i wrote this article in reflection of the state of cognitive dissonance that i found during an encounter with an individual and - as it happened - realised that the thoughts that i would put into this article would refuse to be born in an isolated vacuum. As i searched for any possibility that i was creating my own private echo chamber, i found a larger comparison at scale in the world where something similar at a fundamental level was taking place in social media at large. 

The culmination of my thoughts in this article was prompted by the visceral encounter that i had confronting the "chaos" of our collective interpretations, which sealed the ending of my reflection from the individual encounter of a confused individual unable to make clear sense or meaning of their own cognitively incongruent conjectures joining two bandwagons at once by a thin thread spun of effort and identity. On one side, a private, but internally loud confidence - or quietly unguided, misled certainty - and on the other,  selectively myopic position borne out of avoidant fear of uncertainty, attesting to scientific, medical opinions and theories misconstrued as natural law and absolute fact.

The former, one side of the cognitive dissonance - arose from a self-declared - or even maybe self-proclaimed - mistrust of "heavily curated" mainstream media (note that i categorise mainstream media and mainstream social media separately) which arose purely from having "trust issue" which origins are probably forever a mystery unto this writer. The latter side of the source of cognitive dissonance with interfering frequency competing for audience was the negative form of the latent shape or untapped potential of a truly critical and investigative mind, the lack of it forming a blank or negative space creating resonant harmonic frequencies from the sheer volume and amplitude of the former source of cognitive dissonance. Oh yes, the resonance of signals and noise in the private echo chambers can and do masquerade as the intellectual voice of reason and critique, presenting a facade of intelligence and paper thin wisdom. It often registers as profound and deep insight but it never seems to shut up and arrive to a complete stop at rest with itself in tranquil security as it is only capable of outpouring and flooding without care for measure or proportion, and it wounds more than it heals, and it cuts more than it stitches, it is less mercy than it is exacting a misguided justice for oneself. It has a shape, because it looks like an intellectual voice, but it is actually noise without structure but "organised" into a messy fury of ideas, thoughts and notions that fill up the space within oneself where the locus of being would generate a spiritual "form" or "avatar" whose appearance is how you imagine and appear to yourself in your dreams. The appearances you see in your dreams are all part of this shape and form which you either fill with noise or signal. Cognitively, mentally, intellectually, it looks like a type of selective listening and response, it is only critical, and it is not curious. It is confidence, but it is not certainty. It is a cognitive dissonance of one kind where the identity of who you really are conflicts with who you think you are or should be, between the internal and the external knowledge.

It is the type where category errors across levels of arena of agency vs. urgency are reduced and minimised into simplistic argumentative devices for an easy cheat or shortcut to real critical thinking. For instance, hurting oneself multiple times externally by multiple repeated cuts compared to medicinal treatments (including psychotropics, caffeine, tobacco or even other herbal substances carrying traditional - cultural - strict uses in history like cannabis or ayahuasca) which are argued to biochemically alter or even injure oneself internally (which by the way internal damage and repair is how muscle fibres grow stronger too) as if microneedling and bloodletting was an unknown thing, although recently admitted into modern medical science in its own ways on its own terms. Both involve the use of blades of metal or grass, but neither are equal. Even at one point caffeine was considered illegal, until control and regulation through systems made the effects of its use possible to manage. But then the standard of the former is broken as mistrust suddenly inverts into conviction with the latter in a standard that did not belong to oneself carried and cultivated personally, carefully and painstakingly researched before being used as identity heuristics. 

The world of medical theory and science, especially while knowledge and language is steadily being decolonised and unshackled from fundamentals of extraction, exploitation, coercion and control, is re-evolving again, ever transforming and developing while the scope and range of the data is also expanding, as more data (including both high-leverage extreme and outlier) is gathered and more culture is studied in-depth. Modern, pre-modern frameworks are steadily losing lustre as ancient, traditional knowledge and wisdom resurfaces through cultural memory being upheld and fought for, within the human remnants of the pages of history preserved. Findings in papers, news and studies frequently get updated or even obsoleted or disqualified and debunked (e.g. just look at the covid-19 story and the bioethical (well, foucaltian-biopolitical actually) arguments between medical experts and specialists on vaccines.) Meanwhile, the structure and design of the modern world, always following underpinning principles and fundamental philosophies not immediately observable but nonetheless inherent in the thought and feeling dynamics and processes, is always going through seismic shifts thus never quite providing stable ground to rest upon and build a solid foundation. Identity and individual agency that rests upon anything external (philosophical/physical) instead of ontological being and awareness (internal/metaphysical) never finds any rest, and pun intended literally. There is a deeper element of the internal that cuts deeper than philosophy, and it is at the the core truth of our being, which can only be observed from a metaphysical study, which is no simple feat of metacognition alone.

