I learned a lot from this this is so true.
So like – when I drive to the McDonalds, and turn into the McDrive, whereas I had actually wanted to go inside, what do I do?
Do I go through the drive anyhow, because I’m there now,
or do I back up, with the risk of that not being entirely possible due to other traffic.
or do I tell the guy at te booth FUCK OFF I DON"T WANT YOUR NAZI MEAT?
The irritation must be solved somehow.
Maybe that wasn’t a good example I am not smart enough to make them up. What is another cognitive dissonance?
PS I always give to beggars if they are nice and never if they are only dirty. Does that also count in life?
Hmm. The classic examples generally come from attitude change, it’s the motivating force behind coming to like the things we have (assuming we didn’t particularly want them in the first place).
So, somehow you’re persuaded into buying something you don’t actually want. It happens, we’ve all done it. If you start to think about it you’ll start to feel uncomfortable. We generally have deeply embedded conceptions about ourselves as strong, independent-minded individuals who can’t be swayed by adverts. But we’ve just done something that directly contradicts this, meaning we now have a belief about ourselves present in the mind, generated by our behaviour, that contradicts our self-image.
In this situation, we have a few choices. But since it’s really hard to start thinking of ourselves as weak, we come to start liking what we’ve bought more and more, we weren’t persuaded into buying X, we really wanted X, thus disabling the nagging doubt of CD.
Another good example you’re good at this. I know this irritation so well. It is with me all the time when I buy something I don’t like. I have to admit that I have often at the end of the day just thrashed it into the ground, just because I could not manage to like it even if I didn’t. It’s always with you that nagging when you get tricked into doing / buying something your will doesn’t want.
I broke a really expensive CD player once, I just stomped on it with my feed crashed through its shiny coating right into the inwards, ripped it apart because I was so furious having bought it. It was like 500 dollars. I felt like crying afterwards but at least my emotion was honest.
Ha! This is true. I bought an iPad not too long ago, which is now for sale, and it completely contradicts my general anti-materialism. Since buying it it has certainty weighed on me and I have since been plunged into a ‘cognitive dissonance’ phase. First there was self-loathing, then came a general destruction of things - throwing away drawings, mass clean-out of my apartment, getting rid of old ties and relationships (facebook) - then, the idea that some subterranean creature has taken over my spirit causing all kinds of negative emotions, and dreams about being swallowed in the rubble of a sink-hole. But what’s interesting is the metaphors cited in the OP of Jung. Water, and shadow. Those are two of the words I have been using to characterise my current phase. Water representing the depths of the subconscious, an unknown deep with unknown creatures. And shadow being the birth place of my creature. Born in the shadow of myself. In the what-not of myself as opposed to the what-is i.e. in my inadequacy. A creature of vengeance and resentment. I’ll take its head before dawn though. 
Great explanation. Personally, I know that when I catch myself denying or distracting in these situations, the experience of CD increases because I want to think of myself as authentic and not self-deceptive.
If you pay attention to your CD I think it helps you to refine your identity. Instead of finding that you are deceived about yourself concerning the all or nothing, charitable/non-charitable dichotomy, you might refine your beliefs about your self to a more complicated and conditional, but more accurate, level of resolution.
I have not see these types of words on it, however, I have suffered from it but the cause was from experience.
I have had 2 visions in my life, not the type of vision one hears of in religius circles, but of the type described in the Bible. They will happen quite unexpectedly, and concern things in the immediate future.
Both visions came about because of my stupidity. The straw that broke the camels back for me was when I made a stupid mistake while driving. I made a major error in judgment and when I did, time stopped. I was about 500 feet from my body looking at my situation and I had all the time in the world to see from this vantage point what I could not see from were I really was in the car. I was about to die. What the whole thing amounted to was I was being given a choice. Because of the vision, I avoided the accident. As soon as I decided what should be done, time started again.
At any rate, it was at that moment I realized something that made me very, very, angry. My worthless ass was just saved while others never have that chance. It becomes a moment one can never get over.
And there are supporting psychological events that maintain that posture–my discoveries in language–by definition in scripture, I am a prophet. Probably the lamest in history. I am not religious, because quite frankly, I can never be a mystic, and seconly, it has noting to do with understanding.
I come to realize that the abilities of the human mind are very feeble compared to whatever is out in the universe. I just chuck it all down to a simple saying. Intelligence is relative, but no relative of mine.
Now, all of what I said and have been through might appear to be interesting, however, the real interest is the mind of man. We must use language to effect our purpose, yet how lightly does man account his words. You can tell him the truth to his face, and the words mean nothing–he continues on with drival.
