{"id":28890,"date":"2017-12-15T07:30:08","date_gmt":"2017-12-15T12:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28890"},"modified":"2017-12-15T07:30:08","modified_gmt":"2017-12-15T12:30:08","slug":"americas-painful-self-delusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28890","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s painful self-delusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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America\u2019s painful self-delusion<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\"\"America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America \u2013 that \u201cbrand\u201d \u2013 is incredibly strong.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s a very large gap between that long-held image and the reality of America today. What was once a government built for the people is now a government run for the rich and powerful, one that throws the people under the bus whenever their interests differ from those of the corporate and political leaders who run the show.<\/p>\n

And living in one world (the corrupt) while stubbornly believing you live in another (the ideal), despite mounds of evidence, causes a distinct kind of stress, often called cognitive dissonance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Psychologists suggest that when people are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they\u2019ll search for a way to resolve it, either by rejecting one view or the other as either wrong or unimportant. If you\u2019re a smoker looking at the link between smoking and cancer, for example, you\u2019ll either quit smoking or decide that the research is biased, wrong, or doesn\u2019t apply (in other words, that you\u2019re smart enough to quit before the long-term damage is done).<\/p>\n

But what happens if you can\u2019t resolve the two?<\/p>\n

For most of us Americans, resolving our cognitive dissonance would mean either accepting that we\u2019re impotent and living futile (and feudal) lives, or rejecting our lifestyles and actively fighting the rot in the system. If we\u2019re not willing to do either of those, the dissonance stays \u2013 and eats at us.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s painful self-delusion America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2675,17512,17513,827],"class_list":["post-28890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cognitive-dissonance","tag-defiant-living","tag-self-delusion","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28891,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28890\/revisions\/28891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}