Cognitive Dissonance: Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort that results from holding two or more conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. People tend to seek consistency in their attitudes and perceptions, so this conflict causes unpleasant feelings of unease or discomfort, shame, guilt or avoidance.
Steven Crain is the eldest brother of the Crain family in the Netflix series ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ that premiered its solo season in 2018. The plot of the story follows the Crain family through past and present as they unravel the mystery behind the time spent at their summer home as children. The long story short is that the house is you guessed it, haunted!
The family seems to be vulnerable to the illusions that the house manifests even throughout adulthood. A unique story of trauma, control and fear of death and loss of control. Steven Crain like his siblings could see the apparitions that the house manifests but strictly refuses to admit that they are ghosts. In fact, he refused to acknowledge that he saw anything at all and that they all suffered from mental illness. I found this intriguing and absurd. He has the gift to see ghosts but does not believe in ghosts. It is brilliant how stubborn of mind he possesses! In the episode eight “Witness Marks” Steven Crain is confronted by his father that it is unsafe for him to be in the House alone specifically. The House isn’t haunted, it is just a home he may proclaim. Someone who cannot [refuses] to distinguish reality from the unreal and unbelievable. This person is perfect prey for the House that wishes to exploit him for its own nourishment.
Have you ever found yourself here in this predicament?
We can see clear as day the path that we must take, the decisions we must make, the red flags to steer clear from but are blinded by curiosity. Perhaps, it is not curiosity but a refusal to accept the truth or a hope that what we do next can change the sum. It was too difficult to decide, we cannot let go, it may take too long, I don’t know where to start. These are the stories we tell ourselves to bring comfort to the waking nightmare of our realities. It is harsh reality that we must organize and participate in society. There are wild neighbors, malignant family, and malicious friends, and toxic lovers among us. The harsh reality is that no one is going to come and save us from our problems and that we must learn to work with each other. It is the reality that we must learn to distinguish and to guard that truth.
We take our time; we make excuses, and we wander away from what we know we must do when faced with tough choices. It is natural for us to seek solutions that expend the least amount of energy and ensure the best outcome for physical survival. Although, we feel in our bones and our intuition what must be done and yet we wait for permission to act. Our minds do not translate this response of fight, flight, freeze or fawn from primary instinct if we were faced with a predator in the wild.
Our bodies as part of this physiological response to threat or perceived threat also responds this way across many contexts including relationships. Fear is a powerful motivator designed to assist us in our efforts to ensure physical survival however too much fear can lead to confusion and may override our ability to act reasonably that truly ensures the outcome of our physical survival.
One must determine that may must act in a way that ensures their physical survival. However, in doing so they must face sealing their fate of suffering with no guarantee of physical survival. In addition, there is a slim chance of experiencing a true sense of livelihood and comfort as they work and age. This creates the risk that we may miss an opportunity that could bring the change or satisfaction we seek and risks continuing repeating the same cycles that do not serve us.
I observe this behavior not only in myself but also in others around me today. There is a tension here that mimics nihilism. There is an objective meaningless and disenchantment in how much direct action can make a difference in our demands for liberation.
In this moment – I am looking at Absurdism as one of the culprits of how the acceptance of rising fascism across the last decade. Absurdism can be described as believing that life is meaningless and irrational. It is a philosophy that encourages rebelling against the meaninglessness by embracing the purposelessness. In other words, not taking anything very seriously. Fascism is a scary word and a heavy word – a word saturated with fear and fresh memories of concentration camps and genocide. Something so enormous and stealthy cannot be real! How absurd would that be? It places the idea that concepts and experiences are out of reach of true meaning and therefore can be dismissed as irrational. We say the people who produce these ideas are merely distasteful, mindless, small, empty, and sad. We should feel pity and then we should offer prayer. It is not something to be taken “seriously.”
Just as Steven Crain in Hill house, we say what our eyes are perceiving and what our eyes are hearing are so unbelievable that they must not be real. It would be unreal otherwise! It is simply a joke. It is metaphor, a figure of speech, a punchline or hyperbole!
We do not flinch when the lack of investment and deregulation of infrastructure lead to environmental catastrophes that impact land and communities such as the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. It is beyond our comprehension that after 15 months of assault there are more than 46,000 Palestinians that have been killed by Israel government and military forces. There are 450,000 displaced and 7,000 killed in the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We do not draw the parallels between the decades struggle after racial apartheid in South Africa and the economic and wealth disparity after Jim Crow segregation in the United States between Blacks and Whites. 1,365 people were killed by law enforcement in 2024 and 150 thus far in 2025. We wring our hands, bite our lips and squirm in our seats when the chill meets our spine but surely this is not what it looks like. It cannot be real. This is absurd!
Our political will toward change is tied to our political consciousness and the rise of Trumpism indicates the readiness for dissolution but highlights also the lack of mobilization and preparedness to meet the moment from the Far Left. We have seen the need to meet this moment and showed strength in the 2020 Civil Rights Uprisings – but Supreme Court defeats and inflating costs, ongoing pandemics and assaults on our identity, burning out our leaders and defunding our social justice organizations have slowed the progress of collective resistance.
