By Caroline Knight

Cognitive what? The phrase in itself is ironically a little trendy these days, bandied about by frustrated ‘conspiracy theorists’ as a verbal slap in the face to those ‘plugged into the matrix’. Justified or otherwise, cognitive dissonance — holding conflicting attitudes, beliefs, values or behaviours which often result in varying degrees of discomfort or confusion — is undeniably a major reason for western society drifting further and further from anything resembling conscious, connected community.

Could it be that we are passively – even at times actively - contributing to the decline of society, by refusing to take a good look at our media and peer-instilled values and behaviours?

For all the modern thrills and distractions, civilisation is in retrograde and we can’t pretend it’s nothing to do with us. Cognitive dissonance is simple to spot if you’re the open-minded type – and that probably means you’ve painstakingly wrestled through your own jigsaw puzzle of complicated emotional debris to come up with something resembling consistent moral behaviours. Superficial morality is encouraged through all kinds of cultural coercion, but not much of it seems motivated by genuine integrity; integrity asks difficult questions and doesn’t run at the first sign of discomfort.

In this day and age, it’s clear that we haven’t all perished in some prophesied apocalypse scenario yet, but why would we remain ‘wilfully ignorant’ at a time when it’s more obvious than ever that humanity is suffering from the ill effects of our collective turning away? Maybe because it’s uncomfortable, or even just plain inconvenient? We have become used to a paradoxical situation in which we unconsciously seek out comfort in a very uncertain world, yet we have become so cushioned in our self-created bubbles that we appear to have forgotten that there is anything else going on outside them… or that we even had a reason for creating them in the first place.

I will present below some of the ways in which we need to get a collective grip if we want to see any future improvement. Cognitive dissonance kicks in when we start to convince ourselves that we don’t indulge in such behaviours. Realistically, it’s to be expected that we’re all guilty of a few of them, but now is as good a time as any to get self aware and rethink a few ‘normal’ behaviours, such as…

Social networking and selfie obsessions

When on earth did we become so vain? Most likely it was around the time sites like Myspace and Facebook sprang up. Like many other popular things in society, there are benefits. For instance, keeping in touch (with people we wouldn’t bother calling otherwise) networking, entertainment… but isn’t it mainly a narcissistic playground where we can convince ourselves that someone other than our psychotic ex is rifling through our every stylised moment?

The vulgar creation that is the ‘selfie stick’ says it all about our priorities in life. Not only are we trying to recreate a virtual, highly-edited and fantastical version of our own lives online, we are spending more time on it than we are in the physical company of others, or chatting to them on the phone. That’s not particularly social, really, and what are we demonstrating as normal for our kids? Should we really be surprised when we find that our daughters have posted five hundred profile pictures of themselves pouting in false eyelashes, and caked in badly applied makeup? What about when they bring home new friends in the form of questionable characters they met online?

Patriotism

It’s a funny one, patriotism. In reality, it could be described as the embracement of separation and division. Taken to an extreme, it results in such delights as football hooliganism, glorification of war, and hatred of immigrants due to perceived losses as a ‘nation’. We might think we are showing solidarity by waving around our country’s flag, spilling beer on our shoes and snarling at our ‘opponents’ but we rarely seem to consider that we are displaying an embarrassing lack of awareness.

Divide and conquer is a time old tactic, and we play right into the hands of those who benefit from it; many even giving their lives in the process. It might seem overly simplistic or idealistic to say that nobody has the right to divide the planet into sections and decide upon whom steps over what line, but consider that while culture is one thing, exclusion is another. Who is really benefiting from it? It doesn’t seem to be you or I. Not so? Try marrying someone from a different country.

Fashionable giving

It isn’t surprising that we feel a bit guilty about the world’s problems at times. After all, it is practically rammed down our throats via every mode of advertising, be it the London underground, Oxfam’s windows or the over-friendly guy in a red apron wielding his clipboard in the town centre. It’s not that we shouldn’t do anything to help… but what’s with the guilt? Did we invent the laughable fallacy that is ‘world debt’ in order to keep certain countries in poverty and relying on the equally laughable, exploitative fallacy masquerading as ‘fair trade’? No. We also didn’t spend good money on vaccinating the impoverished instead of giving them food, water and shelter, although we may have contributed to it.

Most of us, when we have thrown money at a popular problem, are not equipped to find out where our money is going even if we did bother to investigate. Yet something is seriously wrong when we are happy to publicly dump a bucket of ice over our heads for a moment of social media infamy in the name of a cause we knew nothing about; considering it important because someone said we should, only to find that the organisation in question pocketed the majority of our cash and used the rest to conduct experiments with ethics so questionable that we will probably be rallying about them en mass once that becomes fashionable.

