Oct. 30, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
04:36
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, I'm Dr. | |
| Pechenek, Steve Talks. | |
| Today I want to talk about an interesting phenomenon that's called cognitive dissonance, that we can't hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, otherwise we will get very disturbed and we can't act accordingly. | |
| A recent poll, literally as of today, showed that despite the fact that two blacks were killed a week ago at Kroger's in Jacksonville, Florida by a white man, no one was disturbed. | |
| Then on top of that, a week later, we had Mr. | |
| Sayak sending pipe bombs to every Democrat and every possible critic of Donald Trump. | |
| Yet nobody was disturbed about that. | |
| Then... | |
| Two days ago, we had 11 Jews who were killed in Pittsburgh and six more people wounded. | |
| And nobody really got upset about it. | |
| When I say nobody, I'm not talking about the fact that most Americans found all of that despicable and expressed it in the mainstream media. | |
| What I'm talking about is a more interesting phenomenon that was very subtle. | |
| Time magazine did an interview along with other interviewers That showed that most people today and of the next six days, their major concern was not about killings, was not about national security, was not even about death or dying in the United States by guns. | |
| Nor was it about gun control. | |
| It was about three basic issues which consistently followed along the political ideologies of both Democrats and Republicans. | |
| What were the three issues? | |
| The first issue was the economy. | |
| Democrats felt that the economy, the growth was due to Obama and his effectiveness. | |
| Had they given attribution to Trump, that would have been cognitive dissonance. | |
| Whereas the Republicans said that the economy improvement was due to Trump. | |
| Had they accredited that to Obama, that would have been cognitive dissonance. | |
| The second point that both Democrats and Republicans agreed on was health care. | |
| The Democrats said we should maintain Obamacare and he did a great job. | |
| The Republicans said, no, let's get rid of Obamacare and let's bring it back to the private physician. | |
| Now, cognitive dissonance would have been if the Democrats said, look, Trump did a great job, we don't have Obamacare anymore, but we're going to get a new one. | |
| Or the Republicans having said, look, Obama did a great job, let's not bother it. | |
| And what was the third issue? | |
| It wasn't guns, it wasn't anything related to national security, but it was immigration. | |
| Not the immigration that Trump was talking about, but the kind of immigration where they feel that people come to America, be they Chinese or Russian, and they get a baby here and then they leave. | |
| They don't like that. | |
| Americans believe that if you come to the United States, you want to be a citizen and you have the right to have a birth here, but in turn you just can't drop a baby and suddenly go back to your home country. | |
| So immigration was a major issue. | |
| What does this all mean? | |
| What it means is that in the next six days, both Republicans and Democrats in the Midwest, in Texas, in the Southwest, in the Northeast, are concerned about these three issues. | |
| Health care, the economy, and immigration. | |
| Accordingly, they will vote according to their political ideology, because the political ideology that's consistent with Republicans will not allow the cognitive dissidents to come in with relationship to any other disturbances, either the death of people in Pittsburgh or the killings of two blacks. | |
| Similarly, the Democrats felt very strongly that they're going to go... | |
| According to their political ideology so that they don't have to worry about gun control and they don't have to worry about the assassination of 11 Jews. | |
| What does this mean? | |
| That means the Republic is very much intact despite all of the turmoil that occurred over the past several weeks. | |
| Yes, both Republicans and Democrats said the people who committed those crimes were crazy, but that was all. | |
| Let me quote Herman Hesse, who talked about a character who had a belief system, and when reality impacted on his belief system, he simply closed his eyes and denied the reality. |
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