- What "new values" are being taught under the
State's new "sustainability plan" to facilitate destruction of
ethics in our courts, schools, and political institutions?
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- Here is the seven-point to teach list now being applied
across the country:
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- 1. There is no right or wrong, only conditioned responses.
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- 2. The collective good is more important than the individual.
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- 3. Consensus is more important than principle.
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- 4. Flexibility is more important than accomplishment.
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- 5. Nothing is permanent except change.
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- 6. All ethics are situational; there are no moral absolutes.
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- 7. There are no perpetrators, only victims.
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- Notice that all of the items on this list involve no
particular event; rather, they reflect ethical "outcomes" that
the individual is supposed to "internalize."
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- Cognitive dissonance is not quite open brainwashing,
and it's not quite subliminal advertising, either. It's more like setting
somebody up for a psychological fall. It plays with the mind by pitting
various perceived "authorities" against one another to exacerbate
tensions or accountability and consequence against specific and clear ethical
or criminal conduct. After a while, intellectual deliberations shut down,
and stymied emotions take over.
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- Only the strongest-willed individuals can hold out upright
against--this applied "Stigma" designed and promoted by the corrupted
to control consequence for or towards the corrupter's actions. Material
or inherient right theft is much easier to accomplish when the victims
of the theft are psychologically-conditioned-responce-neutralized not to
respond with any real actions of consequene to or towards the perpitrator
of the theft.
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- Don't turn your back and look the other way, shoot a
Wolf in the Chicken coop today!
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- Walter Burien http://CAFR1.com
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- EXAMPLES OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE APPLIED By B.K. Eakman
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- Classrooms are rife with examples of cognitive dissonance.
Take The Cry of the Marsh, an environmentalist film shown in many seventh-grade
science classes. It opens with an idyllic, rustic landscape--birds singing
in the trees, mother ducks leading their young on a pleasant excursion
down a creek, rabbits scampering over the ground. The scene oozes fresh
air, sunshine, and peace.
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- Suddenly, a tractor-bulldozer appears. The camera zooms
in on the word "AMERICAN" on the side of the yellow vehicle,
which is actually the name of the company that manufactured the equipment,
though young viewers are left to interpret it as "an American bulldozer."
Because of the camera angle, the vehicle looks like a tank. It overturns
everything in its path--shrubs, grass, plants. Exhaust fills the air.
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- A man jumps out of the front seat and goes over to the
embankment to drain the creek where the ducklings had been following their
mother. Another man brings a can of gasoline, pours it over the surrounding
area, and ignites it. As the men drive away, flames leap into the air.
Trees catch fire. Living creatures run for cover.
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- Suddenly, the ducklings--which, by that time, have emerged
on the other side of the creek--are overcome by encroaching flames and
burned alive. Nests of baby birds come crashing to the ground, and the
camera zooms in on what is left. In a final close-up, the tractor-bulldozer
is shown plowing under the remains of the nest, the ducklings, and some
bird eggs.
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- As the scene fades from the screen, a sentence flashes:
"Man cannot foresee or forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
After the film ends, pupils are divided into groups for a canned discussion
activity: "Who Shall Populate the Planet?"
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- Why does this exercise meet the definition of cognitive
dissonance? First, there is subliminal deception and psychological impact--the
way "AMERICAN" is depicted, the camera angle, the carnage. The
last frame in the film condemns mankind wholesale--we will kill off our
own species and, possibly, the planet itself. There is no issue to debate.
The film aims for the gut, not for intellectual discussion. For all the
children know, the men were creating mayhem in the forest purely for pleasure.
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- Finally, the follow-up exercise requires immediate decision-making--by
consensus and under pressure. By the time the children get home, they can
be counted on to have forgotten the relationship of the activity to the
film and, therefore, will have no context to bring to their bewildered
parents, who, no doubt, will hear impassioned outbursts over the ensuing
weeks and months about grown-ups "destroying our world!" Parents
aren't likely either to see the film or to hear any description of the
follow-up activity that triggered this reaction.
