"Cognitive Dissonance"

The other day, I posted a query to my Facebook feed about who were the worst types of Trumpers. Amidst the obvious choices of wealth fetishists, racists, overgrown frat boys and the like, I offered the option to write in your own.

One person replied: “Cognitive dissonance.”

What he meant was that it is human nature to become intractable about one’s opinions, especially those we hold strongly. That for most people, once you convince yourself of a position, evidence to the contrary is so disturbing to your psyche that you are more likely to dismiss it, explain it away or repress it than consider it fairly. The worst type of Trumpers are those who won't admit who he is to themselves.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that if those were the worst type of Trumpers, it wasn't because of their cognitive dissonance, it was because of our own.

We see Trump wallowing in corruption. We see his 40-year history, a matter of public record, of cheating on his taxes, his wives and his contractors, of lying literally hundreds of times a week. We see that he is barely literate, that he has no understanding of the position he holds nor has he any interest in learning.

We see him committing fraud to the tune of millions of dollars over and over again, and wonder not just how he ever could have become President, but how millions of people will respond to these charges with something on the order of “Yeah, well, what about Hillary and Obama?” despite the fact that neither of them has been stained with any kind of scandal even approaching what happens to Trump in an average week. Despite that both boast a long record of public service while he has had none, and that their professional conduct compared to his has been impeccable.

We could accept, perhaps, if those people simply proclaimed they didn’t care for Obama’s politics or even that they didn’t like the idea of a woman with power. But to suggest somehow that Hillary Clinton should be behind bars while Donald Trump should be in charge of the entire country? It is literally impossible to fathom what twisted logical gymnastics one could have gone through to arrive at such a conclusion.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? I suspect that most of these people applied no logic at all. They got it in their head that Trump is the right guy for them and that was the end of it. They suffer no cognitive dissonance because they are quite effective at discarding logic and reason when it comes to Trump. 

But the rest of us have no such luxury. We work ourselves into a rage trying to figure out how a human being with access to basically the same kinds of neurons, synapses, sulci and gyri as we could have come to the conclusion that Trump is at all competent, let alone someone appropriate for ultimate power.

They happily trot down the lane in their MAGA hats and their “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, blissfully oblivious to the fact that crony after crony of Trump’s inner circle has been indicted or jailed, completely indifferent to the fact that people with years of dedicated service to our country have cried out that this man is unequivocally and gruesomely abusing his power, dismissing these brave souls as hoaxers or “never Trumpers,” while the rest of us are tearing our hair out wondering what we’re missing. 

Cursed with the ability to reason and respect for scientific inquiry, we have to consider the possibility, however remote, that they may be onto something, while they get to just decide that we hate America, are somehow not real, or are brainwashed by “fake news.”

It doesn’t seem fair. We desperately want to say, “well, they’re just idiots,” or, “there are a lot of horrible people in America,” but something nags us about the idea that tens of millions of people with whom we share citizenship are just stupid or terrible. Meanwhile, they seem unfazed by the absurdity of the idea that half the population of the country actively hates it here and is trying to destroy it from within.

Well, I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m here to tell you that we’re not crazy. Trump really is what we think he is and there are really people who will never care, for a variety of reasons that include some unholy cocktail of wealth fetishism, racism, power fantasies, fear of cognitive dissonance and…eye of newt, I guess. I’m afraid the best thing we can do is to dismiss the ones that cannot be reasoned with and hold fast to the ones that can, the way our ancestors dealt with bears and sabretooth tigers, and try to hang on until the winds of change blow our way again.

Trump Supporter's Guide to Sleeping at Night

When Trump does something horrible, like publicly ask a foreign country to investigate his political opponents or tell women of color in Congress to "go back where they came from," or pay off a pornstar to stay quiet about his adultery and then lie about it, refer to the following menu:

Choose as many as apply:

A) He didn't do it. Fake News

B) He did it, but it only seems wrong because failing left-wing media outlets make it sound worse than it is.

C) He did it, and it was wrong, but as long as he's keeping the gays/abortionists/immigrants in check, he can do whatever else he wants.

D) He did it, but he had to do it to Keep America Great

E) He did it, but the Democrats made him do it because they hate him.

F) He did it, but it doesn't matter because something that Obama/Hillary/Biden did was much worse (even if we don't know EXACTLY what that something is. Something about Benghazi or Kenya).

G) He did it, but it's good because it's making the liberals crazy.

H) He did it, but he didn't mean it, he was just making a hilarious (racism/treason/totalitarianism) joke.

I) He did it, but you only care because you hate him.

J) No, YOU'RE the racist!

Is It Okay to Get Something For Nothing?

“When you get something for nothing, you just haven't been billed for it yet.” – Franklin P. Jones, Humorist

One of the most deeply ingrained creeds in the American ethos is the idea that if you work hard, anything is possible. It’s the American Dream. The implied corollary to that, of course, is that if you don’t work hard, you’ll get nothing. More importantly, you deserve nothing.

This is an idea that seems so obvious to the average American that it is held firmly and without a doubt by every conservative thinker, from the most Alt-Right all the way down to the last rung on the conservative ladder, the modern political climate’s “moderate/centrist” Democrat.

It’s a point that seems so unassailable that even those further on the left usually don’t want to touch it. Andrew Yang, one of a score of candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination as I write this, has as the cornerstone of his platform the idea of UBI – Universal Basic Income, which says that every adult American will get $1000 a month on which to live.