And all of this goes on while we strut past the homeless on our own streets, avoiding eye contact and mumbling something about drug addiction to our companion in order to appease the guilt we possibly should be feeling for supporting a system which allows this while calling itself civilised.

Voting

We know they lie. Even those of us who are inclined to support one party or another will often admit their party doesn’t come up with the goods, says whatever is necessary to get the vote, then doesn’t follow through. Nobody seems to have much good to say about any of them. But how often do we ask why not?

There seems to be a commonly-held view that the reason for this is incompetence – for whatever perceived reason: be it too many cooks, too much self-imposed red tape, Ed Milliband having been lobotomised at birth… whatever the opinion on it, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what good all this voting is doing? Perhaps the only real consequences of voting are letting them know we’ve fallen for the show, and perpetuating the facade. The systematic instillation of political correctness is another example of how we are moving away from any true semblance of democracy. Sooner or later we will forget that it ever existed.

Healthy diet

Here’s the general rule: If you’ve seen it advertised as food on TV, it probably isn’t. It’s thought that there are certain products that don’t actually contain any food at all, products so laden with synthetics and additives that there is zero nutrition to be had. You might as well be eating toilet roll. If your supermarket is selling it, it’s probably not going to be very good for you – whether it is whiskey, ready meals or reportedly healthy yoghurt, most of it is prettily packaged junk.

Even though the low sugar options on offer may keep our kids from being diagnosed with ADHD at the Doctors, they are laced with aspartame (a dangerous neurotoxin posing as a sweetener) so the trip to the doc is only a matter of time. But hey, it tastes good and it keeps them quiet. It’s about time we started checking the labels, making the effort to decipher the cryptic rubbish that passes as ingredients, and making informed decisions about what food is actually benefiting us. We can’t let Tesco decide that for us if we want to live past 60.

Spiritual bypassing

It is very trendy these days to engage in ‘shadow work’. Perhaps it makes us feel very spiritual - and current - to be seen to be digging about in our own accumulated emotional dirt in an attempt to ‘cleanse our third eye’, improve the self, and so on. Although there is great value in honest self-analysis and genuine effort to overcome destructive behavioural traits, it seems that what is commonly indulged in is a tendency toward self-absorbed outpourings, emotional dumping and oversharing, and a selectively-evoked victim mentality. This isn’t helping anybody.

Genuine spiritual growth is a private affair on the whole – although sometimes we can help each other with our experiences, which is great. There are a lot of brilliant books out there for that reason; but for every gem of an honest book by a sincerely experienced author, there are fifty money-spinners full of clichés and unfounded claims relating to trends like the ‘law of attraction’. That’s not to say that these ideas have no value; on the contrary, they could probably be utilised well when injected with a healthy level of common sense and a bit of realism.

Unfortunately, and perhaps in part due to political correctness, many believe that saying or viewing anything as negative is ‘not spiritual’, and anybody who ‘calls a spade a spade’ is considered Neanderthal in their outlook - viewed with contempt down the lengthy nose of the self-appointed spiritual superior. There’s a certain irony in that. Of course, burying your head in the sand is fine.

It is surely good to be idealistic, or nothing would ever change. But if we can’t be realistic with it, we will find ourselves going around in merry little circles, cooing false niceties while the sound of our tax-funded bombs tearing apart nearby countries drifts casually by in the background noise of the 9 o’clock news. Wouldn’t it be ‘nicer’ to be honest with ourselves about our responsibility to each other as human beings?

Technophilia

Despite having pervy connotations, it’s actually just a term for having a strong enthusiasm for technology. That said, technology and pervsersions appear to be intersecting, as evidenced by the rise of AI girlfriends. There is nothing wrong with having a penchant for tech per se, but it’s clear that we are heavily reliant on many gadgets these days, to the point of antisocial exclusion. That is not to mention the increasingly enthusiastic outsourcing of our creativity to AI, which although convenient in many ways, could be creative suicide in the making, to say the least.

Kids barely seem to play outside anymore, except for the odd football match. After all, why play outside when you can repeatedly punch a robot in the face for hours or steal cars while picking up derogatory terms for women (that you can use on the girls you don’t like at school)?

On the plus side, it keeps them out of the biscuit tin for a few hours and means we can get through an entire episode of EastEnders on our wall-mounted, surround-sound HD TV. It’s not an alien concept that our smart phones are making us dumb, either. For a start, between them and the omnipresent WiFi, they have a poorly hidden reputation for totally frying our brain cells. And don’t forget, guys, if they’re kept in your pockets, that third eye the hippies are talking about could become a physical reality.

Cognitive Dissonance: Is Civilisation in Retrograde?