John M. Crisp
If nations can suffer from cognitive dissonance just as individuals can, it’s easy to see why we elected Donald Trump.
A good place to start thinking about this is football:
As I often do in late summer, I was considering chronic traumatic encephalopathy when a shooting spree in Manhattan left four dead and a fifth critically injured. The shooter, Shane Tamura, killed himself, as well.
Tamura, a former high school football player, left a three-page note blaming the National Football League for prioritizing profits over player health and blaming his behavior on his CTE. His apparent target was NFL headquarters.
The details haven’t been confirmed: CTE can be definitively diagnosed only by a brain dissection after death. But Tamura believed he was suffering from CTE. As other CTE suicides have done, he took care to shoot himself in the chest rather than the head. “Study my brain, please,” his note read. “I’m sorry.”
Why do I often think about CTE in the fall? Because football is revving up. NFL training camps have opened, and the first college games begin on Aug. 23.
Stories about CTE often crop up in the fall, as well, or maybe I just notice them more. Last week, The New York Times reported on Greg Norman, a star football player at the University of Utah and a hero of the Utes’ 2009 Sugar Bowl win over Alabama.
Norman never played in the NFL, but soon after his college career ended, he began a fifteen-year decline that included many of the maladies that afflict CTE sufferers: memory loss, confusion, aggression, paranoia, substance abuse, attempted suicide.
Norman was found last year near an onramp to Highway 101 in California. He had been dead for 24 hours. He was 38 and homeless.
Norman, of course, suffered from CTE. Dr. Ann McKee, director of Boston University’s CTE Center, says Norman’s brain was in “a state of degeneration for more than a decade.” Greg Norman’s story is one of many.
But this column isn’t about CTE or football; it’s about cognitive dissonance, a clinical term that describes the psychological tension that develops when people hold beliefs that are inconsistent or contradictory.
For example, we are certain that football harms the brains of its players, as well as the rest of their bodies. We know this based on science, data, anecdote and common sense. The brain is a delicate organ floating within a hard cranium; it makes sense that violent blows to the head can’t be good for the brain.
The problem is that our nation really loves football, liberals and conservatives alike. We love it so much that we’re willing to live with the cognitive dissonance that it creates. The harm that it does to its players is easily rationalized. Or just ignored.
We do the same thing in other areas. Serious climate scientists insist that our globe is warming rapidly. They have data that demonstrates this, and increasingly we see the evidence around us in the form of more floods, droughts and heat waves.
But our century-long hydrocarbon binge is so much fun that we’re doing almost nothing about climate change. More cognitive dissonance.
John M. Crisp, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, lives in Texas and can be reached at [email protected].
