Ever wonder why liberals always seem so angry.  Even after the Anointed One’s coronation, liberals couldn’t celebrate without indulging in displays of childish temper tantrums towards the outgoing President.  And it’s not just my imagination.  The General Social Survey has for decades demonstrated that self-identified conservatives are happier than self-identified liberals.   So I wonder why liberals aren’t happy, even in the blessed, utopian Age of Obama they’ve engineered for us all.  And I have a theory–cognitive dissonance.

“Cognition: an individual percept, idea, memory, or the like” – APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2007

“Cognitive dissonance: an unpleasant psychological state resulting from inconsistency between two or more elements in a cognitive system” ibid

Thesis: Liberals carry extremely high levels of cognitive dissonance due to their obsessions with widely inconsistent cognitions which create excessive amounts of cognitive tension, thus leading to unpleasant and unhealthy psychological states.  The majority of this dissonance is created by liberals being guided through life by a random list of causes du jour, rather than an ordered set of timeless beliefs or values.

Liberals have no set of principles or beliefs to serve as bedrock.  They deny the existence of any absolute truth or moral good to which one may aspire. They regularly reject any consistent set of values that could be used to guide decision making.  Instead they storm through life in perpetual anger advocating a variety of causes and isms, most of which lack any semblance of internal cognitive consistency. 

You want examples.  Let’s return to the petulant displays directed towards President Bush.  Throughout his term of office liberals routinely mocked the President, depicted him as Hitler, demeaned his intelligence, ridiculed his beliefs, and cheered for his “death” (remember the peanut episode).  Yet as soon as President Obama took office, liberals initiated unprecedented cries to “respect the office” and “demonstrate unity for the sake of the country.”  Now if liberals really cared about respecting the office, wouldn’t they have demonstrated that belief during the Bush Administration?  But they didn’t.  Instead we were lectured and educated on the fact that “dissent is the real patriotism,” a liberal “belief” that evaporated once conservatives dared to dissent from Obama.  Clearly, liberal actions in this scenario were not driven by any belief or value at all, not respect for the office or patriotic dissent.  Instead they were driven by a cause, namely a Democratic administration.  Whatever supported the cause was good.  Whatever didn’t was bad.  The fact that their arguments were contradicted by their previous eight years of arguments was irrelevant.

“Conservatives have values, liberals have causes.”  This oft-repeated maxim can be justly criticized as an over-simplification, but it does clearly and concisely illustrate a valid critique of liberalism—the blatant inconsistency and hypocrisy of liberals who will do anything to advance their causes.  Since liberals deny the existence of any ultimate truth or set of timeless values, their actions are guided solely by what supports their cause.  Lacking any higher purpose or belief, liberals routinely employ “the ends justify the means” rhetoric.  If asserting respect for the office advances one of their causes, they’ll do it.  And if the next cause necessitates arguing disrespect for the office, they’ll do it without the slightest hesitance or concern.

Don’t believe me.  Here are some more examples.  Consider the Constitution.  When it comes to flag burning, what do liberals use to defend it?  That’s right, the First Amendment.  Which they also use to justify pornography, misogyny, anti-Semitism and any other idea that supports one of their causes.  Of course, as soon as someone disagrees with them, their first response to limit their first Amendment Rights. 

Witness the attempted silencing of Sarah Palin, Fox News, and talk radio, as well as the implementation of university speech codes and hate crime labels to silence any of us lesser-knowns who dare to disagree with them. 

And forget about the Second Amendment. 

They refuse to acknowledge that one even exists despite being able to read it in black and white.  Apparently, in place of the Second Amendment they’ve inserted the liberally sacrosanct phrase “separation of church and state” which despite not appearing anywhere in the Constitution has become, at least within the liberal echo chamber, “constitutional.”  The Constitution as a document, as a summation of the founding principles for the greatest governmental experiment on the planet, as the highest law of our country does not exist for liberals.  It’s just an idea they manipulate to advance a cause.  Don’t believe me.  Review the condescending waste-of-time arguments when the 112th Congress actually dared to publicly read it.  Only a liberal could assert with a straight face that reading a little thing like the law is a waste of time and money.

Need some more examples.  How about “life.”  Liberals believe animals should have long, peaceful, happy lives unimpeded by becoming part of the food chain.  Don’t eat the chickens.  They’re kept in tiny cages.  Don’t eat veal.  They’re tortured.  Don’t eat pate.  The poor, persecuted geese are force-fed.  What would liberals say if I went to an animal shelter and asked for kittens and puppies so I could take them, drill holes in their skulls without anesthesia, and then suck out their brains with a vacuum hose?  They’d want me horse-whipped.  Yet that is exactly what they routinely do to children.  It’s called partial-birth abortion.  Why do liberals grant baby chickens and baby cows a right to life they readily deny baby humans? 

They believe convicted murderers and rapists should be allowed to live.  They rant and rave about “state-sanctioned murder” every time a prison schedules an execution.  Yet they have no problem with millions of taxpayer dollars going to support the  dismemberment and murder of innocent babies at abortion mills.  Why do liberals grant child rapists and child murderers a right to life that they deny innocent children?  Because the sanctity and magnificence of life is not a belief.  There is no intrinsic value in preserving life.  It’s just something to do if and only if it happens to coincide with a liberal cause.

How can these wildly contradictory cognitions exist in the same person?  Not easily or peacefully.  Liberals are not stupid nor are they evil.  They consciously deny their hypocrisy, cruelty, and irrationality by arguing that it’s all for the greater good.  However, you can’t lie to your brain.  The brain recognizes the incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance and instinctively tries to regulate the tension within the cognitive system by modifying behavior.  For liberals that means creating the Utopia cognition.  Someday they will create a perfect world where all their disparate causes will be united in a new secular Garden of Eden.  In the meantime they’re angry, unhappy, and frustrated from their self-induced unhealthy psychological state and determined to take out their negative feelings on the rest of us.  And we’re supposed to take their bullying, their abuse, their attacks, and their suppression of our freedoms because after all it’s for our own good.   We’re just too stupid and blinded by our outdated beliefs and old-fashioned values to know what’s best for us.