What Is Incoherence?
aeon.co
aeon.co
It is a large part why therapy is useful because you out-source that vocabulary/articulation/interpretation to a third party who can articulate it back to you which helps speed up that feed-back loop/process.
The idea that cognitive dissonance is not perceived as a problem as long as one does not need to verbalise those, is scary but also hopefull.
So yes, speaking about problems is, yet again, very important in resolving them.
That is why a therapist will get you to articulate what you mean when you say a word/phrase because people have different meaning of words and/or phrases. That is why when clients relapse, they can go to a different therapist who uses the same vocabulary/words/phrases.
At the end of the day, there is a bit of a serenity to it all. You stop trying to manipulate the world, and start finding people who have the same wants, needs, desires as you. but, alas the first step is all-ways articulation.
1. "I'm an OK person, I'm not particularly bad, I try and do the right thing"
2. "How can #1 be true if there is strong evidence to the contrary?"
I think you're right, hackit2, this is usually not verbally articulated, but FELT as discomfort.
This internal discomfort can be resolved either by:
1. Facing up to the facts around cigarettes - This is hard, this sucks. If you're smart you have to face up to all sorts of uncomfortable stuff, from governmental benefits of addiction to your own mistakes.
2. NOT facing up to what is real. But siding with a group/ideology/thinking mode which is working on the front of modifying reality. Investing time in trying to change reality through narrative or rhetoric or disproving.
I think this framework happens to us all on some fronts... I think the catholic church might have hit up against some of this stuff when the earth ceased being the centre of the universe. I think they may have chosen path #2, cause they had a lot to lose.
Apologies for the long sentence.
A firm basis for standup comedy, and spoken humor in general.
Having real trouble grokking what is incoherent / irrational about this. Seems to me that e.g. preferring Strawberry to Chocolate does not interact at all with my feelings about Vanilla in some other contest?
Sure - given a choice between three flavours, this set of preferences gets you nowhere. But isn't that because we're comparing three objects, two at a time?
All proofs by contradiction would be entirely trivial otherwise.
This is one reason why writing is so helpful. And talking too, obviously!