Cognitive Dissonance - the idea that when we hold two conflicting thoughts or beliefs, we unconsciously adjust to make one fit with the other.
For example, if you have a belief that it is wrong to cheat, yet you find yourself cheating on a test, because it was a dumb class that you didn’t need anyway. Or you may say to yourself that everyone cheats so why not you? In other words, you think about your action in a different manner or context so that it no longer appears to be inconsistent with your beliefs and ease your anxiety .
" Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. "
From Carl Sagan's public lecture at Cornell, October 13, 1994
The vision of America as a “melting pot of nations” (cf. the Latin motto “e pluribus unum” – ("one from many" –or "One out of many" suggesting that out of many peoples, races, religions and ancestries has emerged a single people and nation—illustrating the concept of the melting pot.) , in which the foreign immigrants give up their national identity, way of life, culture and language and form a new nation, has never become reality. In the 1960s, the growing self-confidence of the minorities, their fight against discrimination, and the influx of new ethnic groups who refused to be culturally absorbed by American society, has made America look for a new image for this concept. The concept of the “salad bowl” was suggested as more accurate, accepting America as diverse, multi-cultural and pluralistic.
