Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Contingency, Irony & Solidarity

Gorbachev and Yeltsin at the Extraordinary Congress of Peoples Deputies, September 3, 1991

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person's "Final Vocabulary" It is "final" in the sense that it doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argument recourse. Those words are as far as we can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. A small part of the final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as "true," "good," "right," and "beautiful." The larger part contains thicker, more rigid and more parochial terms, for example, "Christ," "England," "professional standards," "decency," "kindness," "the Revolution," "the Church," "progressive," "rigorous," "creative." The more parochial terms do most of the work. ~ Page 73

....... Everyone has heard of "reducing cognitive dissonance," in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay, he actually recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistence in one's belief. But that's right: there is no contradiction between the proposition "The task is boring" and the proposition, "I was pressured into lying that the task was fun." Another social psychologist Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition "I am nice and in control." Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that yo are not as beneficent and and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight. Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, bit a nerve? When some part of us know it is true. If every part knew it was true, the remark would not sting; it would be old news. If no part thought it was true, the remark would roll off; we could dismiss it as false. Trivers recounts an experience that is all too familiar. One of his paper drew a published critique, which stuck him at the time as vicious and unprincipled, full of innuendo and slander. Rereading the article years late, he was surprised to find that the wording was gentler, the doubts more reasonable, the attitude less biased than he had remembered. Many others have made such discoveries; they are almost the definition of "wisdom" If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked. ~ Mark Twain Our enemies' opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own. ~ Francois La Rochefoucauld. Oh wad some power to giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! ~ Robert Burns ~ Page 423