Cognitive dissonance — the process by which the beliefs someone thinks they hold and the reality of their actions contradict each other — may seem overwhelming.
Your views are suddenly changing, you feel like you don’t know what is true and what isn’t anymore and it’s as if everything you were taught by society, school, or conventional wisdom could have other sides or facets to it that you never knew before. This doesn’t help when college students are already in the midst of discovering who they are and what they believe, but it is necessary.
The feeling of mental exhaustion and weariness when you have two conflicting beliefs is something you should take pride in. It signals the beginning of thinking critically about subjects like you haven’t before. It’s uncomfortable, it’s tiring and it’s constantly going to happen once we start to learn things that don’t conform to a confirmation bias.
At a deeper level, cognitive dissonance demonstrates that identity itself is always in the process of changing and becoming. When we come from places that constantly validate existing beliefs, identity and belief often became conflated as the same.
In practice, the two are both in a process of constantly evolving and reshaping in ways that mean our fixed senses of self are largely illusionary. We therefore find ourselves enmeshed in complicated networks of becoming that reshape fundamentally how we live our lives.
If we follow this logic to the absolute extreme, then the categories of identity through which we live our lives (race, gender, sexuality, class) are constantly shifting in meaning, gaining new meanings and shedding old ones.
The process by which we come to be an “individual” is therefore only through involvement in the networks of meaning and becoming that establish the conditions and possibility of our existence.
What does this mean for politics? Central to politics is the struggle over the meanings of these categories, how people come to embody them, and what that embodiment means in terms of political actions and choices.
The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari note, when describing the rise of fascism in Europe, that “the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” The accomplishments of fascism are therefore to construct identity and to articulate desire toward the fascistic ends — to create conditions such that people want fascism.
