-- Posted Sunday, 16 January 2011 | | Source: GoldSeek.com
Before the financial crisis of 2008, mentioning gold and silver among polite company was social suicide, nothing has changed today except the mode of death. Before 2008, the reaction was to ignore and ridicule the crazy person. Today, the reaction is to panic, and then try and forget about the bad news.
I liked the reaction before 2008 better. These days I don't talk about gold and silver. What can you do for those who run away from the plain truth?
The problem is that a quest for the truth is inherently painful. In order to move away from a world view that is clearly bankrupt, you have to juggle conflicting and disturbing ideas in your head. The word for this process is cognitive dissonance. Most people have a very low tolerance for this kind of pain.
In fact I would say that the human allergy to cognitive dissonance is the root of all evil, but also perhaps the only reason that we can come together and function in large social groups.
Those who do great damage to society are invariably people who have a low willingness to accept cognitive dissonance. Think about the investment banker who is selling toxic investments to a pension fund and then shorting those investments based on his inside information. He is doing "God's Work". There is plenty of evidence that he is destroying lives, but he is committed to keeping those thoughts out of his head, committed not to seek the truth, committed to a narrow view.
Likewise, the pensioner, victim of the investment banker, refuses to deviate from the narrow view that the government will protect his pension, despite all evidence to the contrary. So the victim remains quiet all the time when something could be done to fix the problem. Only when it is too late, and the money is abruptly cut off or the currency abruptly devalued, do we get a response from the victim. The victim switches from the narrow view that everything is fine, to the narrow view that someone is to blame, but since the victim can't handle a lot of cognitive dissonance, he will latch on to the target for his blame that makes things easy to understand and reconcile.
So the blame is misdirected, the source of the evil not punished, etc.
This is the cycle of history. And I believe that this is the cycle of our lives on the small scale as well.
voltaire@incitertrading.com
http://www.incitertrading.com
-- Posted Sunday, 16 January 2011 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
