick, and exhausted himself. He longs for the heart-ache to be over. He knows that he cannot keep caring personally, day in and day out, for the needs of this now unrecognizable, pathetic, gnarled creature for very much longer. Even Dad, the Dad he once knew, would have agreed. Dad needs and deserves a gentle needle. Professor X is certain of it, and he tells his grad students and colleagues so during their quiet, confidential moments.

      

     Do we, in our endlessly subtle rationalizations, see what is not there? Not really. Out of the billions of sense details, the googuls of patterns that we might see among them, and the near infinite numbers of interpretations that we might give to those details, we tend to give prominence in our minds to those that are consistent with the view of ourselves and our way of life that we find psychologically most comforting. We don't like seeing ourselves as hypocrites. We don't like living with nagging feelings of anxiety (cognitive dissonance). Therefore, we tend to favor, and be drawn to, ways of thinking, speaking, and acting that will reduce that dissonance, especially in our internal pictures of ourselves. In private, inside our heads, we need to like ourselves.

           There is nothing really profound being said so far. But when we come to applying this theory to philosophies, the implications are a little startling.

        Other than rationalizations, the rationalists have nothing to offer. 

        

             Notes 

1. Aronson, Elliot; "The Social Animal", pp. 99 to 106; 

   W.H. Freeman and Company; 1972, 1976, 1980.