Cognitive
Triangles
The different ways people respond to a threat or external stimuli and how people are being trained by government mandates and the media to be passive, helpless and subservient
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal
March 24, 2021
There are basically two types of people in the world: Active and Passive. We can subdivide each group as follows:
ACTIVE PASSIVE
Victor Victim
Responsible Irresponsible
Leader Follower
Rational Irrational
Dominant Submissive
Logical Emotional
This isn’t to say a person in one group is bad and the other good, they might be, but not always; it’s also not to say that a person in one group is stupid and the other smart, they might be, but not always. It’s just to point out one group of people are wired to respond to external threats or stimuli differently than the other. And, as one psychological experiment from the 1960’s showed, helplessness can be learned - that is, programmed into an animal or a human by a deliberately planned sequence of external stimuli. This learned helplessness has been a major psychological programming technique used by governments and their accomplices in the left wing media throughout the COVID-19 “pandemic” to create an entire class of helpless and submissive people who will shut their thinking off and do whatever the “authorities” tell them to do on cue - and, through the psychological reinforcement platform of social media, enforce that behavior on their peers via online bullying and shaming of anyone who doesn’t conform to the media-manipulated herd groupthink.
Cognitive Triangle
A cognitive triangle is a philosophical thought experiment developed in the late 1950s to early 1960s. It falls under the academic discipline, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It explains the process by which people think about the world, engage with it and make decisions based upon what they have perceived.
A cognitive triangle is divided in three general areas: Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions (see Fig. 1, above). It provides an outline or a framework for understanding how people think, reason and make decisions oftentimes subconsciously and unaware of how or why they’re making the decisions that they do.
Behaviorists have noticed for decades that there are two types of people who each respond differently to the same stimuli. For example, if you’re in a crowded theater and a fire breaks out (or gunman starts firing into the crowd) the initial Thought will be one of an immediate threat. After that initial thought occurs, often milliseconds later, the person experiences a Feeling. That feeling is usually one of fear and the desire for self-preservation; i.e. get out of the theatre, get out of harm’s way. The third and final branch of the cognitive triangle then plays out and there are two potential Actions that a person can take. The first is to rapidly assess the situation, identify the safe areas, avoid the crowd and the initial threat and chart a course to safety by moving toward one of the unused exits that the panic-stricken mob is unaware of due to the tunnel vision caused by their fear. The second is to panic which will either lead to a stampede toward the door and getting crushed by thousands of pounds of people; or to simply freeze in space and be unable to move - thus increasing the risk of injury or death from the initial threat. So, you can see that there are two different actions that people can take to respond to the exact same threat. One action doesn’t turn out so well; the other will more likely turn out well for them.
The COVID-19
Cognitive Triangle
Now, let’s apply this thought experiment to what we have all gone through over the past year.
A Thought is presented to us by governments and their accomplices in the left wing news media. That Thought is: “deadly killer virus”. There is then an immediate Feeling generated that usually consists of some level of fear or concern for one’s safety and longevity. Then, there’s the Action and, like the fire in the theatre example above, there can be two different actions depending on the type of person doing the decision making.
Action #1
The first Action option that can be taken is a person decides to voluntarily limit their exposure to other people until the threat passes. This can be accomplished by voluntarily staying home, wearing appropriate and effective protective gear if they must go out, or for those who are so inclined and able, simply move into the mountains and live in desolation until the threat passes. In this action, the individual is voluntarily making the decisions for his/her own life and with an understanding of their capabilities and skill sets choosing how best to go about their lives in a way that will lead to the best possible outcome for them and their family.
Action #2
Then, there are people who instinctively panic. They don’t know what to do or how to do it. They immediately perceive everyone around them as a potential threat (or were taught by the government and media to perceive their neighbors in that way). This group then decides to acquiesce to government authority, shut their decision-making off and let somebody else do the thinking for them. Additionally, they have decided they won’t feel safe until a certain prescribed list of protective measures has been forced on not only them, but everyone else in society as well.
This played out with the government mandated lockdowns, and business and school closures. This forced isolation is similar to the voluntary isolation each person would get to make for themselves as cited in Action #1; but now the folks in this Action #2 scenario won’t feel safe unless and until all others around them have been forced to plug themselves in to a one-size-fits-all isolation mandate without regard for how that mandate may adversely affect others’ health or psychological well-being. The “cure” in this case, could be worse than the disease.
