Dissonance to Informational Control in Technological Society: Part 1
How situational dissonance leads to generalized dissent
Continued from The Dissemination of Information in Technological Society: Part 3…
This part looks at the common routes to developing cognitive dissonance against establishment propaganda, why such dissonance is reasonable, why one cannot flee elsewhere anymore to avoid having to deal with it, and which types of people are most likely to experience it.
THE RISE OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE AMONG THE MASSES
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” - Gustave Le Bon
Normal people often experience cognitive dissonance to mass media propaganda in their own area of expertise. However, they compartmentalize their dissonance and refuse to apply it to other areas of life. Michael Crichton called this phenomenon the Gel-Mann Amnesia effect:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper when, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
Curtis Yarvin argues that the Gel-Mann Amnesia effect is rational because the costs of generalized dissidence is too high for most people. He states,
Given Conquest’s law—‘everyone is reactionary on the subjects they understand’—many adopt a craven, but all too human, corollary. After taking a bold stance in their own specialty, they have no stomach for any other fight. Reactionary enlightenment in one field should cast Bayesian doubt on other fields. Instead, local enlightenment reinforces global ignorance. Logically, the specialist should reason that if his own field, which he knows closely, is corrupt, other fields which he cannot examine in detail may be corrupt as well. But emotionally, the cost of a general dissidence far exceeds the value of extending the inference. The sweet spot is general compliance, local dissidence.
Outside of most people’s dissidence in their own area of expertise, one may attempt to convince others of alternative viewpoints, to provide facts and statistics and alternative narrative framing outside of the mainstream, but one likely won’t make headway in adjusting their perspective until they experience a level of cognitive dissonance from events in their own lives that becomes too painful to ignore. It’s sometimes easier to shake a normal person out of their brainwashing during periods of major economic uncertainty.
Obviously biased media reporting is one way to shock people out of compliance. Let’s go through a couple examples.
An example that woke up many people was the media coverage over the George Zimmerman trial in 2012. Zimmerman was accused of murdering Treyvon Martin after the 6’2”+ Martin pushed the 5’8” Zimmerman onto the ground and was beating him senseless until Zimmerman shot him in self defense. The media portrayed Zimmerman as an overzealous racist and Martin as an angelic schoolboy, showing multi-year old photos of a beaming and much younger and smaller Martin, and highlighting he was just going out for a walk for “a bag of skittles.” Obama injected himself into the conversation and said “If I had a son, he would look like Treyvon.” Thanks for pouring gasoline on a tense racial situation, Barack. The country had not yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis at the time and the fear and uncertainty from it was in the back of everyone’s minds.
Another eye opening incident was the 2006 Duke Lacrosse scandal which the media obsessed about for months, hysterical about a fake gang-rape that never happened.
Another was the 2014 Michael Brown incident where Brown robbed a store, violently assaulted the clerk, grabbed a cop’s gun and, per the DOJ from witness interviews, tried to bull-rush the cop leading to him being shot to death and this was used as evidence of institutional racism. He was even canonized with a plaque.
Other than shockingly biased media events, many normal people have become disillusioned with official narratives through a couple other routes:
Men who are unsuccessful in their romantic lives take the “red pill” to try to improve their dating results.1 They deconstruct female behavior between what women say they want versus their revealed preferences (where unconscious female desires result in hypergamy2), pioneered by pick-up artists Roosh, Roissy, Mystery, Strauss, etc;
2000’s era pickup artists. A motley, clownish crew, but one of the routes toward generalized dissent. Nutritionally, where expert-approved carb-heavy “food pyramid” diets result in obesity, diabetes and other health issues, and (usually) men seek out better diets (the biologist P.D. Mangan is a fantastic expert on nutrition and health); and
Political disillusionment, where politicians running for office promise reforms yet never deliver, such as in 2017 when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and Presidency on a populist platform of immigration and trade reform and Obamacare repeal, and instead got…tax cuts for the rich.
These route to dissent involve an individual experiencing cognitive dissonance in their lives resulting in a prolonged period of emotional or psychological pain, followed by the desire to find an explanation to alleviate their pain, which mainstream society cannot provide given their narrative falsehoods are the cause of it. The lower status an individual is in the eyes of society, the more likely that person is likely to experience psychological pain leading to cognitive dissonance. Currently white males, the most disfavored group in the United States, have much higher levels of disillusionment toward the establishment than women and non-whites because the latter are much greater beneficiaries of the system.
