I can also distort reality. I can actually choose to believe that my friend did a fine job and can blame those receiving his message. This resolution also doesn’t work very well, for I am still tethered to reality. There is a third self-perception related to my ability to view reality in an objective manner. My distorted version regarding those listening to by Friend’s message doesn’t sit very well with this self-perception. Dissonance once again is raging in my head and heart.
There is one other option. I can avoid situations in the future where I am forced to confront my warring self-perceptions. This means avoiding attending sessions when my friend is making a presentation. It might also mean that I avoid future interactions with my friend. After all, “it was unfair that my friend put me on the spot regarding my opinion of his performance”. He is a “toxic” source of dissonance for me; so, I better steer clear of him—at least regarding the world of public affairs.
We see in this cascading avalanche of dissonance that things can get quite “messy” when we try to operate under the guidance of alternative self-perceptions that can, at times, be in conflict. We yearn for the return of these self-perceptions to the status of tacit “nothingness.” This may mean that we even sacrifice a friendship or an accurate sense of reality on behalf of retaining consonance and nothingness. All-too-often, our contemporary political world produces a strong incentive to avoid people with differing political persuasions and to create “alternative realities.” We take these drastic and often damaging actions so that we might preserve consonance and protect a domain of nothingness in which we insert our self-perceptions (Weitz and Bergquist, 2025; Bergquist, Weitz and Pomerantz, 2026).
Intrascopic perspective: as we move on from the Exoscopic perspective to the Intrascopic perspective, we find a move from the inside to the outside. The way we feel (the somatic template), our past experiences, and, in particular, what we anticipate about the external world and the reactions to our actions in this world produce our behavior where there was none before (nothingness). As we know, the movement from anticipation to action is quite challenging. Many cortical sectors are required to translate thought and feelings into action. Apparently, Will Power is a big thing. Furthermore, many mental health issues (especially depression) center on this capacity to “exert our will” and move from our internal processes to external engagements.
William James introduced a real bear, from which we run. However, we are more likely to imagine a bear attacking us when we venture into the woods than we are to actually encounter a bear. Robert Sapolsky (2004) writes about the imagined lion and proposes that we frequently imagine the attacking lion, or the attack by other threatening entities (such as an upcoming board meeting or interview for a new job). We imagine the bear/lion/meeting/interview and become aroused in preparation for a fight—or at least an anxiety-filled encounter. At times, we imagine not a fight, but instead a flight. We choose to avoid the meeting or cancel the interview. There is a third “F” that we might engage when we are actually about to meet with committee members or with the person who will be interviewing. This third “F” is freeze. We find it hard to speak at the committee meeting or during the interview and break out in a cold sweat (indicating that our sympathetic system is operating at full force without us taking any action).