I am not fighting myself. I know I have a job to do and I seriously doubt my ability to do it. I am, in fact, over extended.
This is the aspect of CD I find particularly interesting (as a philosopher interested in virtue ethics).
Certainly, in the actual world, everything is more complex, more shaped by lots of tiny decisions, the sediment that gathers to form the grand shape. The examples above are abstractions for the sake of clarity.
That being said, it is not necessarily true that CD refines personality, or, to reform that as a question I find more appealing, what are the conditions that will ‘lead to’ changes in personality? Now I don’t have an answer to this (partially cause I’m attempting to write a tangentially related subject atm and still working through the issues) but if we move from one simple premise the shape of an answer may appear:
William James once said that ‘Whenever you change your beliefs, you do it in the most conservative way possible’, or words to those effect, I can’t be arsed looking up the quote right now. Personally I prefer it in the looser form of ‘the development of the self tends towards following the path of least resistance’. These two things don’t mean the same thing. However, taken together, I think they highlight something important. The purpose of the first ‘quote’ (well, sort of quote) is that, when you slot a new belief in, first you interpret it based on those you already hold (simple example, think about the way conspiracy theorists interpret evidence, regardless what you think about their ideas, the interpretations that are open to them are dependent on those beliefs they already hold). I think that the relationship between beliefs is much deeper and more nuanced than that, that we have to interpret belief systems holistically, but I’m not here to convince you of that. That there is a basic relation is all I need to say, and that this extends to the values we hold. Further, that certain values function hierarchically, certain things are more important to us than others, a hierarchy generated by a mixture of the education we receive and the activities in which we engage. The metaphor most commonly used in psychology here is that of the web (or multiple webs) rather than hierarchy, the latter implies grand structure, the former allows us to talk of values sitting at the centre of the web, thus being very important to us, and therefore being much harder to change (at least partly) because so many other beliefs (and here the relationship between belief and action is necessarily cloudy) and so much of the material we call our ‘selves’ is dependent on them. We can’t change them because it is such a deep part of who we are.
Now, least resistance. Pretty much always, the path of least resistance when dealing with CD is a certain kind of ‘wilful’ ignorance, ‘wilful’ appearing in quotes because the act of evasion shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as conscious. CD requires attention, deny it this and there is no uncomfortable feeling (attention itself doesn’t have to be totally conscious btw).
The path of second least resistance (for example, in cases where actions generate beliefs that are uncomfortable - the beggar - or to put it in moral terms, where our actions do not live up to our standards) is to do nothing about it, to just let our standards drop and not attempt to improve ourselves.
For this to not happen, there must be a deep commitment to our own moral standards that means dropping them is itself very difficult - we don’t just shut up and stop trying. People who talk about CD tend not to touch on this too much - they’re primarily there to study the process without this kind of baggage - but for those interested in moral action or character formation, the idea that we require some deep commitment to some set of values such that they can be refined but not abandoned, appears to me as the next logical step to flesh out how CD works in practise.
Okay, I ran through that rather quickly, but I think it covers the bases… I’ve not actually read through this, so I may end up editing it when I do so and become shamed by the formating of the ideas…
I think the relationship between cognitive dissonance can be shown to be related, as persons undergoing psychotic episodes may feel they are unfocused or muddled (hebrephenic) in their thinking; and if so, there may be a continuum between levels of clarity—I haven’t heard of diagnostic
criteria between cognitive dissonance and schizophrenia. The reason is, that cognitive dissonance is not a classified mental illness, whereas schizophrenia is.
the levels of dissonance vary by degrees of association, for example, there may be “levels” of recognition. (As in Wittgenstein’s family of resemblances), and in schizophrenia , no such levels (continuum) exist. So schizophrenia can be seen as related to dissonance, as the latter being a measure of dissociation think Wittgenstein was right in seeing meaning in terms of language games, hence the general use of “dissonance” overlaps with any specific use of disassociation
Some of them include:
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the illusion of the ‘self’ - we are constantly changing and becoming something new, and the image of our ‘self’ is very much a fabrication. You could even go so far to say that it is a lie we tell ourselves, and so are our beliefs. Notice how our belief in compassion and forgiveness only comes out when we are weak and vulnerable; and those who regularly practice compassion and forgiveness only do so to make slaves and debtors out of the people they give compassion/forgiveness to.
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the illusion of ‘love’ - there is no true ‘selflessness’ or ‘unconditional love’, since all actions are ultimately dictated by genetic code which can only be written one way: by surviving.
