Two Castles, An analogical guide for understanding and conquering Cognitive Dissonance - Dave Painter

Two Castles, An analogical guide for understanding and conquering Cognitive Dissonance

I want you to view yourself as a king or queen and in your mind a great kingdom exists; every idea the king allows into his kingdom, he builds a mental castle around it to protect it from the opposite idea. Most of the times, these castles are built with facts, evidence, reason, and logic. Unfortunately some get built with lies, misinformation, emotion, fallacy, and belief.

Sometimes, new ideas come along and the king or queen looks to build in the same place where another castle may be previously occupied, this is usually successfully done by destroying the old castle and building a new one. A considerably usual and simple process, the king examines these two ideas and proceeds to pick the one with the most supporting evidence. The old castle proves its worth or gets blown into dust and is never seen from again other than a memory wing in the new castle to remember its destruction.

Let’s talk about those pesky ones that the king tries to build on top of each other.

The ones that make the kingdom eventually break into an internal real estate war and deep, deep, (one more) deep down the king of these castles knows this is a fight for supremacy. The castles I’m referring to are the ones that have been built to protect ideas, which when faced with contradictory evidence cannot stand. It starts by the king carefully, or perhaps sometimes aggressively, placing a few new blocks of information on the top of this rickety, wobbly, anemic castle that had a good paint job and a lot of promises from the contractors, these castles tend to be the ones the king built when he was emotional or in a state of ignorance.

The King's Choice

The king must be careful not to allow too much in to his kingdom or some of his castles might start to buckle under the weight and eventually collapse under a new castles weight. The king gets angry when evidence he can't ignore starts to destroy the castle with its weight.

The king, starting to understand what has happened, realizes he has only two options: destroy the old castle and start building a replacement castle with the new idea, or try and fruitlessly stop the collapse by attempting to reconstruct the broken fixtures of the old castle. The majority of kings realize that the castle cannot be saved at this point and let it fall. Occasionally a king might refuse any new ideas and focus immensely on a few castles, ignoring all else, in an attempt to keep them standing, so much so that he may set out to tear down and unwittingly destroy other better-built castles mistakenly thinking he will be able to justify and further protect those few precious castles. That is a whole different issue of Conformation Bias

Alas the king, sullen with the displeasure of losing a castle, begrudgingly starts constructing a replacement castle to protect the conquering idea. While building the new castle, flash-backs reel through his head, making the king realize his folly. The king eventually realizes, he can't have two castles in the same spot, and he starts to renovate the kingdom.

About the Author

My name is Dave, and I am a co-host on The Seeds of Liberty Podcast and a co-host on the Downfall with Jared and Dave. Check out our RSS Feed herehttp://seedsofliberty.libsyn.com/rss we are also on Itunes and Stitcher under Seeds of Liberty

If you’re asking others to not collectivize you, then stop collectivizing them. Only Individuals Act. - dp

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