Three short commentaries: on election struggles, politics and marriage, and human fallibility

As someone without a real horse in the race, to me it seems that the only real difference isn’t in the actual events (how Democrats vs Republicans conduct themselves), just in how each sees things and interprets them. Of course, I’m the first to admit that Trump is an idiot and lets his mouth run away with him, has no respect for the truth, and doesn’t think at all about the general consequences of his words and actions beyond how they benefit him (and make him feel good and feed his personal narrative). So of course he’s going to give idiotic speeches and whip people up and not think about whether that’s actually a wise or helpful thing to do, because he doesn’t have any concept of those categories, except insofar as they apply to himself.

People, of course, are crazy, and in a group get even crazier. All people. Not just Democrats or Republicans, not just alt right or antifa. All people get a bit nuts in a group. Add in a speech and a lot of emotion and people feel that they have to act. Maybe that means barging into a room and refusing to leave until they get what they want or are arrested. Maybe that means waving flags or shouting a lot. Maybe it means smashing windows or spray painting slogans. Maybe it even means assaulting law enforcement. Maybe it means setting dumpsters or trash cans on fire or burning effigies.

I would in no way condone any of these behaviors. But the fact is, tons of people engage in them, and both sides are shocked when the other side does it and are completely blind and full of excuses and self righteous when their own side does it. We literally just went through six months of having the majority of all state capitals and the federal capital overrun by protest and riots, many of which were violent and destructive. Colorado’s capital building was boarded up, fenced in, vandalized, surrounded, and assaulted on multiple occasions for weeks.

But to read the news about it, it was all mostly peaceful, perfectly normal, perfectly understandable, and above board. It was just political passion and people fighting for their concerns in keeping with the great tradition of American resistance. In other cities, people were dragged from cars, businesses were looted, roads were regularly blocked, buildings were set on fire with people inside them, and no Democrat or major media outlet had anything but positive things to say and were in fact proud to associate themselves with the protests.

Even Portland’s regular riots and violence were constantly described as mostly peaceful protests and cast in a positive light, even while the peaceful protestors tried to set fire to the (sympathetic) mayor’s apartment building. That story, which was barely covered, like so many stories, was always incredibly careful to tiptoe around the rioters and never to blame them for anything they did, always seeking to emphasize the positive, portray them sympathetically, explain and excuse their reasons for being where they were, and downplay any violence.

One story that came out just after the riot at the Capital building today said “Four People Died in Attacks on Capital”, giving the impression (with the headline and pictures) that the rioters were invaders who had killed four people in their rampage. Actually reading the story, it turns out that it was one of the protestors who had been shot by law enforcement, and the three others died in “unrelated medical emergencies”. So one wonders why the other three were included at all, except to inflate the headline and possibly to distract from what might have been the story, had this been a BLM protest: “Officers fatally shoot female protestor”.

And now people are writing think pieces on how on earth were supposed to explain the violence at the capital to our children, as if we hadn’t just been through months of protests and violence over all sorts of different causes, from covid to race to policing. One police officer did die several days later as a result of physical trauma caused during the fighting, and as with all such incidents of attacks on law enforcement (who face many dangers), people should be prosecuted for those actions. In all cases. It’s just strange to hear those stories leaped upon so eagerly by people who want to point out that “These maniacs attacked and injured law enforcement officers!” when they were just a few weeks ago arguing that those same officers were brutal, neo-facist maniacs who deserved to be attacked because they’re basically a bunch of violent thugs who are all bastards and should be abolished. The willingness to flip the rhetoric when it serves the narrative is frustrating.

Democrats complain about the terror and impropriety and undemocratic madness of the protests against Biden’s win. When Trump got elected there were protests and riots all over America. People burned Trump in effigy, projected “fuck Trump” and “not my president” on buildings, blocked roads, set fires, invaded and occupied the offices of elected officials (including congressional leaders), attacked law enforcement with clubs and rocks, vandalized and looted private and public properties, and yes, also did a lot of just marching and protesting and shouting and sign waving and flag waving (and a certain amount of flag burning). All over the country, for weeks. One man even set himself on fire.

