The phenomenon witnessed at this blog the past couple of weeks has less to do with the events of 9/11 than with human psychology, and it is fascinating. I’d be foolish to presume to understand it in any great depth. People who do that sort of thing are often themselves caught in a trap, as a psychologist I saw in a YouTube saying that the people who don’t believe the official story of 9/11 are mentally unstable, or the “skeptics” at Skeptics Guide to the Universe or Brian Dunning at Skeptoid saying that we just have to trust our government on this one. They all exhibit the trait they arrogantly claim to describe. The most common name for it, not that it is at all descriptive, is “cognitive dissonance.”
I have read of CG and seen it described as the ability to hold contradictory beliefs, firmly believing in each. Another merely describes it as “certainty” in the face of contradiction. Whatever it is, it is the human condition, so that just like the pompous asses of SGU, if I describe it without including myself, I am a naive fool. Let it be understood that this brief essay is about “us,” and not “you.”
Every now and then I get a brief ray of sunlight on some of my behaviors in past years, and see myself as others might have seen me. It creates a shock wave of pain. Very quickly my inner defenses will rush to the breach and reconstruct that past in a favorable light, and project the problem outward. They had a problem, not me.
I am them, they are me. If I experience this, so too do they. We each construct our own fortress, we each walk around in a cloud of a self-image that is only incidentally shared by others. Our clouds commingle, we get a glimpse of the real “other” within but have no inclination, if we are polite, to set a person straight. The overweight person is indeed muscular and has a thyroid condition, the political pundit indeed understands politics as well as he says, and we are all kind and caring, never wanting ill to fall on each other.
Most importantly, each of us arrives at a world view completely independent of the influence of others, and by means of logic and deduction. The very idea that others have subversively implanted ideas in us is abhorrent.
Our job then is to break free. The prison of our minds is mostly kept in place by religion, so that an objective view of the world first requires that those chains be broken. Since they were put there in our youth, it rarely happens. Cognitive dissonance is most apparent in religious certainty: while knowing that miracles don’t happen in our daily lives, we believe they did before. We live in two worlds, one superstitious, the other to some degree based on objective reality. They contradict one another and we believe firmly in each. Breaking free of chains first requires rejection of religion as anything more than a set of ideals for good behavior, myths that are useful for daily living.
Once free of religion, there are other myths to penetrate. One is “country,” or the idea that political boundaries are anything more than statements of military power with some cultural cohesion within. The 48th parallel, the Canadian border, is the farthest that United States military force could push the British, and it settled there. Canada was eventually conquered by economic force, but they still vigorously maintain statehood due to that boundary. The southern border, Mexico, is far more mythological, with free movement back and forth for economic reasons. Mexico has been conquered by NAFTA, the culmination of a process long underway before the official treaty.
The most powerful force holding together our fifty states is our mythology. It acts as a secular religion. It is implanted in us in youth, and acts as a barrier to reality. Based on this mythology, our young people are willing to go out and attack the rest of the world, having projected evil on them and holding ourselves out to be a force for good.
It is very difficult to break down mythology as time marches on, the older the myth, the harder to bust it open. We know very little of our “Founding Fathers,” and professional historians seem intent on making them even mythically larger two centuries later. We know that they didn’t like paying taxes, that they owned slaves, that they were well-educated in a classical sense, and were slowly breaking free of the religious prison. Good things were indeed happening in the late eighteen century, but by the dawn of the twentieth it had all dissipated. It was as if we had been reabsorbed into the Motherland. British imperialism was again at the forefront, and the U.S. set out on conquest.
It is more than coincidental that the advent of American imperialism is symbolized by a false-flag attack on ourselves, the blowing up of the battleship Maine as it sat in Havana harbor.
My own intellectual history is hardly important, and surely as subject to correction as anyone’s, but I did manage to break free both of Catholicism and Americanism. The event that guided me politically was the assassination of JFK. I was intensely curious about that murder, as I could easily see that it was the result of a conspiracy. Being born and bred American, I assumed that Castro and the Soviets were behind it. I first read Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins,” later the basis for Oliver Stone’s move “JFK,” and was hit right away in the introduction by his assertion that the crime had been pulled off by “right-wing” ideologues. That did not fit, but I set it aside, as I wanted to solve the damned crime. I read and read and read and got no closer even by sheer volume. I was able to pick up on some mechanics – the body-switch at Bethesda, the autopsy designed to reverse the course of the bullets, the pre-constructed assassin’s lair to divert all attention from the front, where the actual bullets came from. The work of the Warren Commission was fraudulent, I could see, but how on Earth could anyone for a moment think any of them were communists? I grabbed every book I could, and there was no answer to the big contradiction.
