Cognitive Dissonance - Everywhere

 Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort felt when holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes, or when your actions contradict your beliefs, creating an internal inconsistency that people are motivated to reduce. To relieve this unease, individuals often change their beliefs, justify their behaviour, downplay the conflict, or seek new information that supports their actions, even if it's irrational.

You see it everywhere these days along with blind pig ignorance, hypocrisy and outright lies.  The problem is that it is almost accepted behaviour these days.  Given actual facts the person denies those facts exist.  This morning someone was getting up on their high horse about where one of the political parties got some of their funding from and how they felt that was bad.  The interviewer asked them where their funding came from and they weren't sure but stated that it couldn't be as bad as this other parties' donor.  The interviewer then destroyed them with facts about a few of their less savoury donors.  But it mattered not, they charged on ignoring that and went on the attack on the other party.

In my days, if I'd have been challenged like that, I'd ask for the facts and time to look into them and then come back with an apology or a rebuttal for not all facts are equal shall we say.

Politicians, in the face of utter opposition from the electorate and being caught out that certain things were not in their Manifesto push on regardless not noticing the damage they are doing to their party, politics in general and their own reputations in particular.  They do not appear to see their own hypocrisy, dysfunction and lack of common sense when they open their mouths.  

I do wonder how much longer they can keep this up?  Already social media posts and TV clips are being found where these idiots were expressing diametrically opposite views to the ones they now espouse.  I, for one, am pretty fed up with it.  I despise them and will not watch them.  I have no idea how I would react if I met them other than telling them how loathed and despised they really are.

For all of my working life I had a no lie policy as it doesn't pay off at all.  If I was made to by management I would quickly get another job and did so.  The number of people I have seen lie to try and get out of a spot of bother only to be found out and make things substantially worse are too numerous to count.  Some even went behind my back to my customer to fix a problem that existed only to find that I had already spoken to them and agreed a course of action.  Customers may get angry that a problem has happened but if you tackle it head on and have a plan to sort it out generally things will be OK.  

These people do not live by my rules and almost everyone knows that they cannot be trusted to say the truth or they will say one thing and do the other.  They wonder why they have lost the public's respect when the answer is right in front of their faces!