Reply #20: Now I understand -- it's not ignorance, it's psychological

[HamdenRice]

Last night I was at my local pub and had a conversation with three other people about the war -- two Bush supporters/republicans, a Kerry supporter/Democrat and myself.

One republican was the barmaid, who is almost comically committed to Bush -- that's her reputation.

The other Kerry supporter amazingly was a National Guardsman (African American) who was in Iraq for a year and thinks the invasion was a disaster and told us a lot about what it was like to be there.

The other republican was a firefighter who was at the WTC on 9/11.

At one point the firefighter says that after seeing the wreckage of the WTC we had to go after Sadam. The Guardsman and I both say Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11. He says he doesn't believe it. Then we both say that even president bush says that Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11. The firefighter gets that blank look that so many posters here at DU have talked about when confronting bush supporters with the facts. Then he mumbles again that he will always believe that Sadam was involved in 9/11 no matter what and walks out of the bar.

This conversation was the same day that I had posted in this thread earlier, and in a flash I completely understood these people we are talking about.

It is not an intelligence problem. It is not an information problem. It is a psychological problem called cognitive dissonance. They are not stupid at all.

Cognitive dissonance is the inability of people to process new information that conflicts with or is dissonant with what they think they already know. People will go to outrageous lengths to make new information "consonant" with what they know.

Here is the problem with bush supporters. If they accept that Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11 then they have to accept truly terrible, dissonant information: that the president is a lying incompetent, that over 1000 young Americans and countless Iraqis have died for absolutely nothing, that the country really is being run by a oil-gluttonous oligarchy, that the president's family is possibly in cahoots with the family of the worst mass murderer of Americans in history.

So they just black out the reality and hold onto the unreality. They are not stupid; they are doing what traumatized people do.