Cognitive Dissonance is an Existential Crisis

Dear Readers:

I posit that the growing sense of looming disaster in the world understood as a direct consequence of the wholesale irresponsibility of our competitive self-interest seeking model of civilization -- I posit that this sense of rightly deserved looming punishment for our collective misbehavior is spawning an ever expanding variety of both psychological disorders and learning disabilities.  The soul is compelled to self-sabotage.  Why keep the train running at full speed when you see it heading headlong into the rock wall of a mountain and a colossal train wreck?  

The fundamental schizophrenic break into two opposing cognitions is therefor this: to be successful is unsuccessful.  We know that the world values our individual economic success and that we will be rewarded for our competitive intellectual, academic, social, and emotional brilliance.  So we say to ourselves, "the world values my success within it's systems, therefor I must be successful."  However, at the same time, we have developed an ever growing collective sense that the success of our system is like the success of cancer: our system will eventually destroy the environment on which is depends so that life as we know it "in the system" cannot continue.  Therefor, the more successful we all are "in the system" the sooner we will bring TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) down on our own heads.

The onslaught of daily reminders is relentless in telling us that in doing the right things to be successful in our lives we are actually doing the wrong things to remain successful.  Here is a case in point from the front page of today's New York Times:

"By midcentury, the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is expected to double compared with the value that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution. At the low end, computers predict that the earth could warm in response by another 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The likelier figure, the analyses say, is 4 degrees. At the high end of projections, the warming could exceed 8 degrees. In all possible outcomes, the warming over land would be roughly twice the global average, and the warming in the Arctic greater still."

"Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in  rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming."

“The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.” 

see link for full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp&pagewanted=print

So, got anxiety disorders?  Got sleep disorders?  Got motivational problems in school?  Got procrastination problems?  Got undefinable depression issues?  Got learning disabilities?  Do you find that certain CALP functions (cognitive academic linguistic proficiency) don't work properly?  Why is it getting so much harder for lots of people to think logically in math?  Why is it getting so much harder for others to process written language or to even speak properly?  Could it have anything to do with side effects from a MASSIVE UNIVERSAL LIFE-ALTERING STRESSOR?  Could it be that the cognitive dissonance of success being unsuccessful at the core of our entire civilization is creating an internal drag of core existential crisis in all of us?  What do we know about existential crisis?

From Wikipedia:

"There is no one given therapeutic method in modern psychology known to coerce a person out of existential despair; the issue is seldom, if at all, addressed from a medical standpoint."

From Richard K. James, Crisis intervention strategies

"An existential crisis is a stage of development at which an individual questions the very foundations of his or her life: whether his or her life has any meaning, purpose or value."

 All of this distills for me into a single simple Proverb.  I paraphrase it as this: "The people perish for lack of vision." (Proverbs 29:18)  I am not, however, interested in perishing for lack of vision.  I've got vision.  I've a dream of a new future.  I've got a dream of paradise post-apocalypse.  I've got my religion.  And I'd argue, that we all need to find our religion, our inner light that can guide us yeah, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, so that we will not have to fear any evil.  If you've got the right religion for you, you know how you, and your children, and your children's children can make it through all of this into a world of green pastures by still waters.  Do you have your religion?  Do you have your vision?  If you don't, get one.  That, more than anything, is what you need in order to be successful.

Be blessed,

Sky Thoth