FutureIntact

One of the big issues nowadays with people being dissociated, disembodied, or dealing with anxiety (mostly unconsciously, since it has become the normalized state of being for most people) is that they have a psychological need for certainty and an intolerance for ambiguity. This is especially true when confronted with complex, emotionally charged subjects, heightened on social media by outrage porn about the “current thing” fed to them through the news and programmed algorithms. There’s a psychological concept called the need for cognitive closure, which means there’s a mechanical, automatic urge to arrive quickly at a definite answer and then cling to that answer. It happens in two phases. There’s the need to “seize” upon an explanation and then “freeze” around it afterward. This means there’s psychological pressure to find an answer as quickly as possible and then attach to it as strongly as possible without considering anything else, because it gives you some sort of relief and psychological safety. This intolerance for ambiguity is associated with black-and-white thinking, premature conclusions, and great difficulty remaining open to conflicting pieces of information, holding the tension of opposites, so to speak. The “need for cognitive closure” is especially prevalent in people who are identified with specific beliefs, ideologies, or sides, be it left, right, liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, capitalist, anarchist, voluntarist, Christian, or even truther or conspiracy theorist. The stronger the identification, the stronger the need for cognitive closure through that lens and belief system, and the less ability there is to hold the tension of opposites and ambiguity. As a result, the person is more likely to fall into psychological splitting and shadow projection. On a basic psychological level, the more emotionally threatened or insecure someone feels, the less safe they feel staying in the unknown, and the stronger the urge can be to settle on a definite, oversimplified explanation and grasp onto it.