As President Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Kissinger considered himself better informed than his boss, and believed that in most situations he could make the best decision on his own. But, if he tried to determine the policy, he would offend or perhaps enrage a notoriously insecure man. So, Kissinger would propose three or four choices of action for each situation, and would present them in such a way that the one he preferred always seemed the best solution compared to the others. Time after time, Nixon fell for the bait, never suspecting that he was moving where Kissinger pushed him.
During the first general elections in India, an American journalist observed that India means only two things to us - Famines and Nehru. Seeing the present conditions in Delhi and across the country, to at least a fair amount of individuals, India means only two things - Corruption and Anna Hazare. Cyrilnomics right from the beginning has vouched for a strong Lokpal bill, but is always against the tantrums and the dictatorial methodology followed by Team Anna, and fairly a good amount of 'Informed Individuals' are of the same opinion, recent one being, the views given by Arundhati Roy.
There are presently no deadlocks across the globe that cannot be solved through dialogues - leave alone the issue of Lokpal. Nevertheless this is not an attempt to evaluate Team Anna and its accomplishments because the entire story has not been unravelled so far. How effectively Anna Hazare can endorse his name in the golden pages of history with the so called 'Second freedom struggle' is still undergoing the test of the time. But, the growing restlessness in the society and the blind support given by the 'intellectuals' of the country is throwing up a lot of questions about the knowledge of the individuals on the topic. Cyrilnomics is trying here to analyze what are the ill-effects of the 'Problem of Ignorance', the country is facing today.
How many of the people volunteering the movement against the corruption know about the constitution and its machinery's in tackling the same? We don't know about the socio-political scenarios in the country! We don't know anything about our neighbours! The electricity department doesn't know that why there was a power-cut! The telephone exchange doesn't know why the phone was out of order for last two weeks! The State transport corporation drivers don't know which all bus stops the route will cover! Net banking official can't figure out, what went wrong with the system! We simply can't understand why we are getting infected by newer versions of contagious diseases! This ignorance leads us to:
- Dissonance
Dissonance is a negative drive state that occurs when an individual holds two or more cognitions and attitudes or attitudes and behaviour which happens to be psychologically inconsistent. In other words, dissonance is an unpleasant state that results from incompatible cognitions. Every now and then the dissonance is generated in the country and the lead role to develope the same is taken up by the media speculations, government interpretations and presently the civil society generalizations.
- Attributional Errors
In making attributions people are motivated with two primary needs:
1) Need to form a coherent view of the world.
2) Need to gain control over the environment.
Attributional errors occur mainly because of our selective perception and we always want to keep our esteems intact. The tendency to make internal attributions over external in exploring the behaviour of others- the reason being perceptual salience and our cultural aspirations. Another point of concern as a result is that people develop a tendency to attribute their own behaviour to external causes and that others to the internal factors. Another manifestation of the same is that of the Self-serving bias which is inevitably the tendency to assign an internal locus of causality for our positive outcomes and external locus of causality for our negative outcomes. A small bribe taken by a police constable is highlighted and generalized whereas we deliberately close our eyes towards any of the financial regularities going under our domain.
- Correspondent Inference
India is victim of the Correspondent Inference Theory that explains that how we use the information about others behaviour as a basis for inferring that they possess various traits. The very use of irrational stereotyping done against the total cluster of politicians or the blind irrational support to the civil society stems from this very fact. This ignorance will lead us nowhere, rather as depicted in the case of Kissinger, we are seriously misguided by the higher order information processors. Therefore, its high time we need learned, informed and empowered individuals. This can only ensure a higher order discrimination which can come as a result of higher order generalization.
