Soothing Those Vexing Psychic Splinters

A man who wants hand-carved wooden stanchions for his mantel hires for ten dollars an hour Mexican men who, um, probably lack green cards, and is delighted with the result of their labors.  Yet this same man vehemently disparages illegal immigration and supports strong measures to combat it. 

How can this man hold such strikingly conflicting opinions? 

Maybe he applies different rules of logic.  The laborers are available, their work is excellent, and certainly they can use the money (magnitudes lower than what a union-qualified carpenter would charge).  As for the border, patrol it! 

How can these disparities occupy one mind?   

Maybe he literally cannot see the inconsistency.   Maybe he builds walls between discrepant opinions and neatly separates them, and so sees only constancy in each little enclave.  Just as in dealing with discrepancies this would take effort, but few people, I think, would be aware of constructing psychic fences.   Such efforts would tend to remain safely subliminal.   

As to cognitive dissonance, therefore, we can recognize and work with it--really what that means is changing our mind, with all that the phrase implies--or we can quarantine it, applying different rules to each chamber.  

One last example. 

The people elect to the presidency a man whose refreshingly stellar intellect and inspired solutions promise a sharp deviation from the corrupt and divisive practices of the prior regime.  Instead of change, however, the new administration proves to be practically indistinguishable from its predecessor--in fact, almost a seamless extension of it.   

Our expectations for the promises made by this man don't begin to be met.  Here is the sting of cognitive dissonance; how do we salve it?  If we choose to recognize this cognitive dissonance, we act on either expectation or reality to resolve it.  We can close our eyes and hope everything will go away or get better, or we can have empathy for the president, speculating that he is not really so much in control.  Expectations too can be changed or denied. 

Or, accepting the abyss between expectation and reality, we can become cynical or angry, concluding that the expectations raised by this man's pre-election promises were lies.  And further concluding that any differences between the two parties that allegedly represent the people of the US are so vanishingly small as to be nigh on imaginary. 

Sometimes, even after we apply honest effort to resolve cognitive dissonance, the pain remains.  

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