And even when it comes to election results, obviously liberals were just as upset about Trump winning as conservatives are about Biden winning. Trump’s supporters in congress are protesting the results in around eight different states, I believe. When Trump won, house Democrats protested the results in eleven. The only real difference between the sides is whether you think the actions and reactions in question were justified. If you think they were, then you downplay and legitimize and sympathize. You understand. Maybe you even see it as heroic. Maybe you even join in. Because you think the cause is just. So you excuse, ignore, or endorse the behavior. But if you see the other side doing it, you don’t understand. You don’t sympathize. Their actions are magnified, rather than minimized, in your eyes. They’re shocking, an affront, an unprecedented assault on decency and order and integrity that reveals the corruption of the whole cause. Same actions, totally different reactions.

Just because Democrats did it doesn’t make it ok when Republicans do it. Just because Republicans do it doesn’t make it ok when Democrats do it. And people with good sense can see that. But most people don’t have good sense. The truth is, crazy people on both sides do it, and people who sympathize on both sides make excuses and ignore things when they’re in sympathy with the cause, and both sides blow up and are outraged and can’t understand and condemn and exaggerate when they aren’t in sympathy with the cause. A completely sober glance at the facts of history clearly shows the hypocrisy of both, and most especially in the way things are portrayed and discussed in the media. Because it’s all about that juicy narrative.

When a group of protestors enter the US capital after getting whipped up by a speech, the same media that kept calling violent riots “mostly peaceful protests” deserving of sympathy and immoral to restrain no matter how many weeks they went on or what lengths people went to or how many state and local government buildings were assaulted and trashed, immediately they call it “a coup”.

The point isn’t the rightness or wrongness of either reaction. The point is the inconsistency of labeling and interpretation, and how quick one group is to pounce in one situation and how slow they are to have anything to say at all in the other. And then they get to have a happy round condemning the people on the other side for doing exactly that, for failing to speak out. I don’t mind either side correctly and soberly pointing out bad behavior that is wrong and stupid and destructive. What I do mind is how they get so excited about it and start making political hay out of it and using it to strengthen their own personal (and often just as destructive and irrational and prejudiced) narratives.

Having said that, Trump does seem to have realized how dumb he was being and has tried to rewind some of the obvious consequences of his words, too late, that any sensible person would have anticipated and avoided. All the major Republican leaders virtually immediately condemned the actions of the protestors and called on them to stop and for law enforcement to retake control of the situation. And that’s far more than we ever got from any Democratic leaders over the protests earlier this year.

Personally, I think Trump deserves impeachment, removal from office, and probably even prison, and is easily the worst president we’ve ever had by a wide margin. Objectively, I think he’s earned all that a hundred times over. But in the interests of national healing and rehabilitation, I think the best thing we can really do for the nation is to simply ignore him. Sideline him, ignore him, don’t react or respond to anything he says or does, and keep moving ahead with what needs to be be done like adults and moving him out.

Trump is an attention hog, it’s what he craves, what he lives for, it’s what gives him his power. So the most appropriate punishment for him, the correct sentence, would simply be to become irrelevant and ignored and forgotten. He’s on his way out; let him go out with a whimper. Let him see how little he matters now and how few listening ears he has and how few friends he has left now that it’s all over. The more time we spend focusing on him and what he’s doing and what he has to say, the more he gets what he wants. The best thing is to just be the adult in the room and stop listening to his absurd tantrums.

Now, I have never been able to successfully explain this process of learning to see things the same from either side to anyone. I have never been able to explain my perspective to a Republican without making them upset or a Democrat without making them upset. There are so many things that look the same, despite seeming totally different to the parties involved, if you just have the imagination to see things from the other side. There is so much of what just seems like normal, neutral reasoning and interpretation that is so heavily colored by our underlying assumptions and perspectives that drive our sympathies, that affect what stands out and what fades back, what seems understandable and what seems like insanity, what seems obvious what seems like excuses.

