Are you suffering Cognitive Dissonance?

Human beings like to feel in control of their environment. It’s a survival mechanism. We form theories and look for patterns so that we can navigate an uncertain world with some sense of confidence that we’re making the right decisions. If we didn’t have this instinct, we’d spend most of the day sitting on the sofa, paralysed by indecision.

The trouble is, it’s very easy to get wedded to the illusion of certainty. It takes a lot of effort to build a world view that we feel comfortable with. So we hate it when our way of looking at things is challenged. Particularly if incorporating the new information would mean having to change our minds about a view that has proved useful in the past.

The discomfort we feel when we can’t incorporate a piece of information into our existing world view is called ‘cognitive dissonance.’ It’s an unpleasant sensation – like an itch you can’t scratch. So it’s something that we all try to avoid.

We stock up on arguments to defend our views, and attack the opposing view. And sometimes, if we can’t give a well-argued answer to a point, we’ll resort to distraction tactics or personal attacks.

In short, we’d rather be proved right than proved wrong. So we seek out information and views that confirm our own take on things, and ignore information that contradicts it. 

These few paragraphs were lifted directly from an Investment Magazine's Newsletter. Investing it seems is just part of the hologram!

The process of awakening, like trading, can often be less than comfortable, and I believe that a large part of that discomfort is because of the cognitive dissonance inherent in the process. In fact you could say that awakening is a process of cognitive dissonance, as new information threatens to upset our world view.

Perhaps the toughest part of the process is to pass the decision making from the head to the heart. As the above passage begins "human beings like to feel in control of their environment" and the rational mind is hard wired to achieve this. When the mind rationalises it quite literally discards or ignores information which challenge its "illusion of certainty". 

In this incredible shift in consciousness which we are currently "enjoying" many still insist that nothing has changed. Well, in their reality that is probably the case, as their "illusion of certainty" discounts the incredible amount of new information available to us and their rationalisers work harder than ever to discard any possibe source of cognitive dissonance.

This is particularly true amongst those who seemingly have most to lose. The establishment and its beneficiaries are putting a huge amount of energy into sustaining their illusion and that will continue until the discomfort created by that effort becomes too much and they will choose to join the rest of us is the relatively mild discomfort of cognitive dissonance.