This is the type of proposal that has conservatives waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. The very idea that not just some Americans, but EVERY American, would get a monthly stipend of a THOUSAND DOLLARS--$12,000 a year!—for just sitting on their behinds, is such anathema to those on the right and many in the middle, that they would rather see almost anything else become public policy.

It defies imagination just how preoccupied many Americans are with the sheer injustice of such a concept. It’s a principle that has “investigative journalists” from the mainstream conservative media regularly following around homeless people in the hopes of catching one sporting a new pair of sneakers or talking on a cellphone. It’s an idea that fills right-wing TV pundits with rage. “A thousand dollars! For nothing! Those freeloaders! Those savages!” As if a thousand dollars a month would allow someone with nothing to live high on the hog.

Can you imagine Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh trying to live on $1000 a month? I question whether they and their ilk could survive on $1000 a DAY.

And yet Yang, despite the swell of popularity he is enjoying and universal agreement that this is a bright guy who knows what he is talking about, is summarily dismissed when discussing UBI. The media seems to think he could not possibly mean it, and is just trying to pull eyes, the way candidates for Class President of your local High School would put up posters in bold letters exclaiming: “FREE SEX!...and now that I’ve got your attention…”

So, what is it that seems so obviously horrible to Americans about the idea of getting something for nothing? And why does it only apply to the poor? We don’t seem to care about the obscene amount of wealth that children inherit from their rich parents. Far from it, we build reality television shows around them. We don’t mind seeing Instagram models get six-figure paydays just for taking a picture of themselves sporting a certain brand of lipstick, even though this seems far from the type of “good day’s work for a good day’s pay” type of effort the Puritan forefathers of this country espoused.

No, it’s only the idea of people of limited means having their means a little bit less limited without any effort on their part that we find so objectionable. Is there any logical explanation for this?

Well, what are the arguments against something like UBI?

Some will say it’s not good for society. If people know they can get something for nothing, they won’t work. We’ll have a nation of freeloaders.

But this is obviously ridiculous. In most parts of the country, $1000 a month is enough money to put a roof over your head and feed yourself and little else. Would anyone who finds the idea of these luxuriating freeloaders so objectionable be content to have nothing more in life than three cheap meals and protection from the rain? Unlikely.

In fact, the reverse is almost certainly true. A person who is on the street and starving can do little else but try to survive. There’s no opportunity to interview for a job when you can’t shower or change your clothes or get a good night’s sleep. On the other hand, with $1000 a month, you could do all those things. And human nature being what it is, once you get a taste of a little comfort, you want more.

Something like UBI would mean no homeless people, a healthier population and more people looking for gainful employment. And if the cost of that is a handful of people who just want to live in a hovel and eat fast food and play video games all day, so what? Who does it hurt? Especially in comparison to what you get in return!

Of course, the other argument is, why should a hardworking American pay for other people to freeload? But this argument also doesn’t ring true. People routinely pay taxes that go to bribing big companies to stay in the U.S. by offering billion dollar tax cuts, that go to the building of giant military death machines that we will never use and often don’t work, and that go to many other things that ultimately offer less of a benefit to society than giving every American citizen a little bit of dignity.

And yet people would rather pay hundreds of dollars for all those things than part with one red cent to make sure a homeless person has a roof over their head or can see a doctor when they are sick.

Why? Even when it doesn’t affect them at all, they object. Even if UBI, universal health care and all the other programs that just give the most disadvantaged of our citizens a chance to succeed were to be paid for by a marginal tax on the wealthiest one percent, even if 99 percent of Americans would not be affected AT ALL, they still object. Why?

I suppose there’s the slippery slope argument. Some may say, well, if someone gets something for free now, they’re just going to want more and more. Eventually, we will get to that point where no one wants to work.

I don’t buy it. There are people in this country now that have more money than they can ever spend or will ever need, and they still put in full working hours every day. There are also people who volunteer their time and do work for nothing. And honestly, would it really be so awful if our society became so advanced that the only people who worked were people who want to?

Is the explanation that our true human nature is sour grapes? "I have to work, so why shouldn’t they?"  Is it that even if we will have so much more than they do either way, we absolutely refuse to let someone else have something that we had to work for? Is it true that for many Americans, it actually feels that someone getting a handout hurts them personally? Even if they don’t have to pay for it? Even if it’s someone they don’t know?

Unfortunately, for many, perhaps even most Americans, it seems that this is indeed the source of our indignation. A study by Zonghu and Li found that increases in relative income and absolute income both weaken negative emotion, but only increases in relative income improve positive emotion.

In other words, being well-off and being wealthier than those around you both make you less depressed, but what makes you feel really good is having more than others in your community. People actually derive joy in knowing that they are doing better than others, and helping the least fortunate closes that gap.

It’s not the idea of taking some of our money and giving it to the less fortunate that people find so objectionable, it’s the idea of taking some of our precious social status and giving it to the less fortunate that we can’t stand. It is our willingness and ability (or perceived willingness and ability) to work that is the currency that social programs for the less fortunate threaten to devalue, and that we cannot abide if we are to maintain our feelings of superiority.

Is there anything that can change this attitude? It will be tough. Even the idea of forgiving student debt has the people who have already worked off their own student debt up in arms. We really cannot stand the idea of someone else getting something for free that we had to work for, no matter what the positive consequences might be.

But maybe the least we can do is not stigmatize the very idea.