a child's tale..

Remember the classic children’s tale of the Fox and the Grapes. I recently realized that it is another of those bedside tales that have multiple dimensions of meaning to them. This is a beautiful example of cognitive dissonance and the most oft-used method of resolving or reducing the contrast. The cornerpoints of this situation are:

1. The fox wants the grapes.


2. He cant have them because they are too high.

Here there is a conflict between interest and reality. This conflict results in a glitch in the mind's congnitive circuits that causes them to go from their ground state to a dissonant one. And how does the fox handle this deviation from normalcy? He needs to flatten down one of those two conflicting structures he is faced with. So he convinces himself that the grapes are not worth having. Viola, we have a reduced dissonance. What came in handy here is the power of self-deception which also goes by the name Rationalization.

Initially the fox coveted those grapes because he knew they were luscious and ripe. But here he comes across a situation where he is forced to express an opinion in direct opposition to his beliefs. Bidding adieu to our vulpine protagonist lets consider a situation where a person is forced to do this. His reaction could be one of two things:

1. He could set down a downright refusal to do so.  


2. He could accept the proposed declaration.

The second possibility is usually the case when the person has an incentive to fall in line with this unnatural situation. This inducement would generally be in tune with the man’s likes and needs or it wouldn’t be sufficient to induce him to perpetrate this fraud.
In this case, there are some subtle changes occurring in the person, which are in part influenced by the pressure or pull of the inducement offered to him. The person might over justify the opinion he is forced to express and in the process he also modifies his opinion of the matter to be closer to the one he is expressing. This is normally a guilt-relieving method that ive seen myself and a many people around me employ quite frequently and I term it brainwashing, not the external variety but the self-induced type. Because note that here I have been bribed only express an opinion or justify it not necessarily to adopt it. But the pressure of a publicized opinion is potent enough to require a reconciliation through a subtle brain-washing however unsupportable it may seem when analyzed rationally or by a disinterested party.

This is a scary thought, this Beeblebrox-like ability of the human mind to override rationality and impose an external will upon itself without even triggering off an intruder alarm. In cases like these the best a person can expect is a fleeting moment of clarity when he thinks to himself, if I meet the ‘me’ who meddled with my mind like this, ill hit myself so hard I wont know what hit me.