Mandatory face mask usage is also a part of this Action #2. This group of people doesn’t feel safe just wearing a face mask; they want everyone else to be forced to wear a face mask, too. One example of this is a customer in a local grocery store last summer was wearing two face masks - one on top of the other - at a time when mask mandates weren’t being fully enforced and some were shopping without face masks. This double-masked customer approached the store manager in hysteria complaining he didn’t “feel safe” shopping in that store because some people were not wearing face masks. Again, this is a person who was already wearing two face masks and yet he still didn’t feel safe. Even though face masks have been proven to not stop respiratory viral transmission, this person only wanted to see everyone else around him wearing a face mask for his own psychological comfort; even if the masks were completely ineffective (and thus, provide no “safety” at all).
It is when this Action #2 type of people gain control of society via a governor or leader who shares their Cognitive Triangle thought process that the population at large begins to have mandates imposed on them that they not only would not have voluntarily chosen for their own situation, but may actually cause them harm. For example, some people simply cannot wear face masks for health or psychological reasons. But, when a crowd stampedes toward the door and mandates everyone else must stampede as well, then our free agency is violated and we cease to be a free and independent people. No good can ever come from that kind of top-down, panic-driven thinking.
With that said, there were some states and countries who chose a more voluntarism approach. They chose Action #1 for their people: Provide all the information available and let people make up their own minds on how they can deal with the threats based upon their own personal experience, ability, health care needs and psychological fortitude. South Dakota here in the U.S. is an example of a State with a governor who adopted that kind of thinking; overseas, we can look to Sweden as another. People were not panicked into stampeding toward the door and causing more deaths by the overreaction and fear than could have been caused by a purported virus. Other areas, like New York and California adopted the panic-driven stampede mentality and had some of the highest death rates per capita in the world during the pandemic.
What should be emphasized here is each person should be free to make their own decisions about how to react to a stimuli or threat. If the reactionary, panic-stricken group is allowed to enforce their Actions on the whole of the group, the overall damage at the end of the day is amplified exponentially.
Learned Helplessness
I’ve been saying since the “pandemic” began that this COVID-19 response is a psychological warfare operation being executed on the world stage mostly by command and control authoritarians. Government fear campaigns and the panic-porn promulgated by the leftist media for viewers and ratings has had the effect of teaching an entire segment of society to be helpless and submissive who otherwise might not have been in the outcome of COVID-19.
Learned Helplessness was studied in the 1960s by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Richard Soloman. He was studying the transfer of learning in dogs. First, he would classically train the dogs by giving them a mild shock every time they heard a tone. This caused a reflexive emotional reaction of fear to the tone.
He then studied the operant conditioning of dogs. He would place a dog in a box with two chambers with a short wall dividing the two. The floor of the first chamber the dog was put in was electrified with a mild shock and the dog quickly learned to jump over the wall to the other side to escape the shock. However, when he placed a dog in the chamber who had been Classically Trained to expect a shock every time it heard a tone, the dog would simply lay down, whimper and give up when the chamber floor was electrified rather than bother to jump over the wall. What Soloman found was once a dog was trained to expect a shock every time it heard a tone and there was no escaping it, then when presented with a situation where it could escape (jump over the short wall to the other chamber) it simply chose not to and endured the pain because if figured there was no way to escape it anyway.
This is what has been done to people with COVID-19. The fear and hysteria incessantly foisted upon us by the left wing news media and reinforced by those in social media are akin to the tone/shock combination. Every time the phrase “COVID-19” is heard, a feeling of despair and impending doom from a “deadly and dangerous” super virus is instilled in the person. As time passes and that fear response is reinforced by governments, media and social media the psychologically programmed people will simply shut up and submit every time that threat is presented to them. We see that behavior with mass face mask wearing in society even though face masks have been continuously proven to not stop respiratory viruses. We see people driving around alone in their cars wearing face masks, we see them reflexively obeying lockdowns and distancing mandates. They have all submitted.
In the future, all governments have to do is utter the phrase “COVID-19” or “coronavirus” and they will be able to immediately shut down and control large portions of society on a whim - even if there really is no such threat at the time; this is good for government power, but bad for us.
This highlights the real danger of allowing one group of people the power to control the whole and it is for this reason that independent thinking must not be shamed, bullied or shunned, but should be celebrated and understood to be a path to the solution, not the problem.
