Cognitive dissonance

Three separate conflicts produce the same distress, and all three are conflicts between realities rather than between beliefs. The first is between a dominant and an authoritative endoreality. The dominant endogroup is whichever one has a person most immersed in its reality or most sublated to it, usually the group closest to them, while the authoritative endogroup is the one with enough coercive force to define reality, morality, norms and law. When home says one thing and the state says another, the person carrying both is where the two grind together. The second conflict is between universal reality and an endoreality, which is what happens when a group's account of the world stops matching what is observably there. The third is internal to a person over time, between an endoreality they once believed and what they believe now. Marsh reads the resulting distress as diagnostic rather than as a private failing. An endogroup is held together against the natural outward pressure of exosocial expansion, and that holding takes constant force, so cognitive dissonance and general unease, along with deanimation, are the signs of that force being applied. Where the mismatch is deliberate the cost is measurable. Chronic lying in a long-term relationship leaves the victim sorting cognitive dissonance after every interaction, which is exhausting because of the conscious effort required and the alertness the victim has to maintain throughout. Totalitarianism does the same thing at scale, and the deanimation it causes shows up as widespread immobilizing depression.

Leon Festinger introduced cognitive dissonance in 1957 to describe the discomfort of holding inconsistent beliefs, and predicted that people would reduce it by adjusting one belief, adding a justification or avoiding the contradicting information. The famous studies that followed, from the doomsday cult that revised its prophecy to the underpaid subjects who decided a dull task had been interesting, all located the conflict inside a single mind. Marsh keeps the distress and moves the conflict outward. What clashes is not two beliefs a person happens to hold but two realities maintained by groups, one of them usually backed by coercive force, which makes the dissonance evidence about the structure rather than about the person experiencing it. On that reading, the drive to resolve dissonance by adopting the authoritative version is not a quirk of reasoning but the mechanism by which reflection is produced.