by Jay Dyer, Contributor, Waking Times
Cognitive dissonance is the firewall that exists in most minds when confronted with a challenge to their basic beliefs about the world. As it is human nature to avoid admitting being in error or having been duped, for most humans the ego zealously flees the admission to oneself of significant error. Challenges to our worldviews or paradigms of belief are also quite jarring – they can unsettle our comfortable existence and lead us to question everything we held dear, and might even lead to psychological or spiritual crises when the consideration of being fundamentally in error is on the table.
As a result, the ego erects a series of firewalls to protect its fragility in order to maintain the schemas, or archetypal systems of symbols, that have been erected in the mind since birth. These structures, even if manifestly in error, are still mysteriously propped up by the mind or ego because of the psyche’s desire for order and meaning – “everything in its place,” to quote Radiohead. However, for those who enter arenas where the goal is to challenge these structures of belief, such as religion, philosophy or even alternative information, being open to the possibility of change is required.
In my experience, the process of continual learning has been the only path that resulted in true growth in understanding, while those who over the years were angered or frustrated by my own experiments in various paradigms became a thorn in the side. In my mind, this is a powerful vindication of theDunning-Kruger effect, where the illusion of cognitive bias functions to give close-minded individuals an air of superiority, paradoxically unable to grasp how much they don’t know precisely because they presume to know. In such cases we have a powerful presentation of the ego point made above, that the fear of error and the unknown provokes the firewall reaction to prop up the existing paradigm lest the psyche undergo any tough transformation.
Relating this idea to classical mythology, I have titled this the mystery of the serpentine mirror, where the fallen psyche demands the rest of the world reflect its own narcissistic projections perfectly, as in a mirror, and when the external world fails in this high demand, various pathologies and disorders result, leading to delusion, mania, psychopathy, etc. A good example of this can be seen in the mass delusion of relativism, where no facts are objectively true or certain, aside from the relativistic ego’s solipsism. The relativistic psyche’s projection of its whims and demands upon the external world is manifestly not true, and yet despite every fact of daily life testifying to this delusion (that the world is not chaotically relative), the ego consistently props up the lie that it is.
In a somewhat famous psychological warfare document, Timothy Thomas assesses the analogy of the human body and mind to a biological computer as follows in “The Mind Has No Firewall”: So far, we have been considering this matter from the perspective of psychology and philosophy, but this microcosmic level can be expanded to understand things on a macroscopic level. When considered at the social or geopolitical level, the scientific understanding of paradigms and worldviews have long been the subject of research for corporations, think tanks, and intelligence agencies. Since advertising and psychological warfare have similar goals, the application of the above principles are thus fitting for intelligence agencies and social engineering techniques…
more…
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/05/27/iq-psy-ops-and-the-civilization-of-the-scam/
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