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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Double standards seem like the only standards most politicians know

By David McElroy · January 20, 2012

In 1998, Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the House who guided the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about an affair. He talked piously at the time about family values and how Clinton wasn’t fit to be president because of his transgressions. At the same time, Gingrich was cheating on his own wife. Even now, the man doesn’t see anything hypocritical about this.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 2009, she criticized GOP presidential candidates who had opposed Barack Obama’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler by saying, “If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars; they would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

There’s only one problem. Schultz drives a foreign car — a 2010 Infiniti FX35 with a personalized license plate bearing her initials. A spokesperson for the DNC didn’t see any hypocrisy in this, of course, but saw it as merely a Republican diversion from the issues.

We could easily cover dozens of incidents of hypocrisy — by supporters of both sides of the mainstream — but you get the point. If you do a web search for political hypocrisy or political double standards, what you’ll find is hundreds and hundreds of articles by people blasting the serious hypocrisy of the other side, but I haven’t been able to find a single word about the fact that hypocrisy is the biggest bi-partisan aspect of politics.

All day Thursday, I saw conservative Republicans blasting Marianne Gingrich and ABC News because of the charges she made in an interview with the network. To me, the woman comes across as a credible witness who testifies about her ex-husband’s deep dishonesty and lack of ability to be trusted. But I saw and heard Newt Gingrich’s supporters call her all sorts of names, most of which use language I wouldn’t repeat here. Why are they attacking her when all she is doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of her ex-husband?

I’d like to suggest that what’s going on in each of these cases is cognitive dissonance. When people are presented with two contradictory pieces of information, it creates feelings of discomfort in their brains. In order to get rid of that discomfort, they’re forced to unconsciously (or sometimes even consciously) discard one piece of information — so they won’t be faced with such an open contradiction.

In the minds of Newt Gingrich supporters, they already have firmly established in their minds the fact that he is a conservative champion who stands for their kind of values. For many of those people, the values he stands for are social conservative positions. This is the evaluation they’ve given him over the years. So when they’re faced with new information that’s in conflict with that — such as finding out that he’s a serial cheater and long-term liar who changes his positions when it’s politically convenient — they have to either reject the new information or decide they’ve been wrong about him in the past.

The cognitive dissonance of facing both of those positions forces them to choose one or the other, so the vast majority choose to disbelieve the new information. They can combine that with the long-established assumption that “the media” are out to get conservatives, and they have a nice story line that suggests that a lying and bitter ex-wife is teaming up with the “liberal media” to bring down a conservative. They might even end up more devoted to Gingrich than they were to start. And, oh yeah, if it does does turn out to be true, well, everybody does it, so it’s not a big deal if one of our guys does it, too.

The same sort of thing would be going on in the minds of unthinking Democrats who might defend Schultz. If the reverse case were true, they would be yelling about a double standard, but it’s different when it’s one of their own. After all, Schultz voted the right way on the issue, so her personal preference of her own vehicle didn’t matter. Right? In the same way that Gingrich voted the way conservatives wanted him to vote, so they were willing to excuse his personal behavior.

If you’d really like to know more about the cognitive dissonance that causes these double standards, I highly recommend a book called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.”

In this book, a pair of social psychologists explain why the human brain is wired for self-justification. They show examples of how we fool ourselves in various areas of life, ranging from politics to police work to romantic relationships. When I read this book about four years ago, it helped me to make sense of a lot of things that didn’t make sense about the world around me. You probably look at other people and wonder why they could be so contradictory and confusing. What you’ll learn is that they’re wondering the same thing about you.

If you already opposed Newt Gingrich before this latest evidence came out, you might be looking at the Gingrich supporters and thinking that they must be idiots to still support him after this. (That’s my emotional response, too.) But you need to understand that you’ve almost certainly made similar errors. I’m sure I have, although I’d much rather assume that I’m the only truly consistent and rational person on the planet.

When you get right down to it, it’s this sort of insane self-justification that will always doom democracies. The theory is that educated and informed people will listen to the facts and come to rational decisions in the best interests of everybody. Even if every single person in the system were to honestly try that — and it can’t ever be that good anyway — it’s not possible for us to come to mutually beneficial solutions. You’re always going to believe your solution is better than mine. I’m always going to assume that my solution is better than yours. We’re both going to justify ourselves as being right.

Whichever political group you’re a part of, you almost certain see yourself as being part of the group that makes sense. The other groups are unreasonable and irrational and a dozen other things. Even though you’re sure you’re right, they’re just as sure that they’re the only reasonable and rational group. That’s just the way human nature works.

We’re not going to be able to rationally convince each other to change our minds — because we make decisions for unconscious emotional reasons and then we dress them up with logical-sounding words that justify what we’ve already decided.

We’re all deceiving ourselves. Some of us are a bit more aware of the self-deception than others are, but it doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant reality to understand.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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