Blog titles and inner realities -

Real quick - Star Wars fans need to read this (it'll resonate in your mind much longer than my post).  Also, I must at least recognize that my son turns five today.   I won't blog about him, because I don't feel I have anything original and clever to say about fathering at the moment.  But in ten or twenty years when you read this, Evan, I love you to death. I hope you don't hate the the haircut I gave you this morning.  Enjoy the Legos.

And now on to my regularly scheduled post . . .

Cognitive dissonance.  It's probably the most important psychological theory that next to no one knows about.  The lay public knows regression, id/ego and superego.  They know anal retentive.  People know a thousand relics of non-scientific Freudian gibberish that the scientists within psychology abandoned fifty years ago.  People know crap that's utterly useless for understanding their own lives.  How many people know about Leon Festinger and the last half-century of impeccable cognitive dissonance research?

This isn't a lecture.  You want details?  Wikipedia exists for a reason (intellectual vandalism mostly).  This is about me, and the fact that my life is ruled by cognitive dissonance.  I am a walking talking contradiction.  I am seriously confused - luckily not in that 'Billy makes me feel funny' sort of way.  But I do admit, his butt does look good in those jeans.  But I digress . . .

I'm a rabidly pro-second amendment gun nut who wishes that guns could be disinvented.  I'm a bleeding heart liberal who thinks we can't afford our welfare system, and that it keeps more people in a cycle of entitled laziness than it pulls to higher ground.  I am a tithe-paying, church-going Mormon temple worker who can't see how gay marriage bans can possibly be constitutional.  I detest Barrack Obama, but I think Fox News must carry a top-secret electromagnetic lobotomy signal in its carrier wave.  It's the only explanation for Fox being the number one news channel in a county peopled with 'intelligent life'. 

I have no zen mastery over my own dissonance.  My brain works just as hard as anyone else's to rationalize away the contradictions.  Sometimes it works.  And I'll tell you about some of those at another time.  Usually it doesn't.  And I'm telling you about that right now.

Contradicting ideas crash around my head like rampaging bouncy balls.  (My original analogy involved physicists searching for the Higgs boson via the particle super-collider at CERN, but then I remembered that sometimes I'm so intensely dorky that I compulsively need to give myself a wedgie while plunging my own head in the toilet.  Oh yeah, and I'm annoyingly tangential sometimes - watch out for that!)   Like most people with attention deficit issues, it takes significant stress or caffeine to get my thoughts organized.  Ritalin and/or crystal meth would probably be helpful too, but I don't want to complicate my relationships with my neighbors by getting involved in dealer-junkie business transactions.  Anyway, my brain is always at war with itself.  Getting involved in psychology did not help.  Ever since I learned about cognitive dissonance, my natural tendencies to reduce it have been enormously less successful. 

One thing that Wikipedia might not teach you is that most modern dissonance theories claim that our drive to reduce cognitive dissonance is based in our need to protect our ego - our sense of self-esteem.  We reject views that have the potential of reflecting negatively on ourselves.  I have been oh-so-guilty of this in the past.  And I'll definitely provide some concrete personal examples - at another time. 

For now, I'm wondering why I've become so damn lousy at reducing cognitive dissonance.  Am I too lacking in self-esteem for the mechanisms to pick a side?  Have I evolved a meta-awareness akin to Dorothy seeing the man behind the curtain?  Or should I just go back to Freud, label myself as hopelessly neurotic, and be done with it?  All three are strong contenders.  Whatever the case, it feels like a particularly contentious session of British parliament every day inside my head.  And I will definitely rationalize that this is the reason I can't ever get anything done (definitely an ego-saving falsehood).

For you all, let's leave things at 'you are far less logical than you think you are.'  Unless you already know you're an emotional wreck.  In which case 'you are exactly as illogical as you think you are'.  If you feel I'm belittling you - I'm not.  My insights, as previously stated, have led to zero meaningful improvement in my own lot.  My inner monologue just has more accurate play-by-play during my ongoing cerebral freakshow.  And now you understand my esoteric blog title.