This is NOT for an argumentative for drug or substance abuse or the likes of it, proceed with that misconstrued in mind at your own expense and peril. We draw a parallel at how plants were separated from their origins in traditional heritage and cultures that use them in specific context and lifestyles, compared to how animals were taken out of their natural state and environment and put into what we will address in this article as the "Psychic Zoo", before finally how we have divorced ourselves from our ontological state of being and paint ourselves into corners fighting our own personal little identity wars and politics.

We have started to prise open the cracks of the fault line in a fractured identity, teasing open a specimen of a fragmented psyche in our little thought experiment, an autopsy you may say, of a metaphysical corpse of thought and feeling that was laid to rest in post-mortem denial. This is the purgatory of intepretation before we study the penguin of incoherence, so that perchance we realise how we have behaved and carried ourselves in social media either amplify or attenuate the stuff we feed on out of habit and addiction or just sustenance.

There has to be a long primer to the key point of my article which is a broader exploration of the Gap of Incoherence - which i mentioned in another article - in Western secular thought, a factured space where logic, emotion, thought and feeling finds itself in a humourous yet tragic congitive tension, where we find the analytical/reflective posts and comment sections full of opinion gold (or one may consider as fool's gold). One can observe a spectrum of different interpretations coming from across varying standpoints, that when strung together and looked at as a whole gestalt, points to that Gap of Incoherence which turned the penguin into a meme of human irony, digitally enshrined in posts reaching views in the millions. Despite seemingly common threads resonating between them, the digital cacophony of opinions and interpretations that live in that space complete misses the point. As the gloriously all-at-once unexplained and tragic movement of life in nature justifiably deserves its own place, natural phenomena turned into ironic meme will provide an anchor from which all my observations connect (and stem) from. This is to prevent, and preclude, any notion of epistemic bypass or trespass that can occur easily in our present environment of knowledge where sinister or insiduous interests can surreptitiously enact a "Cognitive Trojan Horse" that can be observed in content generated or tweaked by AI. I do not want cognitive bias or scepticism to pollute the message of this essay. 

Anchoring ourselves onto the natural environment and that natural laws metaphysically govern them guided by an unseen - or let us say divine - Command, but faithfully recognised, will also help separate this body of text from the kind of misleading deceptions that can occur easily. As i am discussing not merely in the enclosures of science, or faith, or philosophy, or psychology - but all in its intricately complicated abstract of layers - we find the complexities of the human being and the natural world in which he stands and creates, or observes and participates, can typically be categorised into etiher a mechanical/biological enframing of a structural/scientific sort of objective observation of the world, or a personal/historical projection of a retrospective/romantic worldview that engages in a kind of subjective séance. Nuance is confused with notion, opinion is confused for fact. Both are actually performing a kind of reductionism. The core matter this essay serves is to examine the echo chamber bandwagon of reactions in cognitive dissonance after all, which has become a sort of a cult of the "Self", in the self-deification that could be named as the "Religion of Man". It must be stated early on though, that this essay does not seek to create another Epistemic Closure but to expose the leaks in both secular "Scientific" thought and logic and modern "Romantic" feelings and emotions that formed floodgates in social media for opinions and interpretations to almost reign supreme unchecked by intellectual (and emotional!!) integrity.

This "lostness" is the symptomatic result of the Anxious-Avoidant chiasmus. The netizens who romanticise the penguin are often the outwardly anxious; they seek to find an "ideal" in the bird’s "otherness" to avoid the internal avoidance of their own groundless reality. They project their broken "Syncognition" onto a creature that is simply malfunctioning, because they themselves are malfunctioning.

As we discussed, this dynamic is not merely a "style" of attachment, but a manifestation of the internal fracture. We must recognise that:

One who is outwardly anxious in attachment is, in truth, inwardly avoidant. They reach for the "other" (or the romanticised image of a penguin) to avoid facing the vacuum within their own stymied heart.

One who is outwardly avoidant in attachment is, in truth, inwardly anxious. They maintain a distance of "selective scepticism" to guard against the overwhelming chaos of a feeling they cannot think through.

In the commentaries, the "Avoidant" criticises the "Anxious" for being sentimental, while the "Anxious" accuses the "Avoidant" of being cold. Both are right, and both are fundamentally wrong. They are both projecting their own "puritanistic shadows" onto a scene that requires organic cognition—the ability to see the "elephant" (or the penguin) from trunk to tail, rather than through the narrow lens of one's own fragmented wounds.

The "New Religion of Man" in Interpretation

This is where the biopolitical meets the psychological. Our secular conditioning has taught us to prize "self-expression" (the outward) over "self-reconciliation" (the inward). We are encouraged to "feel our way" through nature or "think our way" through emotions, but never to integrate the two.

The result is a form of Mimetic Dogmatism. We see a penguin "breaking the rules," and because we are avoidant of our own internal rules, we deify its "rebellion." We treat its madness as a "secular liturgy" of the individual spirit. We are so desperate to avoid the "moral humiliation" of being "simply lost" that we manufacture a narrative of "being different."