Reality, Not Realities

By Francis W. Porretto:

Perhaps the reason for our current plague of cognitive dissonance lies in all the “multiverse” movies and TV shows we’ve been watching. Ultimately it won’t matter. In this reality, where the speed of light in a vacuum is a generous 299,792,458 meters per second and Planck’s Constant is a steady 6.62607×10^-34 Joule-seconds, the facts are not merely stubborn (John Adams) but lethally inescapable (Sir Harold Bowden). We will face them and act on their implications, or we will be destroyed by our own willfulness.

     And one of the facts that will destroy us is this one:

We Can’t All Just “Get Along.”

     Not if we’re too close to one another, at any rate.

     Cognitive dissonance: The mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; when performing an action that contradicts one of those beliefs, ideas, or values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts one of the beliefs, ideas, and values. (Infogalactic)

     Many Americans suffer from cognitive dissonance on certain subjects. They strain to harmonize their adherence to some prescriptive axiom (“We can all get along if only we try harder”) with the indisputable facts (the race warfare that’s been going on for some six decades). I once suffered from it myself. Then I resolved to hew strictly to the facts, as I personally witnessed them and as they’re reported by persons and institutions I know to be reliable.

     That decision has cost me several friends. I refused to say or imply convictions I don’t hold in order to retain them. For commentators more prominent than I, the consequences have gone further than some social losses. It takes quite a lot of courage for someone whose livelihood depends upon retaining a publisher (or publishers) to stand to his tack under such pressures.

     But there are organizations determined to maintain the fiction against the pressure of the dissonance. There’s money and power in it. And they press their agenda in every imaginable format.***

     Let’s start with this piece from a colleague:

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