Cognitive dissonance is common. We lie to ourselves and each other all the time. To do or say one thing while thinking the other is a social rite of passage. At a young age, and despite never not wanting it, kids are taught to share their favorite toy. That even though greed feels good, it is, in fact, bad. Cognitive dissonance necessary for social experience. Similar is adults with money, we naturally hoard, in this capitalist world it’s the smart thing to do to ensure survival, yet we are also forced to share. Taxes make things a little worse for one person in order to make things better for everyone else. 

Socially, humanity is a machine that builds itself out, a self-replicator designed to preserve its own longevity. Continued existence is the main purpose. Individuals, the cliché gears, are redundancies. From youth to maturity, from freshly cut to rust to dust, they all feel and do the same things, turn the same way, albeit in their own place, to ensure the main function never ceases operation. Cognitive dissonance is industrial-grade lubricant designed to further this purpose.

Those that are too honest, those that lack a proper supply of or continual access to the grease, earn themselves a spot on a spectrum of mental disorder. They are the gears that grind, harshly, against everything they touch. Because of redundancies the impeded speed most likely will not have a tangible impact on societal operations as a whole, yet every other gear in contact with the ungreased one suffers, in terms of overall operational efficiency, from it.

The inverse is a problem of equal magnitude. Too much grease causes a total loss of grip. Too much cognitive dissonance renders movement meaningless. Not necessarily ineffectual, it can catch, but if it does its distanced from discernment, a guaranteed function turned into a game of chance. It’s thinking whatever while doing whatever. And like the aforementioned instance where the gears grind, here, the abundance of grease is shared on contact, possibly causing the same problems for others.

Again, one person’s deficiencies, one gear’s malfunction is nullified by redundancies. But if too many gears grind, or if not enough respond to each other, redundancies, the fail-safes our societal system has built into it, eventually, can themselves be nullified. The key to a smoothly operating social machine, to our continued functioning as a society, is an at-need drip-feed of nuanced dishonesty. For us to lie to ourselves and each other, moderately.