Regular people also become more open to alternative ideas during times of fear and uncertainty such as when societal unrest, high inflation, or unpopular wars occur. The establishment can and does try to co-opt these emotions into approved directions, to express anger at government approved targets (Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11), or to offer de-radicalization “off roads” to keep people from radicalizing further.
These off-roads are provided by certain controversial figures promoted by the establishment such as Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich, Paul Joseph Watson, Jordan Peterson, Bronze Age Pervert3 and many other “right wing” so-called influencers.
GENERAL COGNITIVE DISSONANCE AS A REASONABLE DEFAULT POSITION
The media constantly pushes agenda-driven, false meta-narratives but, because of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect most people do not want to accept generalized cognitive dissonance, which therefore allows this system to continue. We can see this play out in the present. The default position for individuals who wish to break free of their Pavlovian cradle-to-grave programming, then, should be to assume that what we are experiencing now is nothing new, that most or everything we have been taught in school about history is either (1) remnants of meta-narrative lies in the past, pushed to advance elite agendas at the time in question; or (2) deliberately falsified history to push media narratives in the present to advance the agendas of the elite today. Look at the establishment’s present focus on forcing teachers to teach children critical race theory and to hate their own history and culture as an example.
The corollary to this is that the “conspiracy theories” so casually mocked and dismissed by our rulers - who use all the tools at their disposal to brand unapproved theories as low class and worthy of derision, that anyone who entertains them is unhinged and perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to hold a job - perhaps these theories should be re-examined with a fresh eye, an eye sensitive to how much we care about being judged by society versus how much we care about pursuing truth.
It is up to you after weighing the evidence of a theory, examining the veracity of the people pushing the theories and the counter-theories and what their incentives are for truth and lie to make your own determination. Don’t believe any random anti-establishment theory for its own sake ("Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out” said Chesterton), but instead retain a healthy degree of skepticism. For any issue you care about, perform a deep dive and consider the available evidence, while understanding that countervailing narratives will be harder to find and much weaker sourced than mainstream narratives due to funding, publishing, reporting and other incentives.
Let’s go through some historical examples.
Is the evidence compelling that the Soviets were poised to attack Nazi Germany only a few months after the start of Operation Barbarossa because the Soviet troops were massed offensively and they had maps of Germany in hand (Suvorov’s thesis in Icebreaker)?
What about the theory by James Bacque in Other Losses that Eisenhower intentionally caused the starvation or exposure deaths of around a million German prisoners of war held in Western internment camps, covered up by the West?
What about the question of whether esteemed scientist Albert Einstein was a plagiarist and a thief?
Is dark matter even real, or is it nonsense gobbledygook to try to fix irreparably broken formulas?
Is oil named “fossil fuels” without having anything to do with fossils and simply to increase oil prices?
Are there major problems with the theory of dinosaurs?
Did polio vaccines really cure polio or was the reduction in polio rates entirely due to the elimination of DDT use in America?4
Was the 1918 “Spanish flu” outbreak caused by a misguided – and very experimental – Rockefeller Institute meningitis vaccination program which was initiated at Fort Riley by the US military?
How much of Roman antiquity actually happened - perhaps its far less than mainstream society believes? Perhaps even 700 years of history, 300-1000 AD, simply didn’t happen?
Was Nixon guilty or was Watergate a CIA plot and he was innocent?
We know the U.S. plans false flag operations - see Operation Northwoods - what other false flags has it planned or participated in?
Why did 7 World Trade Center collapse when it was never hit by a plane on 9/11 (the official story that debris hit the building and burned until it collapsed seems nonsensical on its face) and eyewitnesses heard and saw and heard controlled explosions in the building? Did Israel have advance knowledge of 9/11?
Was Pat Tillman deliberately executed by teammates on orders to prevent him from becoming an anti-war activist?
Was the Oklahoma City bombing the result of a governmental conspiracy?5
What percent of white Americans actually owned slaves in 1860 pre-Civil War - was it actually only 1.4%? (The answer is yes despite Snopes obfuscation). And were Jews overrepresented in the slave trade? Did slaves have terrible lives and desperately want their freedom, or did many lead better lives than the free poor, who had no value and no protector?
