Cognitive Dissonance

About three years ago, when I was still commenting on Jihad Watch comments fields (about a year before I finally had had enough with the incessant attacks on me by "Angemon" and "Philip Jihadski" and by the utter lack of support I received from other Jihad Watch commenters -- including veteran commenters -- while I was being regularly pestered and mocked by these two clowns), I had occasion to expatiate on one Nick Lowles, a politically correct multi-culturalist in the UK.  His behaviors gave me an opportunity to articulate an analysis of the paradox, the cognitive dissonance, in the heart & mind of the typical PC MC.

I wrote that Nick Lowles is:

...a front-line soldier on our side — unfortunately fighting on the wrong side of our war of ideas — Nick Lowles, the PC MC from the UK on the forefront of helping “moderate Muslims” in their propaganda war and, as Spencer says, who had a leading hand in having the UK forbid Spencer and Geller from entering the UK.

As Spencer describes Lowles’ psychology, consequent upon Lowles thumping his chest to condemn the TMOE (the Tiny Minority of Extremists who are the only problem) and to try to sound strongly anti-“jihadist”:

This is Nick Lowles in a hard place, as the Islamic supremacism he has now aided and abetted is in full bloom in the Islamic State, and he can see vividly what he has been enabling. Others can as well; hence his furious denunciation of the Islamic State and call for it to be confronted — for otherwise “Islamophobes” will take advantage of the situation by spreading “poison about ordinary Muslims.” For some clarity in his befogged mind, Lowles should ask this “ordinary Muslim” friends where he can find a program in any mosque or Islamic school in the UK that teaches young Muslims and converts to Islam why they should reject on Islamic grounds the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam…

While Spencer is correct that the mind of such a PC MC is “befogged”, there is a logic to it: it is the logic caused by the enormous pressure which the unavoidable data of pernicious Islam causes as it increasingly impinges on the PC MC paradigm defending the false peaceful Islam it has constructed. And because that false Islam is logically joined at the hip with a feeling of (self-)righteous tolerance for the majority of Muslims deemed to be ever threatened by our evil white Western bigotry, it becomes in such a befogged mind a major human rights issue, making him feel he is standing on the right side with the angels, helping to stem the “backlash” tide of evil white Western bigotry, hate and racism.

The mental and emotional energy he should be directing at the actual human rights catastrophe of a global revival of Islam is thus redirected perversely to protect Islam and its vast majority of “decent” Muslims; but — and here is the key point — the enormous pressure caused by the actual data of pernicious Islam (the real Islam, which doesn’t go away — and is actually metastasizing and getting horribly worse daily — when someone, like a Lowles, fantasizes about a pseudo-Islam) creates a cognitive-emotional dissonance in his mind, where his conscience (you know, that area of the human being that actually loves the truth and the good) is increasingly in tension against his politically correct Internal Censor which he has assimilated from his surrounding culture that governs his conscious thoughts. And so he lashes out against ISIS and against the evil white “bigots” who would extend the problem beyond ISIS to Islam, and to Muslims in general.

We see pretty much the same psychological dynamic operative in the Counter Jihad Softies as well — with perhaps an even more intense pressure of cognitive dissonance, as I explained in my blog essay Ethical Narcissism:

… for the garden-variety PC MC, this presents less of a problem, since they don’t set up the enormous cognitive dissonance which the asymptote [i.e., the Counter-Jihad Softy] creates in his own heart and mind. I.e., the PC MC is already predisposed to try to feel good about Muslims, to embrace and respect them and their Culture, and so he has ordinarily little tension between that and his logical extension of this, when he proceeds in one or more of a variety of ways to do just that, in word and/or in deed — to embrace and respect Muslims and their Culture.

[Note, the contrast I am drawing is relative to the differences; it doesn’t mean that a PC MC like Lowles isn’t feeling a good deal of cognitive dissonance — it only means that the asymptotic Counter-Jihad individual feels that much more, for the reasons I am arguing here. To continue:]

The asymptotic Counter-Jihadist (or “asymptote”), on the other hand, can often generate a good deal of internal tension and dissonance, because he is otherwise familiarizing himself with an inordinate amount of ugly data about Muslims and their Islam, and he likely is supplementing this autodidactic learning curve with an activity of participating, more or less, in a self-reinforcing subculture of discussion about how evil Islam is — whether in discussion forums, chat rooms, book clubs, town meetings, informal gatherings, and so on. In this ongoing context, which is not static, but must be growing apace with the continuing escalating metastasis of Islamic jihad around the world, the asymptote will increasingly feel a deep discomfort, because his own self-worth is joined at the hip with how good he feels about himself as an ethical person, and his ethics in turn are dependent — in part — on the PC MC still resident in his heart and mind through his asymptotic tendency.

To put it simply, the residue of PC MC in his heart and mind tells him to be nice to Muslims, while his growing knowledge of Muslims and their Islam tells him this will be very difficult, if not impossible to do, if he wants to protect his society and if he wants to stand up for human rights. Indeed, what often occurs is the development of a tension between two competing ethical concerns: the ethical concern to be nice (or “humane”) to Muslims, and the opposite ethical concern to stand up for the rights of the various victims of Islamic violence and oppression. Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a tension, nor much of a problem, if one is convinced (as the mainstream PC MCs are) that Muslims by and large (other than a “Tiny Minority of Extremists”) aren’t doing that much violence or oppression. But the tension can become enormous, the more that a person has opened his mind to learn the full catastrophe: that is, the horrifying, growing mountain (nay, volcano) of data out there about the grotesquely ghoulish and gruesome atrocities Muslims are perpetrating around the world, getting worse by the day, enabled by a larger, amorphous context of taqiyya sophistry indulged by Muslims and the high numbers of fanaticism in Muslim populations (e.g., Pew polls) -- in a context, furthermore, of a concerted desideratum in their mainstream Islamic holy texts to conquer the world and try to destroy our free world using a combination of terrorism and stealth jihad.

Further Reading:

Various essays of mine on this Google page, concerning "asymptotic" psychology.