That doesn’t mean that reality is just some soup of relativism. But it does mean that it’s very very hard to actually recognize the way in which our relative position on any matter colors how we interpret it and react to it and how we characterize it as part of our own personal narrative. We can see it when other people do it, but we can’t see it when we do it.

But whenever I try to be explain it and show it to anyone, they just see me as someone from the other side, as someone who doesn’t understand or appreciate their essential values and concerns and thoughts and feelings, someone who is alien and in opposition to them.

And that’s really the problem. This is how people are. This is how they’re made. It’s just one of the limitations of human psychology. We have different types of people, different personality types, different specializations, different talents, different interests, different priorities, different values. Why? Because it’s just not possible to fit everything the human race needs into one person. If it was possible, we would all be like that.

We can learn to mollify our excesses a bit. We can learn to integrate correctives into our nature as we discover its idiosyncrasies and its excesses and shortcomings and blind spots. We can learn to appreciate and understand and value others who have a different composition from ourselves. We can even integrate them into our lives as spouses, friends, and advisors. If they’re not too far separated from us.

Marriage is, on its most basic level, an attempt to correct the fundamental problem of the nature of mankind. We are incomplete. We are limited. We cannot be all. We cannot have it all or do it all or know it all or care about it all or cover it all, alone. That’s why marriage is more than mere reproduction. It’s not just a fix to make more humans, it’s the basic building block of the necessary social animal.

Humanity cannot be completely described with a single, solitary being. It takes, at minimum, two, male and female, to describe it. And all the other vast complexity of human society and interaction, from children and families to governments and institutions, builds up from that single dyadic point. That’s the absolute minimum that the concept of humanity can be reduced to. These two halves of the species.

And marriage is hard! Relations between the sexes are hard! Sometimes those other people just seem completely insane and inexplicable and idiotic and incomprehensible and misguided. We drive each other crazy, we’re afraid of one another, we resent one another. And yet we need one another. And if we reject that need, we reject humanity itself, because to be human is to recognize and admit and participate in that need, that nature that we cannot singly possess but must instead participate in like a dance.

We cannot be fully human without facing this terrible, frustrating, and seemingly hopeless task. To try to understand and value and love one another, or at least tolerate one another. And all that scales up into the differences between all humans. This is just an easy way to access and understand it, a stable archetypal touchstone of common experience and shared history. Society is a kind of family, and politics is a lot like a marriage. An arranged, necessary marriage. And in the case of contemporary politics, a very dysfunctional one.

This may sound odd, but I’m not really bothered that much by people’s bad behavior, I rather expect it. I know that that’s what people are like. What bothers me is inconsistency. Inconsistency in how people view their own actions and the actions of those they’re in sympathy with, people on their side, and how they view the actions of others. The inconsistency and hypocrisy frustrates me, because people don’t seem to be able to see it. The illusion that people have that they’re somehow better or smarter or more reasonable and principled, when it’s obvious to any outside observer that both groups are behaving and talking in the same manner.

It’s like there’s a magic trick both sides are doing, and it’s completely fooling only themselves and people on their side of the table. And the people on the other side can see through it and are pointing out the trick. And the people on the other side are also doing the same trick, but they’re completely fooled by their own trick, and the other people can see right through it. And as someone standing to the side of the table, both sides look insane, largely because they’re both doing the same thing and accusing each other of the same things and excusing the same things on their own part.

And it seems like it works on virtually everyone. I have not yet met anyone in person who sees it. Even my best attempts to help someone else see don’t work. I just get accused of being contrary and being a denialist, or belonging to the other side. Because I can see the validity of the arguments of the other side (which have at least as much validity as those same arguments, which have been accepted by the other side for their own stuff, so I wonder why they can’t also accept the same arguments when made by the opposition).

But people just don’t seem to be able to think like that. Even smart people and we’ll meaning people. People need a side. They need to belong. They require a perspective. They can’t shed that aspect of individuality and the particularity and relativity of human nature, it’s inescapable perspectivism. And people are who they are. Objectivity requires leaving behind any specific identity or or perspective, it requires disinhabiting your particularity. It requires a great emptying, and then a careful letting in of everything in an undifferentiated balance. It makes nonsense of the world. It makes you gaslight yourself. And that’s really really hard, maybe impossible for most people.

