Pain

Cognitive dissonance is torture

Since yesterday, I’m in a lot of pain — for annoying reasons. It’s not serious but I’m not sleeping at all and it makes doing anything, including writing, a major battle. I’ll be fine, btw — I have a procedure today to take care of it, but I may be a little be slower for a few days, so please bear with me.

It struck me, however, because of this pain, my priorities have completely changed. My mind has shifted towards finding a way to make the pain stop above all else. This is evolutionarily understandable. If you injure yourself, or something goes wrong, your body needs to be very clear with your mind that something is amiss and that it needs to be prioritized.

Of course, the problem with pain is that it’s a blunt instrument. Being in pain makes everything else more difficult and can prevent you from carrying on with normal life.

Pain is also a weapon wielded by sociopaths against their enemies. Physical torture is most well-known version of this, but it is also used in psychological warfare as well.

You have probably heard the term cognitive dissonance. It’s described this way:

Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. [Leon] Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve the dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.

People suffering undue influence aka brainwashing experience cognitive dissonance intensely. The nature of this mental injury is that the victim has been traumatized and coerced into believing things that are false, so when they are confronted with facts that diverge from these beliefs, they experience cognitive dissonance. This is described in the literature as “discomfort” but it is often far more than that — it is mental pain.

The reason experts like @CultExpert Steven Hassan recommend that when communicating with loved ones who are in a cult that you avoid confronting their false beliefs directly, is that these false beliefs cause cognitive dissonance. It makes hearing information that conflicts with the cult’s doctrine literal torture which the victim will go out of their way to avoid, regardless of who is delivering the message.

This dynamic is by design. The cult’s goal is to keep its existing members and find new ones without regard to their health or well-being. So it basically turns the real world outside the cult into a torture chamber of cognitive dissonance. The behavior of cult members, who are often irrational and aggressive about defending their beliefs, is the result.

It’s not an accident that “Pain is Coming” is a major meme of the QAnon+ cult. They know very well what pain is and they are anxious to cause it in their enemies.

QAnon and descendent cults are psychological warfare tactics intended to create oceans of cognitive dissonance which will disable and radicalize the population into changing their behavior. To reduce their mental pain, victims retreat into the cult’s insulated society and cast out their non-believing friends and family from their lives.

At least 30% of Americans are in perpetual cognitive dissonance. It’s what causes them to act the way they do. Our loved ones, neighbors and friends are being tortured by the real world and lash out because they hurt. The cause of the pain is propaganda and coercion intentionally designed to enslave people in their own bodies and minds.

This is an historic atrocity, an ocean of pain in hundreds of millions of people created by criminals to bend the will of the world to submitting to their psychotic, fascist vision. They will not stop on their own. We must defeat them.

#ArrestMikeFlynn