From there I decided that I could solve the assassination riddle if I could understand what it had changed. Vietnam seemed obvious, and Cuba was at the center of attention in JFK’s years. So I started on Vietnam – how could I be alive during those years and yet be so sheltered from truth? I learned that not a few hundred thousand people had died (not just in Vietnam, but all of Indochina and Indonesia), but rather many millions, mostly civilians. The killing machine was not Ho Chi Minh, but rather the U.S. military. But I still marched forward clinging to my belief as the U.S. as a force for good. The fortress was still holding. But I was troubled.
Oddly, it was not a big thing that finally breached the walls, but a little thing. I grabbed a book at the library called “The Fish is Red.” The title was the first line of a poem by E. Howard Hunt that was used as code to signal to the military that the attack on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs was to start. The authors, William Turner and Warren Hinkle, based much of their work on that of the Church Committee of the late 1970’s and early 80’s. The book was about Operation Mongoose, the CIA terror campaign against Castro. Of course, I did not see it that way, but rather assumed that any terror originated in Cuba and was directed outward. One small passage in that book, the details of which I don’t remember, broke the dam. It was an official U.S. State Department pronouncement that was plainly a lie, and a contention by Castro and the Cubans on the same subject that was objectively true. We were lying, they were telling the truth.
As silly as it sounds, as simple as it was, that was my Great Escape. That was the day that my education started. The erosion that had been underway for months brought down the wall. But even after it was a slow process. Late one evening I was watching C-SPAN as a man was talking at American University about Nicaragua and the Reagan Central American Wars. He was speaking in a language I was not used to, saying things I could not comprehend. But his words grabbed me. He was Noam Chomsky. He is, to this day, a powerful force of reason, and for that reason kept off American television and radio and out of mainstream publications.
I’ll stop there. The rest is just hard work, diving into real American history, learning the role of Israel, learning the mechanics of propaganda. It is a big and beautiful and mysterious world, and everything we know is false. Did I substitute one set of falsehood with another? Yes. I became a raging left-winger, thinking that if one side was lying, the other was telling the truth. Also, I assumed that if the Republicans were a stupid party, the Democrats must be a smart one. Belief systems are security blankets. If we lose one, we find another. Patriotism is security, just like religion. It’s all based on kernels of truth here and there, but mostly lies.
That’s a hell of a way to go through life, I must say, each day realizing that more of what I knew to be true was false. But I was also growing in a deeper comprehension of “truth,” which is not pleasant. It is hard to know anything from the chambers of our minds, from within our clouds, but the things we think we know are our motivating force. Lies and myths are important. Without them, we are rudderless. We need to strike a balance, to allow some mythology to guide our thinking, but to be grounded in the knowledge that it is myth. People who have transcended the myths of religion, but still choose to be religious, are perhaps the smartest among us.
This is the grounding from which I experienced 9/11. Like everyone I was traumatized, but also knew immediately that it was a lie. I avoided the subject for years, as frankly, JFK had worn me down, and I did not want to be imprisoned by yet another meaningless mystery. JFK was a mere lever, a portal out of the prison, and I have seen it work in the same fashion on others who want to solve the crime. It is not the medicine, but the side-effects, that change us.
Nonetheless, last year I did it. I jumped in. I won’t even begin to discuss that event here. I am far more interested in the people who have taken the trouble to come here and dispute my view, who think me off on some mental road trip. I have been accused of arrogance and “certainty,” or cognitive dissonance. And yet every person who has come here to dispute my claims has steadfastly refused to look at evidence. That is the prison I was in too. They know! They are walking about carrying within them contradictory beliefs, certain in the truth of each. Because they know that the official truth of 9/11 is real, they also know that Isaac Newton was wrong, at least on that day; that planes crash and leave no debris; that they perform impossible feats like flying at over 500 mph at ground level; snap light posts in two without being damaged; and enter steel buildings without encountering resistance.
Because they know these things, any attempt to set them straight is an attack on the fortress. I was so foolish, years ago, to attack my own fortress, of course not knowing what I was doing. I tore down my own belief system. It was so hard, so painful to sit back one day and know that I had been lied to all my life, but more importantly, had believed the lies. I know where they are at. If their fortresses have been breached, I will not know today or tomorrow, or even for years, if ever.
