The Fault in Each of Us - Cognitive Resistance

In the way our brains work, we struggle to see our own mistakes. It's difficult to accurately proof read your own writing. Once we develop a concept, we use that understanding as a measure of the importance and/or the reliability of new information. We build our knowledge on the foundation of our earlier understandings.

When something comes to our attention that's contrary to "what we know" it's not understandable, and it's usually identified as unimportant or unreliable. If our previous knowledge prepares us for new concepts, we still need to; acknowledge the facts presented, to hold the new information in conscious view, to allow the conflict between what we "know" and the new "knowledge" to reside within us. We have to allow both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind to struggle with the incongruent information: learning takes effort.

Finding "Truth" - or Seeking to Know

Even if the new information is called scientific research, we are likely to make a much easier choice, and reject the new ideas without consideration.

This is well demonstrated by the life of filmmaker Waldo Salt. Salt was 20 when he graduated from Stanford University. He was idealistic, his first film script was released in 1937. In 1938, he joined the Communist Party, fully convinced that Communism was the way to social and economic justice. He suffered for his beliefs, being blacklisted in 1951. Five years later, the news of what was really happening in the USSR and China shocked him. He finally recognised his misguided thinking. But he couldn't immediately adopt a new viewpoint. There was a long period of disillusionment and soul searching, before he could develop a new set of life principles, a new understanding of "the truth."

I first wrote about this in my journal over 20 years ago. Salt also kept a journal, mostly in the form of proposed film frames like a comic book. On one page there are only these words. "To search for truth one must first have lost it." He refers to the basic schooling that we all have, and the difficulty of deschooling ourselves. For Waldo Salt that process began in 1956, when he realized that Communism was not after all a solution to the evils of the world. He was 42, but was lost and unsure of himself. At 53 he was once again writing successfully.

John Stephen Veitch
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