Anyway, what really bothers me about all this is the ironic and hypocritical shock at such a thing happening, and the harsh language used to describe it. As if it were something new. As if it weren’t the sort of thing that is really quite ordinary for humans and that gets excused by the same people who are complaining about it on a regular basis. That rubs me the wrong way.

In an objective sense, yes, I agree what happened was incredibly sad and idiotic and the result of complete corruption. I just wasn’t under any illusions that that wasn’t where we already were. And being cynical myself and already disappointed by people, it’s pretty rich to hear some of the very people who have so disappointed me talking like they’re shocked by such horrible behavior, when they’ve been ignoring it and excusing it and encouraging it themselves. In fact they’ve been ignoring and encouraging far worse for far longer.

I can’t stand the self-righteous posturing, as if these people, who are themselves the perpetrators of the problem, will somehow be the ones to cure it and make it better. As if they’re somehow better. The hypocrisy is simply infuriating.

That’s why I was always disgusted with Trump, someone who exploited real problems that he actually only exacerbated, who never had a chance of being better or making things better himself and likely never intended to. He makes trouble and stirs up controversies wherever he goes on purpose, it’s on of his tactics. So the idea of him making things better was laughable, so long as he was around he was going to keep creating trouble that other people had to deal with. The ridiculousness of the posturing and pointing out the sins of others, as if he wasn’t himself just as bad, was disgusting.

And then the Democrats play the same game and the same tune, as if they themselves weren’t exploiting the same tactics and causing just as much damage and weren’t just as much a danger to society. Each of them has some real power too, because each is to some degree right (likely entirely right) about the dangers they see coming from the words and actions of the other party. And both have a real contribution to make and things they’re right about and assets that our country desperately needs to protect it and make it prosper.

That’s why both sides have power, because insofar as they go, they’re right about what they have to offer and they’re right about the danger of the other side. But what both sides have wrong, what both are missing, is that they don’t understand what the other side has to offer, and they don’t understand the danger that they themselves pose. And that’s the source of the sickness. And because each side pushes so hard with the source of their power, laying so hard into those assets, they corrupt even these because they’re missing that other half of the equation, and so subvert what power they had and make even their great truths and assets into the most deceitful and pernicious of lies and poisons. Because they’re not just something false, but something true gone wrong.

I’ve felt this exact same frustration with both sides of the political system in turn over the last several years. And while I can enjoy sympathy if I go to the opposite side, I can never seem to get anyone to cross back and forth with me and appreciate both fully. There’s been no shortage of bad behavior from both sides. And no shortage of a complete blindness on the part of both sides to their own sins and a blinding glare of their examination of the other side’s sin. But they’re really the same, deep down. Different, but both equally human. Both doing the same things in different ways.

And I can’t find any comfort by fleeing to a side, escaping into the comforting selective blindness of perspective. To just accept a narrative and live by it and interpret things according to it. I can’t help but see the problems, the common words and behavior, whether I agree or disagree. Humans have to have a place, a perspective, a narrative of meaning. And since it’s often easier to recognize bad people more than bad ideas, and what behavior bothers us or attracts us is largely down to who we are as a person rather than any specific rational scheme of ideas and principles, these are the levers that move people thither and thus and drive their behavior.

Maybe there’s a hope under all this. A kind of unity. If we can only come to see it. Hopefully in a more positive aspect than how I see it. Right now we’re at the he far end of a dysfunctional relationship. The closest I’ve come to a solution is really just an emergency measure. People need to get off social media. Facebook and Twitter need to go. Comments on news stories need to be ignored or disabled. We need less of everything. Entertainment news, editorial news, should be shut out of our lives.

These things are eating us alive. And we think we want them, we think they’re good, we think we can handle them and manage them and keep our heads, and we can’t. They’re too much for us to handle. It’s just not possible, with the way the human mind works and is supposed to work. It’s ripping the psyche of the whole country apart.

