As I get older, nearing a milestone of 64, I realize how much I like to get good sleep. What makes me lose sleep? Living with a lie. That is the dragon that needs slaying. We have a name for living with a lie - cognitive dissonance. By naming something we put it to bed. How ironical.
What is cognitive dissonance. It’s saying or believing one thing and doing or thinking something else.
We have individual dragons we need slaying and we have social constructs based on lies that need slaying. Machiavellian politics is alive and well creating nightmares around the world. Men cheat and it’s like pissing in their own pools. They try to kid themselves that it doesn’t matter. They know it’s wrong and dishonest but they live the nightmare thinking such macho behaviour is acceptable. Thinking lies are acceptable to a healthy individual leads to unrest. For some individuals and organizations not so much.
Consider some of our most cherished institutions or people. Mother Teresa is nominated by a Pope to be a saint. But her autobiography tells how she despaired in doubting her faith, living with the Church’s biggest sin - despair, yet she promoted her faith anyway. Einstein stated that ”religion is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions”. He got that right. The Roman Catholic priests abuse children and the church covers it up. People of religious faith are themselves stunted children. People of the southern American States have the highest religious subscribers yet are the most unlawful with the highest crime rates. Hypocrisy is the name for recognizing cognitive dissonance and living with it.
We all have dragons to slay. I used to practise praying at meals while believing in evolution. Once I stopped praying at meals I felt honest with myself and slept better.
It seems that normal healthy individuals have a true north and can keep on the straight and narrow, albeit with periodic compass re-calibrations. An organization on the other hand like a church, government or corporation, although given the rights of an individual, appears unable to reconcile lies and inconsistencies and may even create them. The organization I work for for example, the CFIA, refused to acknowledge the inconsistency of claiming to be a scientific evidence-based organization while regulating ritualistic slaughter. They rationalized it to me by claiming such slaughter was based on political science. Apparently organizations don’t require a good sleep.
The reconciliation between the laws in macro or Newtonian physics and strangeness of sub atomic quantum mechanics will probably with time be resolved. This too may be quite ironic as it seems that time heals all. In time we all get a good sleep.
