The upcoming 2022 US Midterm elections have gotten my brain neurons stretched, frayed, and braided into a conflicted tapestry of parties, policies, voters, and overall integrity of things.
Recently, I made the carnal error of raising a political question on Twitter in response to an observational fact. Almost immediately came the replies and comments in the form of critical analysis, sensible counterpoints, and concurring arguments. Some users were opinionated and ideological. Some sounded realistic supporting their stance with historical data and opening new perspectives to consider. One person called me a bigot. That was fun!
Without naming names, my particular qualm was about a recent poll that showed a conservative newbie candidate, who has been proven to be dishonest, controversial, and painfully unintelligent, receiving 45 percent support from the voters of the state.
I nurse no illusions about political parties sometimes needing nothing more than a warm body to gain them the majority, even when it is glaringly obvious that the candidate is not qualified in the least. Today’s politics is certainly a far cry from Aristotle’s “noble activity in pursuit of virtue and good life”, and I doubt if it ever was a noble enterprise to begin with, given the human elements and egotism at play.
Neither are the politicians our knights in tailored suits set out to score us the “good life”. Our seasoned politicians are in the field to play the dominance game and they play it to win. Power is their trophy and they pursue it by whatever means. Lucky for us, sometimes the “means” tends to look like economic and social development and we play along claiming the crumbs and scrapes as the “good life” we wanted. We are well aware of this charade, yet swear allegiance to the lesser of the evils and roll with the fortunes of the players.
Interestingly, this understanding between the people and our politicians makes sense only as long as the contending parties continue the pretense of striving to provide us with the “good life”. I wish for us a utopia where we don’t have this twisted relationship, but alas, this is our reality. So, when one party blatantly adopts a cult personality while hiding behind religious nationalism, when it not only lacks ideologies but also has outright contempt for competence, a flair for unfounded conspiracy, and is set out to destroy all high ideals of a fair system, it only makes sense that the voters of reason denounce the candidates supporting such a party. Yet here’s 45 percent of the people willing to support the group that openly abuses power, spreads lies, and is set out to destroy democracy.
In every country and in every political system, there is one-third of irrational people who are willing to turn a blind eye to embrace extreme shifts as our move forward. Whatever their premise, these people refuse to look at the common good rationally, thus choosing to affect not just the political sphere but also our environment, climate, natural resources, and biosphere, thus hurting the world with their warped outlook. Then the question is no longer about politics or parties, but about the people who are willing to support it. Who are these people and what is their reasoning? When good and bad are as clear as day and night, what is their line of thinking to choose blind fealty over hard-line integrity and the common good?
Man, the rational animal
For Aristotle, what sets man apart from any other species is not only his capacity for speech, but particularly his ability to reason through speech about what is beneficial and harmful, just and unjust, hence earning him the title “rational animal”. This great philosopher considered man to be endowed with the ability to discern right from wrong, and through reason and speech to be capable of creating laws that will allow human communities to flourish with virtue and happiness.
Let me be the prick to burst Aristotle’s bubble, but in reality, man is an irrational animal, who is hopelessly incapable of objective moral reasoning.
Man’s rationality is a rigid, subjective set of rules heavily influenced by his upbringing, environment, and social constructs. He is guided by misinterpreted emotions and misguided principles, swayed by his own story-telling and biases of what is right and wrong. Man may be capable of objective truth to serve the common good, but in most cases, he is incapable of rising above the deep beliefs and stories he has grown to identify with. His sense of the world is through duality – I versus them, my beliefs versus your misbeliefs, my one truth versus your falsehood, and that division, which in itself is erroneously motivated, creates even more division. So when such a man is conned by abstract realities like land borders and nationalism, he becomes incapable of seeing how the global powerplay is affecting our planet and its resources. He easily gets onboard with taking from the earth for his immediate generation’s gratification rather than restoring the planet for future generations.
The indigenous people of our world knew the consequence of over-indulgence and were environmentally conscious. But the modern man neither takes notes from the wisdom of the ancients nor relies on today’s hardcore data that screams of the dangers of our way.
There was a time when man lived as one with nature and took his wisdom and rationality from the living balance around him. For instance, when all the birds and animals living in the mangrove swamp started to flee uphill, early man had the common sense to trust the creatures’ instinct for impending danger and followed them away from the ocean that looked surprisingly dead calm. He acknowledged what he didn’t know and welcomed new perspectives, and with it, greater wisdom. But the modern man, who neither had the cultural knowledge to read the signs nor the gut instinct to intuitively know an approaching danger, wandered into the sea when it receded in 2004 due to an earthquake in the Indian Ocean, only to be swept up by the monstrous tsunami wave and get literally killed by his misplaced curiosity.
Either man should reason intellectually by having an open mind to welcome all kinds of worldly rationale to protect the planet and evolve together as a species. Or he should go full-on spiritual, drop down from the intellect, and look at everything instinctively through his heart and collective consciousness as deep, deep love, awareness, and compassion, so he could move forward unitedly as humans, creatures, and biosphere. But if he keeps up with his half-baked world knowledge, unwillingness to look past his biases, submission to abstract concepts like fascism, financial gains, and consumerism, and continues to stay out-of-touch with global synchronicity, he will most probably land our future in a ditch that we might never climb out of.
