Having reached record levels of viewership in recent weeks thanks to their parodies of Trump and Clinton, SNL was unlikely to go quietly into the night with the show following the most divisive presidential campaign in US history. In three distinct segments last night, WaPo reports, "Saturday Night Live" pretty well encapsulated many of liberal America's reactions to Donald Trump's election as president, as it worked its way through the five stages of grief on live TV.
From the dysphoric opening rendition of "Hallelujah" played by 'Hillary Clinton' to Dave Chapelle's 11-minute monologue giving Trump a chance and mocking "white riots", SNL concluded with an election night sketch that saw white liberals recalling their friends at left-leaning media outlets having assured them that Clinton would win, as the 'cognitive dissonance cluster bomb' we noted previously is worked through the five stages of grief…
Denial: "My friend at the Huffington Post says she wins by five points… Well, I dunno, my friend at Slate says she'll win by three."
Anger: "I'm not giving up, and neither should you.. America’s done it. We’ve actually elected an Internet troll as our president."
Bargaining: "I'm wishing Donald Trump luck, and I’m going to give him a chance… and we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too."
Depression: "Hallelujah"
Acceptance: "It might be a historic night, but don't forget it's a big country." …"All my black friends who have money said the same thing when Trump got elected: “That’s it, bro, I’m out. I’m leaving the country, you coming with us?” Nah, I’m good dog, I’m going to stay here and get this tax break, see how it works out."
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As Scott Adams noted yesterday, this is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it.
This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on PREDICTING the outcome of the election using the Master Persuader Filter. I told you it would be easy to fit any theory to the facts AFTER the result. And sure enough, we can fit lots of theories to the facts. At least 24 of them by CNN’s count.
Generally speaking, the greater the persuasion, the more cognitive dissonance you get. Trump is – in my opinion – the greatest persuader of my lifetime. I expected this level of cognitive dissonance. Next time you see a persuader of this magnitude, you can expect the outcome to be cognitive dissonance in that case too.
This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s the setup that triggered them.
- They believe they are smart and well-informed.
- Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.
- Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.
Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.
There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place. When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to explain-away the discrepancy.
So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?
You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)
In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both.
As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.
That’s why the protestors live in a movie in which they are fighting against a monster called Trump and you live in a movie where you got the president you wanted for the changes you prefer. Same planet, different realities.
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