We only invented all this ten years ars ago and look how much it has already done to us. It has rapidly accelerated the decline of our national relationship. It has fractured cities, parties, families, friends, faiths, genders, everything. And where it hasn’t fractured it has distilled and concentrated and pressurized and exaggerated and inflamed. It has pressed us down into fiery little eggs and rolled us against each other in a constant jumble of tension, until none of us can stand or live with each other.

And what we all need is just some space and some quiet and to mind our own business a bit. We need social media to end. We need less media absolutely. We need calm. We need a less concentrated perspective. We need to alter the focus of our eyes and ears and return them to the proper scale of our own lives. We aren’t ready to be God, hearing the voices and seeing the sins of the whole world. We’re just people, barely able to face and navigate the world immediately around us in a good and healthy way.

We need to stop listening to the people profiting from all this. The hustlers making their names and living off our suffering and outrage and the pain of an inflamed identitarianism. Our whole society is sick with it, from left to right. I don’t know if we can be cured. But first, at least, we need to stop drinking this poison and stop making ourselves sicker. And that means not listening to either Trump or the people claiming the invasion of the capital was a pro-Trump coup.

Trump is a fool, whose words capture the hearts of fools, whose foolish actions are then taken advantage of by fools to push their own narrative and platform, so they also can talk and act like and incite and excuse fools. All of them don’t really care about any of it, deep down, only that the person who gets the chance to be the dominant fool is them. Not that even they are aware of it.

Most people can’t see beyond their own filters, and see only their own advantage plainly written, their own story advancing and confirmed, taking clearer shape in the world, their own wounds clearly pricked, their own cares clearly provoked. And they see anything and anyone else as just an incomprehensible, utterly corrupt slag that must be purified and burnt out of society. As if there really wasn’t something deep down under all that perversion and twisted exaggeration and isolation that we didn’t really desperately need. As if the aggression and competitiveness of some was merely something worthless to be purged from society. As if the sensitivity and of some was merely a weakness to be eliminated from mankind.

It’s right to be cautious about excesses, the madness that comes from being isolated and unbalanced, from being alone, from being removed from the dance, having lost faith in its value and power. We need the harshness of the other, the softness of this one. We need the caution of one and the courage of another. We need the willingness of those and the reluctance of others.

Both factions are capable of descending into great madness and evil. And both are needed in concert for good. It’s wrong to reject the dance altogether, the value of our partners and who they and we can be when we are in balance. It’s inhuman to say that we don’t need one another. That we can be all, that we do not need, do not depend on one another. We’re sick without one another. It is, as scripture puts it, even in paradise, “not good”.

The dance is a trap. It is a prison. It confines us, restrains us, forces us into dependence and servitude. And it is our only hope for life and freedom, the only escape from slavery to our own nature and limits. Only in service and devotion to others, only in love and unity with them, only in tension and struggle with them, can we grow and become more than what we are. Only that way can reach toward being complete.

My own only claim to virture or wisdom is no great one. Only the claim of Socrates. I’m only that little bit wiser or different because I have some idea that I myself am part of problem. I’m not good or better myself. Only God is good, because only God is complete. I’m not. I’m just not under the illusion, or I’m a little less under the illusion, that I am. I know I’m a fool. And in our age, that passes for great wisdom. But, much like in the time of Socrates, no one seems eager to learn this wisdom.

I can in some sense sympathize with those Trump supporters, much as I despise Trump. If they truly believe what he was saying, if they care about the country and they’re hearing these things from the president himself and believe him, then a terrible injustice has been committed. They’re being brave and heroic, charging into a situation for which they are ill prepared and have no hope of success, against the arrayed powers of a massively powerful government (“the man”). They’re standing up to and drawing attention to a terrible wrong. From their perspective.

I’ve listened to plenty of people over the last six months justify similar illegal activity from a completely different perspective, seeing themselves as heroic for standing up to a different man, often to Trump himself. And the explanation both sides give is “well, but our people are actually right”. Which is what everyone thinks and says and really just takes for granted. And the truth is that usually to some degree both sides are right. And both are often also wrong.