Some think that the American public will change its habits if they learn the events of 9/11 as they really happened. That is nonsense. The vast majority will never be reached. The propaganda system owns them. Some assume I am on some sort of mission to change people’s minds. That too is nonsense. Minds don’t change, but mindsets can be altered. It’s a long and slow process. The walls cannot be attacked head-on. They must erode from the bottom. We are all guarding our walls, and call out the engineers at the first sign that there is some failing in the construction. Hardly anyone will ever change, and certainly not because of what I write here.
But on the other side of that wall is freedom. It’s what keeps me going. I love being alive because I am free, not bound by anyone else’s truth. Each day is a new adventure.
Thus spaketh the accountant.
_____________________
PS: For anyone who indeed is curious about the events of 9/11, here is a contradiction to get you going: The “9/11 Truth Movement” is part of the ongoing cover-up. We are up against manipulative geniuses who maneuvered innocent people into place to unwittingly participate in 9/11, and others of equal integrity to unwittingly participate in the cover-up.
PPS: Perhaps the most obvious clue to the existence of cognitive dissonance is apparent discomfort that we either feel ourselves or see in others as they lash out at us with illogical arguments such as “conspiracy theorist” (an implanted term that has no discernible useful meaning other than as one of denigration used to marginalize people), or other more degrading insults such as “nutjobs,” “whackos,” or mentally ill. Another strong clue is an inability to even confront counter-evidence to strongly held beleifs.
Piece of Mindful 
“Relax, ” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “
LikeLike
“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . .”
“And?”
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
LikeLike
It’s a conspiracy.
LikeLike
You do present an interesting case for study, Swede: Can a cognitively impaired person suffer from cognitive dissonance? Would you care to submit to some testing?
LikeLike
Sure, I’d loved to be tested.
On issues that matter.
LikeLike
And would the testing include a new microchip?
Quote: “ In the massive US HEALTHCARE BILL, which your elected representatives voted for without reading, there is a section titled: Subtitle C-11 Sec. 2521 – National Medical Device Registry which states:
“The Secretary shall establish a national medical device registry (in this subsection referred to as the ‘registry’) to facilitate analysis of postmarket safety and outcomes data on each device that—‘‘(A) is or has been used in or on a patient; and ‘‘(B) is a class III device; or ‘‘(ii) a class II device that is implantable.”
The language is deliberately vague, but it provides the structure for making America the first nation in the world that would require every U.S. citizen to receive an implanted radio-frequency (RFID) microchip for the purpose of controlling medical care.”
LikeLike
Yeah, well, you know that I was hugely opposed to that crazy bill, so I’m not sure of your point other than maybe you’ve reverted to partisanship again? D’s and R’s are mirror images of each other.
LikeLike
The “C” or “S” party has no reflection.
Like Vampires.
LikeLike
Is that what happened to you Swede? They implanted you? That would explain a lot.
LikeLike
He was probed by the aliens, the same ones that knocked down the towers.
LikeLike
You know what I find interesting Jack, is that since the 1960s there have been tens of thousands of cattle mutilations in the US and in other countries, but so far they’ve never caught anybody surgically coring out the anus, surgically removing the eye, surgically removing cow penises, vaginas, utters, or draining away the blood.
It’s a mystery. It’s on going.
http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/archives/38615/
http://cattlebusinessweekly.com/main.asp?SectionID=14&SubSectionID=19&ArticleID=2785
And then there are these retired Air force guys at The National Press Club.
So what’s it all mean, Mr Natural? What to make of it all.
“Because you know something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?” – B Dylan.
LikeLike
Too many links sidetracked that comment, Steve.
Jack’s eyes are telling his brain things that it does not want to see. His thought control system has kicked in, constructing defenses. They have a name for it … Cognitive something or other.
LikeLike
Steve, Dont listen to Mark he has already told me has no belief that extra terrestrials have visited earth and is unwilling to look at the evidence.
LikeLike
I have said: In my unscientific mind, the distances between stars is too great too overcome, so that visits by other intelligent life is extremely unlikely. However, I know that military research and testing is secretive and likely uses technologies unavailable and unknown to the general public. For those credible sightings of “UFO’s” I would suggest an earthly source.
9/11 appears to have been a demonstration of a new weapon unknown to the public.
LikeLike
Im with you on the cattle mutilations. The local hot area has been the rocky mountain front up around choteau. Definitely a mystery with no logical earthly explanation that makes sense to me. The fact they commenced rapidly in conjunction with and in correlation with the location of hundreds of nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles in the immediate area is also a point to consider. Hoaxes? Satanists? EBEs? Military distraction? I dont know.
LikeLike
Question for you: Why are you bringing up crop circles, cattle mutilations, UFO’s? It appears to me to be deliberate distraction. I am going to ask you point blank (which usually makes you disappear) to look at the evidence I have brought to the fore.
