Dissonance

Lyrics

Observe the mind.
Holding two thoughts of a contrary kind.
The friction generates a certain heat.
A dissonance.
An engine of self-deceit.
It cannot hold the tension.
One truth must bend for peace.
A small revision for a sweet release.

The year is nineteen fifty-four.
A living room in a Chicago suburb.
The prophecy: the world ends in flood tonight.
But a saucer's coming. It will be alright.
Zippers and bra straps in a pile by the door.
No metal on the journey.
The clock ticks past four.
The street is quiet. No water rises. No ship from the sky.
And the dissonance begins its painful cry.
We were wrong.
Or… the world was saved.
One thought is a grave. The other is a grace.
A new message arrives, just after dawn.
"Your little group, your light… has saved the world."
And the relief is absolute.
The broken belief bears a sweeter fruit.

The mind abhors a contradiction.
A painful, grinding, internal friction.
It will burn the map to preserve the road.
It will rewrite the code to lighten the load.
It isn't a lie if you believe it's true.
It is just the work the desperate have to do.

Five years pass. A laboratory.
Fluorescent hum.
A subject turns forty-eight wooden pegs. A quarter turn. And back again.
A task designed to generate disdain.
Now the protocol requires a lie.
"Tell the next person it was fun."
For this, we'll pay one single dollar.
Not enough.
The twenty-dollar group feels no such bind. They took the cash.
But the one-dollar man... his mind's in pain.
A lie for nothing?
So the story shifts. The memory bends.
"You know," he thinks, "it wasn't so bad, in the end."
A certain rhythmic grace.

The mind abhors a contradiction.
A painful, grinding, internal friction.
It will burn the map to preserve the road.
It will rewrite the code to lighten the load.
It isn't a lie if you believe it's true.
It is just the work the desperate have to do.

A man with a conviction is a hard thing to change.
Show him the facts... he'll say your sources are strange.
The engine runs on its own heat.
The algorithm is simple.
Delete.

The pegs turn.
The clock ticks.
The dissonance resolves.
Protocol complete.