Are many rappers really “thug rappers”, or did they put on a front to sell records and many were actually homosexual dilettantes (see Tupac’s early mannerisms for an example)?
Do the elites manipulate the weather?6
Do current top elites have access to life extension therapies that the public doesn’t have access to?7
Don’t rely on anyone else, media spin, or establishment experts to make up your own mind for you - do your research and make up your own mind.
FLIGHT TO AVOID COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE
For decades when people were faced with rising crimes, lawlessness, homelessness, illegal immigration, stretched governmental resources, toxic schools, unaffordable housing, high taxes and rapidly declining quality of life, people were able to flee to other cities, states or countries in order to get away. However, these social ills have spread from liberal cosmopolitan areas like a cancer to the point where it is not possible to avoid these negative policies wherever one flees anymore — at best, one is delaying its encroachment into their suburban or rural area by a number of years. Moving state to state in the U.S. is a rear-guard, losing action because globohomo is importing endless numbers of illegal immigrants and busing them into red areas, many liberals are fleeing the results of the policies they previously espoused and bring their voting patterns with them, and, regardless, federal law trumps state laws and much of societal ills are federally mandated.
Due to globalization these trends have also impacted essentially every country in the world: certain countries historically seen as safe-havens such as New Zealand have banned gun ownership, squelched freedom of speech, had severe COVID lockdowns and are also busy importing many non-integrating minorities, while others like Chile and Portugal have also suffered severe crackdowns on freedoms during COVID (in December 2021 Portugal imposed an array of post-Christmas COVID restrictions, including mandatory teleworking. Close to 90% of the population was fully vaccinated).
While the rational impulse when faced with this chaos is to move and find a new place to live in peace there is nowhere to go for a permanent solution and people are being faced with a difficult choice of living where they are or buying themselves a little more time in a rural area.
WHICH GROUPS OF PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY TO FEEL COGNITIVE DISSONANCE?
The groups most likely to experience cognitive dissonance from the establishment’s messaging are the ones that are least likely to benefit from the system. Despite the claim that straight white males are highly privileged due to the structural nature of society, they are discriminated against at every level — from affirmative action in school, to scholarships, to government contracting, to the ability to organize based on identity, to the ability to speak freely, to the protections afforded in the workplace, to television and movies (the antagonist is almost always a white male) and advertisements, to regime propaganda blaming white males for everything bad in the world. To argue that the system prioritizes straight white males requires an enormous break from reality. Even nominally pro-white television is designed as a “hook” to catch viewer attention; after the viewer has been sufficiently lured in, elements of wokeness, deviancy and female super-empowerment are gradually introduced until the show’s ratings fall and viewers go on to repeat the process, having learned nothing but still being exposed to a big serving of globohomo propaganda in the meantime. Indeed, the further one gets from a straight white male the more privilege one receives. The most privileged group is a black, transexual, Muslim, obese disabled female Democrat — it doesn’t get further away from white males than that.
This dovetails with the concept of bioleninism that a blogger named Spandrell has discussed at length. As he explains, populist-hating elites have organized the lowest status members of society into foot soldiers for the establishment: the darker the pigmentation, the dumber, the more crippled, the more obese, the more with alien belief systems like Islam the better, because these people have low natural status in western society, have little chance of succeeding in such an environment, so they blindly take any opportunity given to them to remake society in order to improve their own social status. It is their primary, perhaps only chance to improve their social status so they are likely willing to do what they’re told. The establishment loves using these shock troops because of their unrelenting loyalty to their causes. White straight men are too independent with too many options to blindly follow attempts to remake society to benefit its leaders so from this perspective they are seen as undesirable. The establishment then rewards their loyal foot soldiers with preferment in society.
Therefore, the lower officially mandated status a group receives in society the more they are likely to feel cognitive dissonance against the messaging pushed by the upper echelons, and the higher officially mandated status a group receives in society the less likely they are to feel cognitive dissonance. This is true across space and time and is irrespective of race. While white males have the lowest status in society today and therefore feel the most cognitive dissonance, it was the opposite in Nazi Germany. Hitler bragged about how the white male masses ate up official propaganda even when it contradicted itself the moment before8:
“We have frequently found ourselves compelled to reverse the engine and to change, in the course of a couple of days, the whole trend of imparted news, sometimes with a complete volte-face. Such agility would have been quite impossible, if we had not had firmly in our grasp that extraordinary instrument of power which we call the press—and known how to make use of it.
