Fingers crossed for a favourable Wireton Willy prediction. Alas, nobody puts a contract out on the rodent when he’s wrong. A shrug and it’s done — six more week of winter. I’m guessing Harold Camping’s (Harold who??) end of the world predictions have been off the mark a dozen times or more — so often in fact that most of us have never packed a single bag in anticipation of same. Prediction, prophecy, far from shaping our day to day plans, is seen more often as a curiosity, the province of some fringe group or other with an esoteric axe to grind or bizarre belief in alien rescues for the select few. More the fodder of sci-fi novels and TV series . . . than anything over which we should really get unduly exercised. 

Nevertheless, when the end days expectation failed to materialize on December 21, 1954, ringing down the curtain on all but the chosen ones (The Seekers), the most enduring legacy was not that of yet another weird cult’s demise. It ushered onto the stage one of my favourite psychological dynamics: cognitive dissonance.

The concept has been around for some six decades or so, happily living in the wings and not likely finding its way into everyday language — until recently. Not that we don’t all experience it and find under the radar ways of containing it — we just didn’t know that it was operating in background, skewing our rationalizations and contorting our behaviour, our choices, our beliefs. The sole contribution of Seekers and Co. then, was to put Leon Festinger into full plain clothes, infiltration mode. Allowing him to study how this sad wee collection of rapturists, standing, bereft on the empty saucer pad, waiting for liftoff, would deal with profound disappointment. No tickee, no washee, no space ship boarding pass, another Christmas dinner spent with earth-bound, boring relatives. The result: When Prophecy Fails, Festinger’s definitive opus on how we hold two, conflicting beliefs in mind . . . at the same time. 

And so with the proviso that prophecy is not precisely conspiracy, we trace another infiltration: the insinuation of ‘cognitive dissonance’ into quotidian, political language and the sine qua non of the GOP. The Josh Hawley’s (he, of the op ed detailing why the Big Beautiful Bill was a travesty —then voting for it), the Marjorie Taylor Green’s (she, of the Jewish space laser villainy in forest fire causality), the Laura Loomer’s, the Steven Miller’s, the RFK jr.’s, and on . . . and on — have refined and taken the concept to lofty new levels. Going north and south at the same moment — and fuelling yet another news cycle with dropped jaws and expressions of ‘they did what’s?’ and ‘but. . . they said’s’. 

That would be until Jeffrey Epstein did his Lazarus act. So the content that saw the orange TACO elected to a second term and a whole house full (literally) of sycophants dutifully conforming to the party line (again literally), now has hit a wall. That wall being the relentlessly hyped fairy tale that all would be revealed . . . until it wasn’t. (‘Nothing to see here. . .’) Willingly forgiving, turning a blind eye to, and rabidly cheering any and all outrageous, self-contradictory ‘promises’: all the bad guys will be deported, universal peace will be restored, and the world will become affordable again — the base paused and took a reflective breath. Finally, finally the swamp was going to be drained. The curtain pulled back on all the pedophilic wizards, the cabal that has been driving the deep state, named and shamed for all time by Sir Changealot. . . Oopsie, sorry, the guy just hung himself (Jeff, literally; the other guy, ‘out to dry‘), the binder is empty. 

And so the base is attempting to come to grips with the raison d’être for its unwavering support of DJT. A scramble to reconcile a core belief — maybe the only core belief — with a null set, a flattened soufflé, no aliens (or pedophiles here — well not the predicted ones anyway). . . a betrayal!

So a word of advice from Leon:

 The most direct way to resolve dissonance is to change the behaviour that is causing the conflict.

But then where would be the entertainment in that?? Maybe just have a look at the current iteration of the ‘X-Files’ — formerly known as . . .