Cognitive Dissonance or Political Change

Psychology of Bivariation


Flip-flopping between Democrat and Republican regimes poses as political change. This artificial pluralism presents a psychological condition known as cognitive dissonance: believing one thing and saying or doing another.

As the president faced his party's bivariate with reciprocating recriminations, was it a political polemic toward a practical understanding of fundamental differences, confirming a bivariate party system is a credible mechanism for continuous improvement, or the expression of a psychological condition that presents as a debilitating dilemma symptomatic of being ideologically conservative but practically liberal?

The debilitation presents with the inability of the two parties to agree on how to control costs and deliver services. Being the essential variables for the conflicted psychological state, the dissonance reaches a point of inflexion with the president's unusual confrontation with his counter party being a micro manifestation of a macro trend.

Cultural pressure to believe conservative values, chief among them that laissez-faire capitalism provides the greatest good, is very strong. Practical experience, however, demonstrates a strict adherence results in crises, like The Great Depression, and now The Great Recession.

The polemic essentially revolves around the dissonant values of theory and practice, and the president's expression of the dissonance indicates what the psychosis demands--the need to decide and relieve the dissonance.

Bivariation functions to ensure the decision is liberal or conservative, which perpetuates the dissonance to a point of apathetic and anomic distraction. The distraction is interpreted to be the verified consent of the governed (or, as Republicans are now saying, "bringing power closer to The People").

Depth of the crisis has driven the distraction to a point of inflexion. The president has demonstrated a broader need to dispell the dissonance with an appropriate cognition.

Independents will be at the forefront of a pragmatic ontology unfolding in an age of reason and the scientific method. It is an inevitability that ideologues knowingly fear will depose the psychological benefit of feeling powerful by denying the consent of the governed and depriving the promise of a peaceful prosperity to the point of dissonance and distraction.

The only "hope" for ideologues is, for example, the recent Supreme Court decision that affirmed money is protected speech. It will take a lot of money to persuade The People that resolving the cognitive dissonance is a bivariate choice.

With a sense of lost investment, dissonance tends to abate with how much The People have sacrificed, or suffered, for false beliefs and disconfirmed legitimacies. Since, however, the source of corporate money and the accumulative size of the public debt to abate the suffering and secure the distribution of wealth and power is the cumulative source of the dissonance, neither buying it out or starving it out will prevent, but abet, the inevitable.

A persistent third element, the independent element, will break the bivariate and the psychological barrier to change we really need.