Why Cheating Matters and Republican Cognitive Dissonance

by: Fong

Sat Jul 17, 2010 at 12:45:44 PM MST

But on Scott McInnis' facebook fanpage you can see a few examples of people who don't mind that he did what he did and will still emphatically support him.

What does this show? In part it proves some Republicans don't care about competent work. They don't care about honesty or personal responsibility in their leaders. In the face of uncomfortable facts, some people can manage to rationalize and ultimately discount demonstrations of unscrupulous actions. But this is nothing new, as Allison Kilkenny of Citizen Radio (link on the sidebar) wrote about last week, people would rather cling to some strongly held beliefs, even when evidence show those beliefs to be false.

In addition to that, she happens to have a few paragraphs on cheating:

In the US, students are channeled through social conditioning factories disguised as schools. But in fact, the goal laid out for pupils is not to learn a lot, but rather to succeed and advance to the best college or university possible. The silent direction here is to advance by any means necessary. Teachers, parents, and counselors don't need to directly instruct students to compete and cheat because they clearly describe what will happen if the students don't seize upon every imaginable opportunity and fight for their survival. They'll fail. They won't get good jobs. They'll be poor. They will be invisible men and women.

I think it's understood that if you don't survive by any means necessary, someone else will come along and take the opportunity upon which you don't seize. The implications of what McInnis has given in to shakes our values to their core-- not to mention how opportunism at any benefit to the bottom line is a "free market" value, eh?

So what is our collective bottom line here?

And what system or mentality can honestly look upon something like this and say hey, it's ok. In fact, you did what any of us would have done and we can't expect you to be any better than us and have any amount of respect for itself, particularly when it has to do with the selection of leaders? When will the Party of purity get to claim human vulnerability on these huge contradictions?

For aggression and power, not having all the answers equates to vulnerability which can conjure sensations of shame and shame is the biggest motivator behind unquestioned responses so then again, aggression takes over.

Thus the cycle of abuse continues.