My President, right or wrong. What lies beneath?
When as right as you think you are is as wrong as you turn out to be, it not only threatens to create doubt and fear in you, it threatens to dis-integrate you.
Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz was perhaps most remembered for his experiment where newly hatched geese “imprinted” on him and followed him around.
When human beings are feeling most vulnerable, confused, frustrated, disempowered, disregarded and not listened to by the representatives they elected and are dependent upon, like those geese, they will imprint on someone who boldly and loudly proclaims he/she hears them and will give them whatever they need to make those negative feelings go away.
There is good news and bad news about the imprinting process.
The good news is that when you take the leap and imprint on a person to take your worries away, ease all your fears and who furthermore joins you and stokes your anger regarding what you are upset about, you feel enormous relief and are even exhilarated by that relief and that your righteousness had an impact.
The bad news is that once you have imprinted on that person and experience that immediate relief, you will do anything you can to not go back to your prior state of psychological chaos, confusion and doubt. That includes looking for confirmation bias in the slightest thing that person says — even how they say it — that tells you that you made the right choice. It also means disregarding or diminishing the significance and relevance of anything that person may say or do that doesn’t make sense, including when he/she contradicts themself or even lies.
In essence, when you imprint on a person in this fashion, you fixate on them and disregard their actions and even what they say.
The challenge becomes how can someone else deprogram such a person once they have integrated this imprinting, fixation and the resulting beliefs into the core of their personality?
Another way of saying this is how can others go into the core of these deeply held beliefs and retrofit him/her with reality, facts and common sense?
That person is not going to allow it if they need it, but don’t want it.
What could cause them to want it?
As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, at the very least it would take their openness to accepting that as right as they thought they were is as wrong as they turned out to be.
Given how vociferously that person and others — including family members and close friends — will defend their opposing political views even to the extent of ending relationships (because both parties have deeply “imprinted” on their beliefs), what would make such a fixated person relinquish his/her beliefs?
The sad truth is that is that there is very little that can effect that change. Sometimes cancer or the death of a child or spouse or the loss of physical functioning can penetrate their self-delusion, because the viscerality of those experiences can strike at their core right where their core beliefs also reside.
With that in mind let me crowdsource you with, “What is something that caused you to let go of a belief where you thought you were so right?”