A year before, when the Russo-German Pact was signed, we had the task of converting to a completely reverse opinion those whom we had originally made into fanatical opponents of Russia—a maneuver that must have appeared to be a rare old muddle to the older National Socialists. Fortunately, the spirit of Party solidarity held firm, and our sudden about-turn was accepted by all without misgiving. Then, on 22nd June 1941, again: "About turn!" Out shot the order one fine morning without the slightest warning! Success in an operation of this nature can only be achieved if you possess the press and know how to make tactical use of it.
When you regard the role of the press from this angle, you will realize at once that the profession of the journalist now is very different from that of the journalist of yore. There was, indeed, a time when the profession of journalism was one without real importance, for rarely had the individual journalist any opportunity to give proof of personal character. Today, the journalist knows that he is no mere scribbler, but a man with the sacred mission of defending the highest interests of the State. This evolution has been in progress throughout the years following our taking power, and today the journalist is conscious of his responsibilities, and his profession appears to him in a new light.”
Therefore the inclination or disinclination of a group toward independent thought is variable and depends, at least to an extent, on their perceived status in society.
But what about judging a person’s skepticism to propaganda on an individual basis? Ethnic, religious, and sexuality groups experience great variability in thought and beliefs, even though generally the more privilege a group receives from globohomo the less likely they are to resist it. A gay black man in America is generally going to support big government and blindly listen to liberal authority figures, but not always. How can individuals be categorized?
This is where we will turn next in Part 2.
Learning "game" was an earlier memetic evolution in the male vs. female dating game (which is always evolving as each tries to gain an edge over the other); more recent evolutions include low-status men dropping out of the dating game entirely and becoming "incels" (involuntarily celibate), or, to a much smaller extent, turning to something called "androcentrism" where men stop dating entirely but peruse prostitution to fulfill sexual desire (one of its proponents, a steroided Polish man called "Looks Maximus”, ultimately had an emotional breakdown and denounced the community and his followers).
Hypergamy is as toxic for women as it is for men. Women end up having sex with very high-status men (“Chad”) far beyond their ability to lock that man down for marriage and children because men are fine “hooking up" down/far down from their status level, leading women to become angry and bitter when they are unable to successfully pair bond. The more men that a woman has sex with, the harder it is for her to pair bond and the weaker her pair bond will be. This also applies to men but to a much lesser extent. This results in a phenomenon where women "settle" in their 30s before their eggs expire, but they are generally very unhappy with their sub-par mate. These Red Pill comics demonstrate the phenomenon described here, but please note that they are sexual and very crude in nature: Comic 1, Comic 2, Comic 3, Comic 4, Comic 5, See also here.
Bronze Age Pervert encourages the youth to support neocon military intervention and divert their actual grievances into empty lifestyle gestures and 'aesthetics', i.e. homosexuality.
Also see author Jim West’s book DDT/Polio – Virology vs. Toxicology building on Dr. Morton S. Biskind’s 1950s research and testimony connecting DDT and polio.
Per Gore Vidal in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, p. 113, 117, 119, published originally in Vanity Fair, September 2001.
“Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather-modification capability: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, (2) computational capability, (3) information gathering and transmission, (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future.” From here; also see NATO’s conference in Norway in 1990 where the the core technology was discussed. Proceedings published in “Ionospheric Modification and its Potential to Enhance or Degrade the Performance of Military Systems”.
David Rockefeller lived to 101, Henry Kissinger has lived past 99, George Soros is well into his 90s, Jacob Rothschild is late 80s, Klaus Schwab is mid 80s, as examples.
Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 482-483.
You might be interested in the research of Richard Willis. He was a contemporary of more well-known conformity researchers such as Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram, but he had some interesting ideas, including what he called "anti-conformity," which is rebellion for the sake of rebellion. As he put it, "The more independent an individual is, the less conformity or anticonformity he can exhibit. The completely independent person may happen to behave in ways that are prescribed or proscribed by the norms of his group, but this is incidental” https://doi.org/10.2307/2786152