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Cognitive Dissonance
No Compromise: The Dangerous Dream That We Can Have It All
Intolerance of ambiguity drives people to ignore their cognitive dissonance.
Updated March 10, 2024 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- People often want opposite things, leading to cognitive dissonance.
- We deal with the discomfort of dissonance by rationalizing why we shouldn't have to deal with it.
- In religion and politics, we see the rise of movements that idealize some have-it-all total package.
- Movement leaders claim that they want success and justice when, really, their top priority is their success.
Hoax springs eternal.
Strictly speaking, we each get only one top priority. That’s what top priority means. If you have two top priorities they could conflict. Say your top priorities are winning and playing fair. Say you could win by cheating. In such conflicts, if you always choose winning over playing fair, winning is your top priority even if you say that fairness is.
If you alternate between winning and cheating, you must have another top priority that decides how you alternate; for example, winning by cheating but only when you can get away with it. Regardless of how many top priorities you claim (and people typically claim a lot of them, for the prestige), you only have one.
In the ideal world, there would be no tension between our priorities and, therefore, no conflict, debate, or doubt. Cheaters wouldn’t win, crime wouldn’t pay, just behavior would be more successful than unjust behavior, and people wouldn’t be tempted to cut corners to win.
Is that our real world? Most would admit it isn’t, though some would say it could be. Some even say that we’re destined in that direction. MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." And lots of people say, “Crime doesn’t pay,” and “the good guy always wins.” Fiction is populated with stories that make such hopeful visions sound realistic, like we can have that kind of harmony if we just tried harder. They often say that that’s what God or the higher power wants for us. The kingdom of harmony here on earth.
People imagine a mighty and just God who bends the moral arc of the universe toward a utopia where justice always pays and crime doesn’t, if not here yet, someday soon, or at least elsewhere in heaven or some other happy hereafter for all eternity.
It’s not just that God can bend the moral arc. He really wants to. Such imagined overarching wants are what make spirituality little different from religion. The spiritual often claim to have thrown off the shackles of religion by dropping the idea of god as a man with a white beard. Hairsyle aside, the real question is whether the universe or some higher power wants anything. God’s will or the higher power’s will, it’s still will, some supernatural overarching entity having aims.
God has four top priority aims: He’s omniscient. He wants to know everything about reality. He’s omnificent. He wants to bring about harmony. And he’s omnipotent. He can do anything, including wanting to know everything about reality and wanting to use his might to realize the greatest good.
OK, but you can only have one top priority so there’s this age-old question about God. If he can and wants to know everything and is powerful enough to do anything, maybe he doesn’t want a just world. Or maybe he doesn’t want to bother knowing everything or using his power to make the world just.
Religion addresses that with God’s fourth aim. God is one. He never wants to contradict himself. Could he build a mountain so big he can’t move it? He wouldn’t want to!
Yeah, but in reality how does one keep those four goals from conflicting? The answer is utopia. Just assume a dream of complete alignment of all of God’s goals. In heaven, reality is perfect. The world we hope he’d manifest here, manifest there. Perfect justice, no crime, no disputes to resolve. He can make it so because he works in mysterious miraculous ways. And wow, does that dream sell!
We think of both hope and realism as positives. Always be hopeful; always be realistic. There are tradeoffs between those two top priorities too. Sometimes realism isn’t hopeful. As global crises mount, we could be in for a lot more realism that isn’t hopeful.
Giving people hope is a key to success. Hopeful people are more popular than realistic people. They make more money. They win leadership positions.
It may not seem like it. Politicians run negative campaigns, and fire-and-brimstone religions are very popular. They wouldn’t be if they didn’t offer hope. Trump says we’re failing but that only he can save it. Religions talk about hell but also salvation. Existential threats are the sticks to salvation’s carrots. Carrots and sticks, costs and benefits corral people into alignment. Follow me for sure-fire success. Or else, total failure.
When dark reality waves its threatening stick in our faces, we tend to look for unrealistic carrots. Hope springs eternal but gushes in crisis. Desperate times motivate unrealistic measures, so hoax gushes eternal, too. When the going gets tough, most people get unrealistic, to counter it. In times like ours, unrealistic hope really sells.
These days we’re seeing the rise of leaders who claim two top priorities. Like God, they represent what’s absolutely good and absolutely successful. They become winners by misrepresenting reality in ways that give people hope. They’ll do anything to keep looking like winners. Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Un—no leader has ever been as just and successful as these guys pretend to be.
Some of us see through them. They have one priority: Being successful. They’ll say and do anything to stay on top. They’ll cheat reality and anyone in their way and say it’s to bring about a just and harmonious world. To them justice is defined as them remaining successful. People flock to them in droves even in a democracy where people aren’t forced on pain of banishment to the gulag. Yet.
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