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the impossibility of knowing for certain anything at all - we rely entirely on our senses to learn information about the external world outside of our mind.
All that evokes a nihilism that is very difficult to shake off.
One thing I’ve found is that, when bringing these concerns up to people in real life, there is far more cliches to use as responses than there is explanations. Most people don’t think about these things, it’s not their role to think about these things.
Who assigned us these roles as ‘thinkers’? Was it our family? And what were they hoping for when our role as ‘thinkers’ failed them? Were they disappointed it didn’t bring them money? Fame? Pride? Didn’t they know that it had no practical application?
It leads me to think that philosophy is only viable in a developed and thriving society. But this can’t be true, ‘thinkers’ have been a part of us since the dawn of man - only then they were called shamans.
So why did we fail? Did our discoveries yield more tragedy than indulgence?
Philosophy can’t be sold to people unless it:
A) is philosophy dug up from the past - as if that authenticates it.
B) gives people a sense of having some privileged information that no one else has. This is why self-help garbage can sell so successfully and can be addictive for people.
- cognitive disonance is different from sychronocity, in as much as cognitive dissonance is not defined in terms of simultenious thought events, only differences in the content of thought. This latter scene implies a sort of receptacle of thought, from which it is possible to draw discontinuous thoughts. The self. Is true not these thoughts --in themselves. Therefore their “Being” is not grounded in them. They are determined by their self image and their roles. The self image is primary, roles secondary processes, that often are developed by understanding in a seeming linear way (bouncing off objective identification against the background of introjective identification. Their understanding of themselves , thus, becomes the workable self when this process is internalized. Once that happens the concept of the self becomes validated in a contextual frame of reference, and it becomes the self. The self is assumed, and by daily use of the self it integrates into the larger socialized circles of reference. So far so good. Dissonance exists with alien, or buried points of reference, and when confronted with these, the conventional self translates them in order to understand them. This is done through utilization of new language forms, with various degrees of “knowledge”. As I see it, schizophrenia is a miscommunication in language form acquisition capacity, where unknown forms are put into a content of least applicability (the unconscious).The use function of these become filed. Away —in terms of usefulness–hierarchies of applicability------where rarely used forms are memorialized as put into the most generalized content --as a result, philosophy is born, the orthogenesis of ALL applications, in the most general form. Shamans did this, too, but with totally unknown recall. (McKenna) They relied on external factors of tot protective symbols to operate their system. Schizophrenics, in a like manner use a cognitive content to establish their social construction, but without magical rite associated as an accepted ritual. The schizophrenics ritual consists to try to establish social reality without a role, whereas shamans and others such as Christ, seem to become messianic by virtue of contextual content being bushed centerfold, (belief=seeing) and faith based systems evolve, whereby, res become seen as a divinely mythoogically set given. What’s missing is the role of the messianic figure comes full circle in the acceptance of that figure as the social acceptance of that figure as the sine qua non–of that very social organization, in primitive cultures the shaman did not achieve the status of such a figure, since structurally the hegemony behind them was not as well fine tuned. (Remembered, learned). The way we can see compassion develop, is within more generality in terms of social organization, and more content, contextual relativity----(((such as the demise of the Holy Roman Empire leaving a power vacuum—and unloading more unused, almost forgotten thought forms)----this in my opinion, does not invalidate the ideas associated with altruism and so called Christian virtues, it uses linguistic signals—to cover content of social disoorganisation and the need them. Hence agreed the use of “compassion” having survival value, but not just for the individual,but as some kind of guarantor against social abberation, disorganized, and distortion)
Before I continue reading the rest of your post, I just wanted to say that its very… coincidental… that you brought up synchronicity. If you know what I mean 
But jokes aside, it is strange that I said nothing about synchronicity, yet apparently you knew intuitively that I was familiar with it.
Are you aware of my particular affliction and knew that synchronicity was involved?
Or is synchronicity perhaps the hot new concept around these parts which appeals to everyone’s desire to justify nihilism?
Edit: After I continued reading your post, you started to confuse me. Don’t know if it was a grammar mistake or if I’m just not at the level right now to read it with ease. But if you have the time, can you summarize it for me or something? Or maybe add some paragraphs to it so its not one long stream-of-consciousness post?
This confused me:
“Is true not these thoughts” doesn’t really make sense 
I simply meant the thought (of the self qua thoughts) is not sufficient ground for its Being (in-it’s self) whereas the self is grounded in its own existence (implied) …no I am not aware of your illness. And as far as synchronicity is concerned, it was brought up earlier in another blog on the same topic, you may not have noticed it. And yes it has become widely used and abused.
