Looking back down the stack, a spell...

To understand, then, what I snarkingly called the Totempwog (et al) below, perhaps we best see the entire process as a method of stabilizing adherence in a system which encodes routine periods of managed chaos (elections, bubbles, economic contractions, mediated crises), as a means of releasing the built up of social pressures and social toxins, and breaking social resistance to authority.

As Al Schumann wrote (and far, far better than I),

"Every relatively healthy adult experiences cognitive dissonance as a severely distressing condition. In the face of overwhelming refutation, supplied by people and world around them, they sooner or later back away from the insupportable belief. It's not easy, sometimes, and it can take ages to make headway. But it does happen. The defensive constructs of wilder and wilder dissonance pall and finally gall so much that it's a relief to give up on them. What comes after, of course, varies. 

[snipped reference back to this blog, which seems gauche and unseemly to duplicate, on my part]...takes a hard look at the serial imputation of idealized qualities to public figures who invariably fail to live up to them. The qualities, if they existed, would be sufficient to impart vast integrity in the face of totalizing systemic obstacles to their exercise. As the systemic obstacles are indeed totalizing, effectively so at that, the vast integrity remains forever out of reach. But there's no shortage of new faces to which it can be assigned. And that's a lot easier than taking a step into what looks like chaos. The dissonance, then, is a comfort. Not distressing except in the moments between new faces."