Cognitive Dissonance

Last year there was a news item on the BBC about a litter of piglets rescued from a fire that were later served as sausage to the firefighters who had rescued them. The farmer predicted that vegetarians were not going to be happy with the way he showed his appreciation but in fact it was mainly meat eaters that were appalled with the situation.

Six years ago, an American passenger jet on the tarmac in Washington had to be towed out to the runway for takeoff because it could not dislodge itself from the holes its wheels had sunk into from the extreme heat.

Coal-fired power plants in the US have been temporarily shut down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either too hot or too dry.

The cognitive dissonance that is at play to allow us to be appalled by piglets saved from a fire being slaughtered to feed the firemen who saved them is also at play when we use more fossil fuel-burning machinery to get another fossil-burning piece of equipment dislodged from a tarmac that is increasingly overheated due to climate change so that it can go on its fossil fuel-burning way.

Cognitive dissonance or not, the chickens are coming home to roost.

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true.” - Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)