Guest Post by Scott Adams
Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn’t even complete. I’ve heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing?
It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. This is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it.
This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on PREDICTING the outcome of the election using the Master Persuader Filter. I told you it would be easy to fit any theory to the facts AFTER the result. And sure enough, we can fit lots of theories to the facts. At least 24 of them by CNN’s count.
Generally speaking, the greater the persuasion, the more cognitive dissonance you get. Trump is – in my opinion – the greatest persuader of my lifetime. I expected this level of cognitive dissonance. Next time you see a persuader of this magnitude, you can expect the outcome to be cognitive dissonance in that case too.
This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s the setup that triggered them.
1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.
2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.
3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.
Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.
There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place. When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to explain-away the discrepancy.
So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?
You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)
In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both.
As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.
That’s why the protestors live in a movie in which they are fighting against a monster called Trump and you live in a movie where you got the president you wanted for the changes you prefer. Same planet, different realities.
Cogenitive Dissonance. If Trump Wins he will build a wall on the Southern Border, I can no longer take this racists country. Therefore, I’m revoking my citizenship and moving to Canada.
Always Canada, never threatening to move to Mexico. Why is that?
They intend to bring Mexico here.
Going there would be a waste of time since they just have to wait here till it arrives.
They’d find it too tough to learn to cope in Spanish, eh?
Careful! Just mentioning anything that requires effort might “trigger some folks”.
Great article by Scott Adams. It really helped me understand what my wife is going through.
Yes, I live with a Liberal Hillary support. Love is blind I guess.
Deaf might be better, or both depending.
I just wanted to say that I noticed both Trump and Clinton adopted a Margret Thatcher hair style towards the end of their campaigns. Hair that looks like a golden helmet and doubles as a halo when they were under television lights.
I read an interesting report today that really got me thinking. It showed and reported on the 25 arrests made last night for violence/rioting in Portland–and a rare episode of surprise struck me.
It turns out that 22 of the 25 arrests were white males/females !!?? I know it is a degree of supposition on my part but when I hear of burning American flags and waving Mexico flags etc, I presumed that we had rioting by the disaffected–the immigrants and urban underclass/impoverished.
What surprised me was that the rioting was primarily the SJW crowd–that’s right, the special snowflakes have left their safe spaces long enough to commit violent and riotous civil unrest.
I’d say a full 2/3rds of the mugshots were white males of late teens or very early 20’s. That alone seems to bust the narrative of so many Democrat pundits who masquerade as “journalists” with their “whitelash” opining.
What is really going on-as Scott so astutely observed ( very perspicacious of him) is that this is mostly a bunch of privileged white brats who are throwing a giant tantrum. The parents of these adult children, and especially the universities that coddle them, have insulated these youngsters from simple reality so long that they are not cognitively fit to function in a real world. A world where people have different viewpoints and maintain the right to express those opinions. A world where people outside of their self-imposed, segregated safe spaces also are conceded rights.
I better stop now or I’ll be writing my first blog instead of a quick comment–but it is amazing that the media continues to twist and spin what is really occurring. Some overgrown toddlers are trying to hold their breath until the rest of us cave in and give them their way—and they actually believe they are right and they still might get their way. Cognitive Dissonance indeed.
PS: my wife made a hilarious comment/analysis today–she mentioned that the USA has more rioting, deaths and civil unrest on Black Friday every year than what is currently going on and it is usually heralded almost as a “good thing” as a spur for the holiday spending lends to economic growth…….hmmmm.