A short discourse about cognitive dissonance.
One of the main things I’ve discovered during this pandemic is that it’s acting like a scythe on the golden fields of friendships. I’m learning who are my true friends and who are the weak-minded fools that I need to cut free.
For example, I have, or I should say had, these two friends who my wife and I have known for about twenty years. We’ll call them “Bill” and “Alice.”
Bill was a very successful former economist and statistician who worked in the financial markets in New York and then in San Francisco. When Bill retired he moved the family from San Francisco to Washington state.
Alice, his wife, while not employed since they were filthy rich, kept a pretty thorough knowledge of current affairs despite being a busy homemaker and raising their two kids.
She had more free time over the last ten years since the kids had moved out and gone off to their own lives.
OK, that’s not totally correct.
The kids are actually really dysfunctional. In part due to the fact that they were never given any sense of independence to “go forth and fail” as most children should in order to learn about life and the world. Instead the kids were given everything on a shiny platter. They were sent to Ivy League schools. They were catered to on almost every whim. They never had to hold down a real job to actually earn what they wanted, or learn first hand what desperate poverty felt like.
Ultimately this left the kids so inept and spoiled at taking care of themselves that later in life, now that the kids are approaching their thirties, Bill and Alice purchased each a house and pay their mortgages and utilities payments.
But I despite all this I continued to revere Bill and Alice as well-read, smart friends who could appreciate our similar shared viewpoints.
But then Trump became president.
Trump’s election made our economic and philosophical differences more readily apparent.
Bill, being filthy rich, transformed over these last several years into the kind of Neo-liberal who more often that not irks the crap out of me. You may know the type: A person who is more than happy that Trump was making him wealthier, despite the all the obvious erosions to our democracy and the economic damage to everyone else.
As for Alice, while she was always a bit of one, she become even more of a contrarian. For example, once when we all saw some yahoo driving by with huge confederate flag flying from his pick-up, Alice spent the next hour arguing that it was his right to fly the flag…without a mention about the treasonous racists, failed exploitive economic system, or genocide tied to the flag.
That should have been my tip off right then and there that our friendship was withering.
But it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that I really started to open my eyes and ears.
One day we invited Bill and Alice over to our nice large yard for a “social distanced” lunch. They came over, and as is the case with most discussion right now, we immediately started talking about the pandemic.
Being the hot-headed Irish Italian that I am, I expressed my total disgust with Trump’s lack of action to address to the pandemic. Contrarian Alice thought Trump was doing the right things and that it was the States who were failing miserably by imposing lockdowns.
This obviously lit my fuse. I countered that State responses were dependent on Federal leadership, and since there was NONE the states had to do these uneven responses.
We then argued over other countries’ responses, that there is no such thing as “herd immunity,” and then the effectiveness of masks.
Alice, of course, was against masks “because they make her claustrophobic.” Which honestly is a weak excuse, not so much concerning phobia, but it’s essentially a selfish viewpoint. It avoids the fact that a mask isn’t about protecting just yourself but also protecting others from you.
This is when Bill chimed in. He too was against masks. He said he had read numerous studies and the facts were obvious. This was said with a certain haughty authority which implied that since he was statistician he therefore was correct in all aspects of knowledge.
Then he stated, “You really have to worry when the virus gets inside your mask and then bounces around in there until you inhale it.”
Later in the conversation he stated that he only looks at the news once or twice a week.
“So much for deep fact-finding research.” I thought to myself, as I changed the topic of discussion. I sadly realized I was chatting with two people who were so locked in their self-entitled ivory towers of privilege and confirmation bias that it had put them on the same intellectual footing as an uneducated Trump follower who never lets their brain stray from the FOX news propaganda.
We ended our lunch with Bill and Alice on a courteous note although there was palpable tension.
The following week I emailed Bill after seeing that the former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain had died a couple weeks after he attended Trump’s Tulsa rally and didn’t wear a mask.
“Hi Bill,
Stay safe out there and please do wear a mask no matter what you may think about them. Herman Cain poo poo’d masks while at the Tulsa Trump Rally on June 20th and now he’s pushing up daisies.”
I received a reply from Bill. He still contended that masks were nonsense by offering a lengthy detail of news articles about Denmark’s lack of masks and lockdowns to successfully address their pandemic.
Conveniently to his argument he left out that they they also had proper testing in place and a willing populace that self-quarantines when needed. Also Denmark has a very good social safety net of nationalized healthcare and social/financial support. The US on the other hand is has no affordable healthcare, no adequate testing, and is full of selfish conspiracy minded goofballs.
I wrote him back, “Thanks for the info, Bill. Next time I require surgery I’ll make sure to demand the surgical team drop the “hygiene theater”, dowse my wound in whiskey, hand me a bite stick, and that they stop wearing THOSE DAMN MASKS!”
I’ve not heard back from Bill, and honestly, I think it’s a friendship I no longer desire.
