Watched this very interesting video recently :
Aside : I have such a crush on this dude now. He’s cute, he’s smart, he’s hot, he’s upbeat, and he teaches me science. FRUVOUS WANT.
Anyhow. This notion of cognitive ease leading to false feelings of truth really connected the dots for me, bringing a lot of things I already knew into alignment.
I love it when that happens!
For one thing, it provides a solid scientific basis for “the big lie”, the idea that Nazi motherfucker Goebbels popularized that any lie, if repeated loudly and often enough, will eventually be taken as true.
Why? Cognitive ease. It becomes the easier thought to think, and we have a very strong tendency to believe the easier thought to be true.
After all, in a very broad sense. the easier to think thought is often the true one because it’s the one that does not conflict with what we already know (which I have mentioned before) and it’s the thought which “feels good” to think both because of the cognitive ease and because it offers a way out of a potential state of confusion.
This solution is especially attractive to people who aren’t that mentally strong in the first place. That’s why it’s only the overly smart mutants like myself who can resist the effect.
We, the intellectuals, can develop the high level of metacognition needed to actually analyze and judge new information and either accept or reject it.
And I am sure we are not completely immune either. It’s just harder to fool us.
It’s not surprising that animals do it to, at least not to me, because I have seen a lot of nature documentaries where the documentarians got their closeup footage of actual wildlife by moving into the area and just… hanging around, being unobtrusive and nonthreatening, until the animals got used to them being there.
Being a somewhat timid and skittish animal myself, I can relate.
I can also relate to the notion of the grumpy, suspicious genius. I can totally believe that having the sort of temperament that views all new information as a potential bullshit grenade would lead to both a higher level of truth and a lower level of happiness.
In fact, that idea makes so much sense to me that I am immediately suspicious of it.
Cognitive ease, therefore, can also be used to explain why stupid normal people seem happier than us brainy types (and vice versa). Their life contains a far higher percentage of cognitive ease because they accept things at face value and only do the heavy thinking when they can’t avoid it.
This explains the correlation between intelligence and depression, I think.
However, one cannot simply choose to be stupider. I know this because I have tried. I can only feel safe when I have let my internal security team sweep the area for threats.
I can’t just send them home. I don’t have the faith in my own safety and the benign nature of reality and life in general I would need to let down my guard like that.
Perhaps in time, I can overcome my paranoia and learn to relax about life.
But as things are right now, I have no choice but to keep on being hostile and suspicious in response to a cold and malicious universe.
Which is pretty stupid, to be honest.
More after the break.
I declare myself
Okay, sports fans, time for some serious big league declaration style affirmations!
I hereby declare myself pure.
I am not a tainted thing. Nor am I toxic, or repulsive, or diseased, or any other thesaurus entry for the idea of being inherently something very bad.
I am not filth. I am not bad. I am not rotten. I am not spoiled.
And I am absolutely, positive, and in all senses NOT DEAD.
Any notions I have ever had along these false lines have merely been bad attempts to explain how I feel by imagining these feelings to be some inherent part of me. A reflection of something about my true self.
But they are not. They are lies created by a simple chemical imbalance in my brain. They might be how I feel, but how I feel and how I am are very different things.
So I am pure. I am clean. I am innocent.
I am new.
Therefore I am as fresh and clean as the dew that greets the dawn. I am as pure as a river fresh from its source, and as innocent as a newborn calf. I don’t need to own any of the terrible things which have happened to me in my life and even if I did, I do not need to let these things cling to me for life and weigh me down and make me weak.
So I hereby declared myself flushed. All those toxic illusions are hereby banished from my body and my spirit and given freely to the river of life which will take them far, far away and then give them, in turn, to the might ocean, where they will disperse harmlessly into the ocean’s vast and voluminous reaches.
Begone, thou false foulness! I cast ye out. You were never real. You were just smudges on the false mirror of my illusory self. The real me has be alive and strong all this time.
And I am not a bad thing. I am a good boy, wonderful and lovable and clean, deserving of all the love and compassion and understanding and acceptance and encouragement and guidance and all the other good things of the world in the universe.
I am a good, sweet, kind, bright, adorable creature and did nothing to deserve the hateful things that have befallen me.
But most of all, those things have never changed who I really am.
The real me is pure and strong and clever and good and wholesome and clean.
The rest is just bullshit I will be better without.
Fuck you, false foulness.
You go back to the hell which spawned you.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.