Definition of dissonance
1a : lack of agreement the dissonance between the truth and what people want to believe especially : inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s beliefs — compare cognitive dissonance
Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father
Thomas Jefferson was born into a slave holding family. He wrote about the horrors of the trans Atlantic slave trade as he owned slaves. He had to had to have had cognitive dissonance, I believe.
The ruling class in the United States invented race for the sole reason of keeping me from access to wealth, access to having ownership of my own body in order for them to exploit my body for personal gain or satisfaction.
To this day, there are citizens who object to the teaching of history in any way other than that which holds the founding fathers as heroic. I understand that for many reasons, people have a need to love this country. I understand cognitive dissonance and I have lived with my own cognitive dissonance in different forms. Any dissonance that I held or may still hold hides itself from my awareness. It has been nearly impossible to examine things that I think are precious to me.
Fast Forward
Most or all of us are suffering from a shared delusion that forest fires and super hurricanes and plastic islands in oceans and mass extinction is going to get solved by guys wearing white lab coats. That is some persistent cognitive dissonance. Our science based culture works to maintain the systems that are predicated on believing the earth is here for man to plunder because man should own the earth’s body instead of respecting it as a living system that we cannot live without. I think that the energy behind a thing (a thing like a society) can taint the thing, and furthermore, as its inheritors, we are all living in that taint, myself included, because I was born in it. We are living on earth, running around to some degree broken from the taint.