The other phenomena are curiosities, and the chance for pranksters very high, especially with crop circles. But as a direct result of 9/11, two countries were invaded, millions killed millions more became refugees. Since that time five or six more countries are under the gun – none of which would have happened had 9/11 not happened.
That in mind, I suggest a serious man would want to make is mind up based on internal reasoning power rather than authoritative pronouncements from those who stood to gain the most from the event.
Is this good bye for now, Jack? See ya then.
LikeLike
I didnt bring up cattle mutilations it was Steve W, I just made a smart ass remark to Swede and then responded to Steve W. A “serious” man would conclude through internal reasoning power that if there was any sort of inside job conspiracy with 9/11 the way to get there would be to start with examining the links between the hijackers and saudi/pakistani intelligence agencies.My internal reasoning power concludes that most of what you would describe as holes in the official story (mainly on scientific gronuds regarding the collapse) are debunked or are far more likely to be anomalies attributed to a once in a lifetime event that has never before taken place to be studied than to be attributed to a hypothetical secret weapon (that obviously we dont even have the benefit of examining how it works if one were even to acknowledge it ‘could’ exist).
LikeLike
You could try looking at evidence, but you ain’t going to do that. Are ya. A “Saudi” connection to hijackers who did not even exist is a blind alley, in my opinion. The reason they were chosen, most likely, is the old connection the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan – they were intelligence assets who were managed day-to-day (like Osama) and had doppelgangers that they could send to various places like flight-training schools. As I read it, seven of them were quite surprised the next day to learn that they had hijacked airliners.
On the other hand, the evidence around a new kind of weapon is immense, from steel turning to dust in midair to cars two block away frying to absence of adequate Richter readings on the collapses to a huge magnetic field fluctuation recorded in Alaska to elevation of tritium levels in the Great Lakes to historic highs. You may be right about “once-in-a-lifetime,” but don’t seem to be curious beyond that wholly inadequate explanation.
LikeLike
You keep repeating in various forms that the hijackers were found to be alive, this is an example of how you keep repeating arguments that have been debunked. The examples you speak of were instances of people with the same names not people who were shown to be the same individuals. My understanding is that several of the hijackers had names that were somewhat common in muslim culture so its not unusual at all that others with the same name could be located and then this is somehow seized upon as ‘evidence’ that the hijackers did not exist. The blind alley is the investigation of an alleged secret super weapon, which while interesting, does not lead to any tangible evidence. I dont come to any conclusions because I think there is far more out there than we know so conclusions are premature, but the tangible evidence has been there for years. The mysterious coincidental deaths of all the individuals allegedly named by Abu Zubaydah in his interrogation raises my eyebrows far more than the wishy washy and spurious scientific claims regarding the fall of the towers.
“Here, the story line veers from le Carré to “The Godfather.” Shortly after the U.S. inquiry, on July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed, age 43, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. On the way to Ahmed’s funeral the next day, Prince Sultan al-Saud was killed in a single-car crash. A week later the third prince Zubaydah had fingered, Fahd al-Kabir , was found dead 55 miles east of Riyadh — according to the Saudi royal court he’d “died of thirst” while traveling in the summer heat. Seven months later Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife and 15 of his closest associates died in a plane crash near Islamabad. The plane had recently passed maintenance inspection, and the weather was clear. According to the Asia Times, “Reports at the time said that the pilot had been changed just minutes before takeoff.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/13/was-the-saudi-government-involved-in-the-9-11-terror-attacks.html
http://www.salon.com/2003/10/18/saudis_2/
LikeLike
Too many links sidetracks a comment. I think the limit is two, but it is unpredictable.
First, I have dealt with “debunking” in other places. No matter what evidence pops up, so too does an official “debunking” of that evidence, and because you are only interested in validation of your own views, you go there and never examine the original evidence. It is calculated, and part of the ongoing cover-up. Indeed people who were fingered as hijackers stepped forth in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
That an exotic weapon used to bring down the towers is supported by mountains of evidence. “What” that weapon was is unknown, how it worked is unknown, but it is assumed to be “directed” energy as opposed to “kinetic.” That it was pancake collapse is easily shown to be false, as viewing the collapse shows that metal turned to dust as it fell, that energy forced matter up and outward with great force, and not down, as gravitational collapse would do. That took another source of energy beyond the gravity that was stored as energy in the building.
That you will not look at the evidence speaks of you, and not the evidence.