/// and further-----in my case its more like being in a guarded garden like in virginia woolf’s garden when you do not need to get out as often—or emily Dickinson—the self reduces to images(gestures) and the stages becomes me (figuratively)—life imitates art//—phenomenological reduction. Implies in authentic behavior and. However, as in Sartre’s Nausea,( the characters which comes to mind ----the waiter, the self thought man,-----acted out os existential necessity, a primary function) The image of the self trumps the social disorganization, therefore the need for the epoche. To overcome this deficiency, forms are bracketed. BUT , not knowing the causality or chain Of causality’s can get you (me into big trouble) because of this shift of values. If You know what I mean. This is what I really wanted to say, and hope it makes more sense then just the textbook given analysis
-----peachy nietzche, i apologize the very short and inadequate summary I sent You. Upon re reading my summary I re read it and I am ashamed of its inadequacy. First and foremost, and please o not misunderstand me, as I see it, the whose area of conflicting thought matter, which coincidentally is synchronous,(as is most likely in our communication—as these events are very common in my daily experience are very likely exemplified even in our communication. They are different than dissonance, since dissonant type thoughts are unclassed in regard to value, importance, or attention. They are just “there” Whereas, in schizophrenia, with which I was diagnosed at a very early and troubling adolescence, the there was some notice and differentiation in regard to the dissonance which existed in the “thought events”. Even in those times when personality problems were easily brushed aside in favor of categorically more “known” criteria, there was a tradition to de emphasize synchronicity as a useful way to look at simultaneous thought. Patterns as more than a coincidence. Consequently historical was not used as a coincidental tool of comparison, as in case histories, or definitions of similar experiences as can be seen in shamans, or Jesus Himself. The analogy is there, except the methodology was missing. Jung was not re-discovered and applied until the 60’s , however rarely, in psychoanalysis. I went through years of Jungian therapy, and the results of that were favorable, but of which we can talk about later, if You wish to correspond. . Lastly,bYes, I think, your psychic adventure was probably had some similarities to mine, and although I believe I cam across a blog on this topic somewhere here, the chances may not necessarily great that the probability of chance occurrences would have lead us to be able to recognize each other’s communications. Again I. Apologize for my inadequate blo, and hope to be able to correspond more on issues surrounding shamans, Jesus, and their significance in reference to such interesting ideas as : deterministic events and how determinism impresses an overall psychology, in the case of the shaman :magic, and in the case of christ a synchronistic events leading to a total break. : of what seems to have been a historical necessity.
some people think of themselves largely by what they think of themselves in relation to what they think other’s opinion of them. In other words opinions of others’ sense is determined in these individual the assess themselves. They are vulnerable tO test their individuality within context, to a more extent then people who are said to be “grounded” in th their esteem of themselves. These type of people tend to be artistic nd intuitive, introverted. This psychic stance usually manifests with ROLES in which they find themselves, either roles they earned through study, job,family association, Or roles into they have been “pushed” --such as institutionalization (prison etc), or, homeless, , marginally disadvantaged,. As such , in their view, their roles will displace their ability too find their true role, usually displace their ability to think through their predicament–by substituting substances (note the familiar linguistic structure here between substance and substitute)-----thereby displacing thought processes either to the marginality of the authority of the contextual group–hence relinquishing authority and autonomy to others. In a sense they will see themselves as dependent lost would, who need constant support.
. --------------------------perhaps a sideline would be an inquiry of a dismissed idea of seeking some value of relationship quantifiers between topological and economic considerations::::::::as far as to qualify self image, object relational and association matrices? These sorts of ad hoc presumptions may be analogical to distinctions which separate delusional and so called realistic assessment? (In furthrence of advancing a continuous interpretation of functional/dysfunctional disorders?(Now that borderline means other than this connecting link) sorry strictly off the cuff
I think cognitive dissonance can manifest and be sustained by: synchronous events ; and other.defenses to avoid self referentiality and consequent. Structural de compensation.
Cognitive dissonance is a normal human experience. The dominant theory in psychiatry today is that schizophrenia is a brain disease. But the onset of psychosis is often precipitated by by stressful life events. So, the internal stress of cognitive dissonance could be a factor in the onset of schizophrenia in particular cases. Marked ambivalence is also a symptom of schizophrenia, which points to pathological inability to adjudicate conflicting inner values once the disease becomes active.