Actions that are condemned by one side will often look heroic to the other side. How you see and describe them doesn’t derive from the nature of the acts themselves, but derives from the meaning and the narrative that you use to frame them. That’s what war is. That’s why both sides build monuments to their heroes. What defines heroism is a function of the context of those actions in that society, not merely the actions themselves all alone.

War is the most obvious and open struggle between conflicting contexts, conflicting narratives. When the only option left is to just decide by force which will become embodied in the world and become the shape of the future. These wars of narrative are always going on, struggling in a battle of selection to become the present and shape the future. Often they’re merely psychological. But in an exclusive world that contains definition and choice and specific character, only death can produce change and growth. Why? Because you can’t take any path without also giving something up, even if that thing is only possibility.

Possibility is pregnant with all possible choices. But in order to have any of them you have to choose one. And that means not choosing something else, letting that possible future perish. And harsh as that sounds, it’s a better bargain than making no choice at all. A train that chooses no destination goes nowhere. Maybe, someday, other future choices will reveal new possibilities, the return of similar past possibilities. But in the only real moment of experience, the present, you cannot go forward into the future without letting all possible futures but one die and fall behind, never to be.

Time and life itself are the function of the constant elimination of what could be from what is. War is the final escalation in the conflict between competing visions of what could be, an ultimate test of strength and will, the stubborn will to live, to be, to grow to become the future. Is it any wonder that the Norse, great and terrible fighters, gave man himself this meaning in his name, “the stubborn will to live”. And we see from a glance at the genetic lineage of men particularly how often that stubborn will has caused so many to fall behind and be forgotten while others became who we are today, became us.

What some people don’t seem to understand is that what makes something heroic or villainous isn’t a function of some objective feature of the physical world. It’s a function of what people believe. It’s a function of how they see the world and how they interpret it and what that meaning presses upon them as nesessary and courageous and praiseworthy action. It’s not something fixed or formulaic or just obvious. There’s a whole story behind it.

Human action is primarily about meaning, and our essential narrative are what provides the structure that causes that meaning to coalesce and become intelligible. That’s how human minds work. (This realization, along with the recognition that the material world cannot obviously be proved to contain “meaning” was what drove many thinkers into relativism. The hopelessness of sorting out any reality that wasn’t merely private in the face of such personal realities of expwrience, and the realization that the hoped for new common reality of bare physical laws and particles could not easily be construed in such a way as to include meaning and other such non-physical concepts.)

Messy afterthoughts: The flower wars of the Maya seemed heroic to them, to die in a war fought merely for the same of war. The raids of the Vikings seemed heroic to them. Do we know better now, or do we merely think differently? For all that we look down on them from our great height, what might they despise about us? If our current manner of life fails and falls, what might that prove? We enjoy great wealth, built on a foundation we largely inherited. But Rome stood for a thousand years, and Egypt far longer, on very different foundational narratives, against far more terrible odds, and we’ve hardly begun compared to their time scale. They weathered storms we could hardly dream of today.

Why do I love so much the assaults of cynicism and existentialism? Because facing them tears away your illusions and lays bare the real bones of reality and the human soul. It blasts away all the trite illusions that get in the way. It forces you to find better foundations. It’s a fire that burns away anything that isn’t adamantine.

I’m really not a cynic, though I may flirt with it and struggle with it. But I struggle with it like a beloved enemy. The battle with it makes me purer and stronger, if it does not destroy me. It burns away my folly and dross. It steals the comforts that would make a slave of me. It reveals the secrets at the heart of reality, beyond being. In mere glimpses, as around a corner. In that moment when self fails and falls away, you see, if you are not blinded and eradicated in the void of unbeing and unminding and unself and unsanity. And then you fall back into yourself. Recoalesce, like drops of mercury on a pan. But in that moment of exploded consciousness, for just a moment you see past yourself and get a glimpse of God. And are bewildered. And understand.