Cognitive Dissonance
It’s been a busy week around the property. One of LuAnne’s brothers and family from Portland, Oregon spent a week with us. It’s always great to have them around. July 4th was a busy day. It started out in Millville, Pennsylvania—site of our soon-to-open 3rd Heritage Family Health location. Millville is 1 hour and 40 minutes north of Schaefferstown. It’s a small town with one traffic light, but it hosts an amazing 4th of July parade. This year was the 123rd annual! On this news video you can see a bit of our office in the background. Our day ended with a train ride and spectacular fireworks at The Star Barn in Elizabethtown.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cognitive dissonance lately, particularly over the past 3 years. For example, what if, after spending a half million dollars on education, one wakes up and realizes that much of that training has been “indoctrination” and that what is often branded as quackery and chicanery actually has solid scientific proof of efficacy behind it? It was only in the past few years that I became aware of the role of John D. Rockefeller in the early 20th century and his commissioned Flexner Report for removing herbal medicine from standard medical school curricula and replacing it with petroleum-based pharmaceuticals. (It was this awareness that led LuAnne and me to complete an herbal medicine fellowship earlier this year.)
In the introduction to his 1979 book Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, sociologist E. Richard Brown writes this striking indictment of modern medicine:
This book sees scientific, technological medicine not as the determining force in the development of modern health care but as a tool developed by members of the medical profession and the corporate class to serve their perceived needs (pp. 3-4).
This is an example of cognitive dissonance, defined broadly as the clash between two contradictory ideas. One would have expected “medicine” to be about helping people, but perhaps it’s largely driven by corporate and pharmaceutical greed. As a further example, statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) are predicted to hit $22B by 2032, according to Persistence Market Research. According to JAMA (November 22, 2021), statin use among adults older than 40 cost $16.9B in 2012 & 2013 alone. But in Dr. Mercola’s “Just Say No to Statins” (May 26, 2023), he cites research which shows that statins essentially do nothing for either primary or secondary prevention of heart attack or stroke. (Of course, one has to pay to read this article, as during C19, the powers that be made Dr. Mercola take down most of his articles within a few days’ time as part of grand government censorship of alternative opinions.)
Add to this fact a Cochrane review published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (Vol 148, Aug 2022, pp. 160-169) which showed that 94% of healthcare interventions had no high-quality evidence supporting their benefit. Only 5.6% had such supportive evidence and actual harm was measured in 36.8% of interventions.
Surely this is cognitive dissonance! We’re told one thing when in reality, the exact opposite is/may be true. A somewhat humorous example is seen in the photo below:
I was watching a news clip earlier today and noticed a picture of Meta’s headquarters (parent company of Facebook) in Menlo Park, California with the unique street address of 1 Hacker Way! I’m not sure if this is a joke, a coincidence, or overt acknowledgement that “the company that allows you to share your personal and vacation photos also is hacking all your privacy data.”
Cognitive dissonance makes people very uncomfortable, and few people can exist in that discomfort. Therefore, most people dismiss the dissonance with “well that can’t possibly be true” or “that’s just a conspiracy theory.” We saw this all the time during C19. Remember my “Dear Pastor” post addressed the fact that 2/3 of the adult population are living in a state of perpetual adolescence. It takes maturity to face the reality that “maybe I’ve been lied to, but what am I going to do about it?”
I’m keeping this post short, because the real reason for this post is to share Dr. Malone’s Stack from yesterday entitled “Perspective, Values, and the COVIDcrisis.” He has recently been writing about this very phenomenon. What I have called “cognitive dissonance” he has called “ontological shock.” I would really recommend clicking the two links in this paragraph (my writer dashboard shows me how many times the links are clicked!) as it’s an excellent treatment of this subject. But in case you don’t click and read either of these links, let me share four quotes from yesterday’s “Perspective”:
I was forced to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about the way the world works.
What the COVIDcrisis has taught, for anyone willing and able to listen and hear, is that we are living in a world where government propaganda, information control, and increasingly mind and thought control has been normalized.
I think I can see clearly now, perhaps for the first time in my life.
Many, many lost their ability to maintain an objective perspective, to accurately assess reality.
Bishop and psychiatrist Dr. E. Daniel Martin is my friend and mentor. While facing a difficult church situation many years ago, he burst out in prayer for me during a phone conversation. I will never forget what he prayed: “Joel has seen something that he can’t unsee.”
“For anyone willing and able to listen and hear,” don’t close your eyes. Don’t close your ears. Don’t fall asleep. Pray for the courage to face the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and come to a place of truth that sets you free.