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- With this curriculum under their belt, youngsters are
deemed prepared to weigh in on such topics as urban sprawl, nuclear waste,
and global warming, all of which require considerably more advanced study
than seventh-graders possess. But these particular seventh-graders, prepped
as they are, will be quite full of politically correct opinions that they
cannot articulate.
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- Cognitive dissonance is not so much about skewing questions,
interjecting bias, or censoring information as it is about a controlled-stress
approach to precipitating conflict and overwhelming rational thought. The
tactic relies largely on obscuring the lines between "authority,"
"loyalty," and ego.
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- You didn't "brainwash" your child into believing
that a teacher, policeman, or minister is an authority figure. That's much
too strong a term. You did, however, transmit the notion. What happens,
then, when one of those authority figures forces your child to choose among
them or tries to marginalize the others? The answer largely depends on
which authority figure the child spends the most time with and which one
the child perceives as being the greater threat to his pride.
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- Thanks to a culture that increasingly keeps children
with their peers and away from their parents, most youngsters today view
their classmates as the authority figures--as the persons having the greatest
effect on their ego. Unethical educators capitalize on this; they use children
to punish and report on other youngsters, then call it "peer pressure"
or "classroom dynamics."
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- Herbert Marcuse identified adolescents as the perfect
targets--eager, always, to become independent of their parents but still
needy of approval. A fan of Germany's Kurt Lewin, who conducted the first
groundbreaking experiments to induce neurosis on a mass scale, Marcuse
combined the anti-authoritarianism of Erich Fromm with Karl Marx's theory
of alienation (people will do almost anything to avoid ostracism or ridicule)
and put it to work. If you could get impressionable young people to believe
they were thinking independently, even while performing mob-dependent acts,
you could start a revolution, he wrote.
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- Marcuse went on to foment and organize (usually behind
the scenes) many of the campus riots of the 1960's. He understood that
it was easier to manipulate groups than individuals. In dealing with team
players, you reduce the chance of "lone rangers" who attempt
to solve problems on their own initiative.
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- The key was to blur the lines between dependence and
loyalty. Marcuse's students confused group loyalty with herd approval.
"We're all in this together" became a recruitment slogan. Today,
it's a rallying cry for every agitator with a cause, especially in the
social sciences, which, increasingly, includes education.
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- By placing "interdependence" over "rugged
individualism" and a herd mentality over personal principle, educators
have scuttled American ideals about self-reliance and personal integrity.
If it is politically correct to accept promiscuous behavior as "normal"
and monogamy as "religious extremism," then anyone who balks
is a pariah.
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- Thus was my generation (the Baby Boomers) educated to
"need" our peers more than we needed our principles, making us
easy marks for such tactics as cognitive dissonance. Our children are now
sitting ducks, with civilized norms forever under attack.
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- Consider the following scenario: A pregnant young woman
contracts German measles. After a sonogram and an amniocentesis, she is
told her unborn child has serious deformities. Two simultaneous and incompatible
messages will plague this woman, both bolstered by the media: First, If
I go through with the pregnancy and birth, I am a bad person because I
am opting, voluntarily, to commit this child to a tortured existence that
I could have prevented. Second, If I terminate this pregnancy, I am a bad
person because I have murdered my baby. Conclusion: No matter what I do,
I am a bad person.
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- Enter the "third party," an advertisement:
"Just do it!" "Take control of your life!" "Be
a decision-maker!" "Do what feels right!"
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- Unless this woman can "default" to firm principles
one way or the other, she is a candidate for suicide. She has been given
a justification for not abiding by an earlier generation's values; her
ego is stroked by implying she has more decision-making power than she
really has (she can't undo the German measles); she has been taught that
life-and-death dilemmas are inconveniences, not moral decisions; she must
choose between two opposing authorities, God and "science," under
the pretext of thinking independently; and, finally, all choices are equally
legitimized.
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- Today, cognitive dissonance is an institutionalized method
used to force-feed whatever is politically expedient. In a climate where
fear of alienation vastly outweighs fear of moral corruption, what has
happened to "intellectual freedom"?
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- B.K. Eakman, a former teacher and the current executive
director of the National Education Consortium, is the author of Cloning
of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education (Huntington
House). Her website is www.BeverlyE.com.
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