There are two kinds of people this weekend. The first camp had their minds fixed on Kaduna already convinced that President Tinubu would be stoned, booed, and left staring at empty seats. They were hunting for failure.
The second camp were expecting the opposite headline: “Kaduna shut down for Tinubu,” a mammoth crowd, loyalty confirmed. They too were hunting, but for validation.
The tragedy is this: even if 90% of the APC presidential campaign flag-off in Kaduna was positive yesterday, some will circulate only the 10% negative clip to prove their prophecy.
A single booing video, looped and re-forwarded, becomes the whole truth.
This is not accidental. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance explains it. People seek information that comforts their prior belief and discard what threatens it.
Eli Pariser calls it the filter bubble, Walter Lippmann long before warned that we define first and then see.
And so the negative becomes canonical not because it is dominant, but because it is useful. It consoles, it massages the echo chamber, it becomes evidence for a judgment already made.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias, but in politics it is propaganda in its purest, most voluntary form: we propagandize ourselves.
On the other side are those who will pretend everything went perfectly, who airbrush out every glitch as if dissent did not exist. They too are performing.
In both cases we cease to be observers and become actors, staging the world we wish existed and demanding that reality conform to our script.
We pass judgment quickly because it soothes us. Yet as Daniel Kahneman shows in his work on motivated reasoning, a fiction believed today becomes tomorrow’s disappointment.
You cannot live on illusion without paying emotional interest.
This is what I call obsessive imprisonment: locking yourself inside what you want to be true until you lose the capacity to see what is actually possible, however unpalatable.
Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