“As long as he tolerates colonization, the only alternatives for the colonized are petrification or assimilation (Memmi).”
“He had also come to talk about how his career was blocked, how the deck was stacked against him–how, in fact, it was stacked against any black person who worked there. His frustration and anger I easily understood. But what struck me as well was that his expectations left him absolutely no room to grow. He believed so strongly that the white men at the Daily News were out to stymie black achievement that he had no option but failure, whatever the reality of the situation.
Even those who refuse to internalize the expectation of failure are often left with nagging doubts, with a feeling, as journalist Joseph Boyce puts it, “that no matter what you do in life, there are very few venues in which you can really be sure that you’ve exhausted your potential. Your achievement is defined by your color and its limitation. And even if you’ve met your fullest potential, there’s an aggravating, lingering doubt…because you’re never sure. And that makes you angry (Cose, 1993).”
This may be the result of our experience down the seven chutes of burnout, compassion fatigue, displacement, disassociation, and perpetual disorder. The House always wins.
“We are the sort of creature who not only needs to put up firewood and food for the winter but who must also predict the distant future, make decisions about who or what created the universe and what sort of principles and path we should follow, deal with our fellow difficult and dangerous creatures, and in other ways make sense of things that would overtax any creature (Maisel).”
Those in the United States are estimated to consume upward of 11.8 hours of information a day across all given mediums including television, news, radio or podcasts and social media. The amount of information that our brains are posed to decipher is incredible the question becomes how much of that information may not be useful, reasonable or accurate. How much information are we processing and storing as useful, reasonable and accurate from 34 gigabytes a day?
How many of those gigabytes are threatening us, making jokes of our livelihoods, feeding on the range of fears and anxieties that threaten our physical survival. How much of this is impacting how we behave, navigate the world and share the planet together? I recognize that this psychic and emotional overwhelm is a lot to ask of ourselves.
The government – State, Local and Federal pass scores of legislations often posed to serve the interests of the few rather than the many. Legislation designed to be as absurd as possible and disconnected from the reality of working-class experiences and our needs. Legislation that encourages and introduces psychic, emotional and physical overwhelm, strangling our resources and placing access to them on precarious positions. The absurdity reinforcing that we cannot trust our own senses and that we cannot do much but take cover. This can be too much to think about and it can feel like being under a hailstorm of fire.
Now it is not just worrying about what you are going to have for dinner tonight and whether you can afford it. You must consider the last time you checked the recall list for ground beef, frozen vegetables, canned goods? You must consider pesticides, hormones, preservatives that can affect health and diet. The gratitude and privilege to imagine that food, water, shelter, warmth, clothing, hygiene are all givens to each person. For people who are transgender, non-binary, androgynous there is the question of – can we leave our homes and enjoy peace? There is the elitist bourgeois ideology carried in our dominant culture that those that do not have these basic needs met for them must be inferior and must be subordinates in need of authoritarian guidance.
“The promotion of the mediocre is not a temporary error but a lasting catastrophe. Only the colonizer, from birth to father, father to son, uncle to nephew, from cousin to cousin and by an exclusive and racist government can manage the affairs of the city (Memmi).”
This description of laziness and inferior is useful for those who want to maintain power consolidated among a small minority. “The colonizer insists that the colonized are not capable of governing themselves… [allegedly proven] by the very fact that that colonized does not govern. Being kept away from power, he (the colonized) ends up losing both interest and feeling for control. How can he be interested in something he is resolutely excluded (Memmi).”
We see that this is happening in real time as the new administration works to dismantle State policies and Federal legislation related to upholding the promise of the 14th amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court made a historic decision in 2023 to reverse affirmative action despite benefiting mostly white, middle-class women; this decision remains a loss for facilitating an equal opportunity for all citizens to gain employment, education, and access to exercising political power. In 2023 it was presented that 88 percent of all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were white men, the House of Representatives is currently 80 percent white, and 74 percent of Congress is over-represented as white.
The dialectics of considering the colonized as lazy and incapable of governing themselves positions the colonizer viewing themselves as a benevolent steward of the inferior (Memmi).” Those who are oppressed or colonized must be lazy otherwise they would have risen from their position, transformed their condition, or not have been colonized at all. Free People rule themselves and will decide who will rule us and how we will be ruled.
We the People must reflect upon our true power and how each of us are our own shapers of reality. We wield the power to materialize our imaginations into being. Your daughter, your son, your father, your mother, You, and all that has been created because we all exist. How much more could we create if we turned our energy toward innovation instead of othering? What if you asked for the truth of what you wanted? What if you coveted truth, honesty, safety, and justice and did not need scapegoats as placeholders to satisfy the cravings of another day without these needs met?
It is absurd that we have so much famine, infant mortality, sexual and domestic violence, miseducation, misinformed and unaware, extreme child hunger, poverty and homeless rates with rental prices continuing to rise.
We must understand that our brains and bodies are not machines – the demands of on our minds and bodies to maintain the functions of life is enough. Our natural being is following a practice of indigeneity which here means to connect to self and others through meaningful traditions to land and what it shares and provides. White supremacy separates us from this natural connection to ourselves, the environment and to one another.