Before examining liks between Saudis and Pakistani and hijackers, a serious man would examine the evidence of existence of hijackers. Since a jet airliner cannot be absorbed by a steel building without resistance, that video must have been fake. If the video (easily duplicated using CGI) is fake, there was no plane. If there was no plane, there were no hijackers.
You make a fundamental error here I trying to ascertain who did it before even knowing what happened that day. You’re in a blind alley.
LikeLike
How about a cognitively impaired nation? I think you’re onto something. But is baked really a better choice than fried?
LikeLike
Cognitive dissonance indeed. The Right Rev. Jerry Falwell long ago asserted–and quoted numerous biblical passages and references to certain signs to back up his claim–that 9/11 was God’s chastisement for America’s indulgence of pagans, abortionists, feminists and gays. I have thoroughly examined the proofs offered by Falwell and find them unassailable. Until you have read all the same proofs and can offer countervailing evidence that he was wrong, I’m afraid I will have to consider you just another damned chicken-hearted, brainwashed fool, too intellectually dishonest to participate in the discussion.
LikeLike
Ouch!!!!!!!! That’s going to leave a “mark.”
LikeLike
You’re living vicariously via the comments of others? Here’s something I can assert with some certainty: Ed read the post. You did not.
LikeLike
Actually it’s not certainty you have, only arrogance. Ed reduced your post and your whole conspiracy nonsense to ashes by borrowing your own tactics to show what a farce your claim to unassailable knowledge is.
LikeLike
I didn’t think his parody was useful, as we all have been forced to examine the evidence of the validity of the Bible. Falwell was preying on the believers. On the other hand I have evidence that you all refuse to look at. There is something more going on here that none of you are talking aout, but I am: cognitive dissonance. Believing is seeing.
You, who have yet to even read the post, have no standing here.
LikeLike
Religious faith is belief without evidence. Is that what you infer here, that I have no evidence? Mere suspension of Newton’s third law that day is evidence, and not belief.
It is true that I cannot know the inner workings of governments and defense contractors and other whom I suspect brought this about. I might well be wrong about the direction of the arrows. I am only certain about where they do not point. Perhaps it was dancing Israelis. But this I know based on solid evidence: No planes hit buildings, ergo no hijackers; many military drills were underway that compromised defense readiness that day: “pancake” collapses that are physically impossible without injection of new energy; no significant seismic signals when buildings collapse (not enough debris); significant magnetic activity registered that day on monitors in Alaska; a hole in the Pentagon too small to absorb a jet airliner; Impossibility of airliners to fly at such high speeds at low altitude; toasted cars blocks away from Twin Towers;
fires that doplasma that does not burn paper but causes metal to disintegrate; people jumping from buildings even as it was obvious that help would arrive.You won’t go to the evidence, Mohammad bring evidence to you. Deal with it.
LikeLike
The only connection I would make between you and Falwell is the tendency to doggedly run down any scrap of evidence that supports a predetermined belief. In his case, fundamental Christianity, in yours the belief that the United States — an unsleeping machine of infinite resources and bottomless evil — is behind every dastardly deed in the world, no matter how small. American exceptionalism, indeed!
LikeLike
I get that – confirmation bias. It is easy to spot in others. Don’t mean to go all Kailey on you, but the second part of your statement is a straw man.
In the meantime, evidence? Care to look at it? Ever? Or is it, as Dr. Wood says, a) poor problem-solving ability; b) group-think, or c), that you are terrified by the implications? I know it ain’t #a.
By the way, I’m pretty sure I am going to lose my bet with you on Sunday evening. Any suggestions on what I can do with the $5? (Wait for it …)
LikeLike
I’m guessing we’ll both lose. I loved the Lincoln movie too much, so it clouded my judgment. I haven’t see Zero Dark Thirty, but it appears to be fading. What does that leave? Le Miz? Django? Oh, well, I suppose we can both wait until Sunday.
LikeLike
Ed, I remember that Mr Falwell had an interpretation, but I didn’t know that he had elevated it to biblical prophesy with accompanying truths. Did he write a book? I thought it was just a generalized kind of catch all pronouncement meant to divert people away from what happened by linking the completely unique events to the supernatural.
Here’s my question; Was Jerry the least bit thankful that God spared New York City from Hurricaine Erin on that morning of 9/11/01? Or did he even know about that? i think Jerry Falwell should have gotten together with Lisa Jefferson, who believes she was “Called” by God to deliver the the story of Todd (“Let’s Roll”) Beamer on flight 93 to the people of the USA, and raised a bunch of money.
But then he died before that could happen, I guess.
LikeLike