Cognitive Dissonance
A house of cards, built on conspiracy theories, must be continually reinforced
It’s one of those phrases we use so often it starts to sound like background noise.
Cognitive dissonance.
A little intellectual spice for online arguments. A shorthand insult. A concept we think we understand but rarely stop to examine.
But it's worth remembering where it came from and the extraordinary story behind it.
In the 1950s, social psychologist Leon Festinger was trying to understand a very human problem. Why do people cling to beliefs even after reality kicks the door in and drags those beliefs outside?
He and a couple of colleagues stumbled onto a rare opportunity to observe that question in the wild. A small UFO cult in Chicago believed the world would end on December 21, 1954. A massive flood would wipe out most of North America. Only those who had received messages from extraterrestrial beings—through automatic writing, of course—would be rescued by spaceship.
The group called themselves The Seekers. Their leader, a woman named Dorothy Martin, claimed to be in contact with intergalactic protectors from the planet Clarion. The messages were clear. Salvation would come, as long as they stayed faithful and kept the media away.
So Festinger and his team went undercover. They joined the group and took detailed notes as the prophesied doomsday approached. And passed. And nothing happened.
No flood. No spaceship. No apocalypse.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Some group members, realizing they’d been wrong, quietly slipped away. Embarrassed, maybe angry, maybe heartbroken. But they left.
Others didn’t.
Some doubled down. Their new story was this: their faith had saved the world. They rewrote the prophecy in real time. The aliens, they said, were so impressed with the group’s devotion that they spared Earth entirely. The failed prediction became proof of divine intervention.
Festinger’s theory came into focus. When people hold two conflicting thoughts—our prophecy failed, but we believed it deeply—they experience mental discomfort. Dissonance. To ease that tension, they don’t change their belief. They change the story.
And if they’re surrounded by others doing the same thing, it gets even easier. Group support acts like insulation against reality.
You don’t need a UFO cult to see how this plays out. Every political movement, every religious community, every social tribe is vulnerable to the same distortion loop. Even scientific institutions, if no one is allowed to ask hard questions. Even you. Even me.
The scarier the truth, the more seductive the lie that explains it away.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t just about being wrong. It’s about what we do next. Do we adjust our thinking? Or do we recruit others to hold up the scaffolding?
When prophecy fails, do we walk away?
Or do we stay and build a church around the empty sky?
That’s the question I keep turning over as I watch the meltdowns over the Epstein files—and the people who built a religion on what they were sure the files would reveal.
Excellent history and analysis.