We can decolonize and suture the broken and misplaced pieces back together.
We must be willing to accept that we cannot do it all and may not have all the answers. This is not a reason to avoid or hold back. We may be inundated with information and may not be able to process all that information for a whole week. We ask our literal brains to manifest material and satisfying resolutions to these complex issues that feel beyond our control. It is here that rest must be centered and that we must work hard to maintain high value of our work. The reality can otherwise make it all feel meaningless and absurd. Life will always be filled with work and often the work toward change is not sexy. It will still be hard unending work, but it can be work we own and retain the full value of.
I’ve been learning this lesson myself as I continue to study and accept that sometimes there are seasons that the only thing to do in that time is to study. “To think, wait and fast” (Hesse, Siddhartha). Educating yourself of strategies, philosophies and perspective is sensible in war and can be an important action in the long-term struggle toward revolution. Speaking to your neighbor or friend about their daily struggle and offering mutual support.
I am learning that sometimes we ask too much of ourselves. I am remembering that it is important to focus on your work and then let your work speak for itself. We must do the work even when the work itself is absurd. We do this because it is absolutely necessary.
It is absurd that we have so much famine, infant mortality, sexual and domestic violence, miseducation, misinformed and unaware, extreme child hunger, poverty and homeless rates with rental prices continuing to rise (listed as affordable and empty. A stagnant housing market from overpriced renovations in gentrified cities, jobs with high qualifications and low wages and poor benefits. Detention centers and holding facilities for immigrants, undocumented migrants and other dissidents. Investments into Cop cities, prisons, surveillance and further police militarization. After years of protesting for defunding, dismantling and abolishing the prison industrial complex and instead build social services and education services.
We are at the era of divestment from broad humanitarian aid both domestic and abroad including defunding and dismantling the United States Department of Education, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and finding that participating in World Health Organization (WHO) is a waste of money, time and is ultimately inefficient.
This should come as no surprise in a nation where mothers and children are locked out of services, care, and basic human dignity. It is that we choose to keep available doors locked when we could keep families united, warm and alive. The oceans are boiling, the land is scorched, the animals suffer from plague and biodiversity continues to decline. This is BUSINESS as usual. This is BUSINESS as usual. This is BUSINESS.
We don’t need to be happy, well-fed, healthy, wealthy or educated to work. We could choose revolution. We could choose truth and happiness! We could choose health and wealth! We could educate ourselves and one another. We can keep resisting and carry on the tradition. Revolution is just a word unless we take it seriously.
Instead, some of us will choose absurdity as usual, and choose to be convinced that the absurd is our new normal and blindly accept the experience and blindly assimilate to the amended condition. We have collectively decided to dissociate ourselves from our realties and wipe our hands of responsibility. It could be me, or you tomorrow runover as collateral damage, the Empire is too busy to notice on its way to meet its bottom line. This is the tragic destiny we all await when a society is organized around a sociopathic sociopolitical and cultural consciousness. White supremacist capitalist ideology devalues all People over profit especially those racialized as Black, Indigenous, or non-white.
Those who are white, working class, or poor must understand that this plight and struggle is often the same and shared. Racism is the myth that we are lazy, it is the myth that we are less deserving, that we work less and ask for more than our share. We cannot be above one another while being right next to one another. We are all creatures who work to collect firewood and shelter to stay warm, seek pleasure to our senses and seek meaning to our lives. We do not need to know the utmost compassion for one another right away to cooperate and to recognize our shared interests. What if the House was manipulating us into playing a diabolical game that led nowhere while they fed and nourished themselves on our labor in each attempt to win. Telling us that we shouldn’t believe our own eyes, that all is well, and this is only for our own good.
We have collectively decided that we know this and understand this history. We know it because the marker of generational trauma carries in our blood and feeds our heart. We know it because we are haunted by all that came before, the ghosts of those consumed speak to us begging us to listen. Will we learn? We know better and no one can tell us anything about who we are or where we are! We see the ghosts but do not believe in the ghosts. What we see we believe – we do not believe what we see. The temperature continues to tick upward and with sweat on our brow like a clock counting down the remaining seconds in the end game. We are eagerly awaiting the bloodshed for the sake of bloodshed; to prove that ours is as red as ours too. It is absurd.
What we see happening today is a clear indicator of the gap between reality and the time we have left to finally face ourselves.
Source(s):
Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, the Creative by Eric Maisel
The Colonizer and the Colonized by Alfred Memmi
Rage Of The Privileged – Newsweek
How Much Information Does the Human Brain Learn Every Day? | by Wonder | Medium
Consuming Information Research | Wonder
The Nap Ministry | Rest is Resistance
Mom of Detroit kids who froze to death said she asked for help from city, children’s father | FOX 2 Detroit
Racial, ethnic diversity in the 119th Congress | Pew Research Center
What Is Nihilism? Definition and Concepts of the Philosophy – 2025 – MasterClass
U.S. aid freeze ‘decimates’ life-saving work globally, survey finds | Reuters
Temperatures Rising: NASA Confirms 2024 Warmest Year on Record – NASA
The Wayward Scholar 
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