Cognitive Scientific Theory of Collective Dissociation of Late-Stage Capitalism
A framework applying cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying collective dissociation under late-stage capitalism. The cognitive scientific theory investigates how individual cognitive mechanisms (attention, memory, belief formation, cognitive dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning) interact with capitalist social structures to produce collective denial. It asks: How does the constant cognitive load of modern work inhibit systemic reflection? How do advertising and media exploit cognitive biases to maintain consumption despite awareness of consequences? How does the sheer complexity of global capitalism exceed human cognitive capacity, producing dissociation by default? How do cognitive processes scale up through social networks to produce population-level patterns of knowing and not knowing? This approach reveals that collective dissociation under late-stage capitalism is rooted in the basic architecture of human cognition—amplified by economic structures, triggered by overwhelming complexity, and shaped by information environments designed to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities.
Example: "Her cognitive scientific theory of collective dissociation of late-stage capitalism showed that the human brain simply can't track the consequences of its consumption through global supply chains—the complexity exceeds our cognitive capacity. The dissociation isn't just denial; it's cognitive overwhelm, built into the scale of the system."
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