Campaign 2024: From Rabbit Holes to Wisdom, From Neutrinos to Rites of Passage and Beyond
Bob Deutsch
If you traced the cognitive path most people travel on a daily basis you would find instances of insight and also hazards that shift one’s mind into lies and fantasies. It’s one thing when this happens to folks like me and you, but when the president of the United States or those who are seeking that office drop into a rabbit hole out of touch with reality, well, that can be the end of the human race. No exaggeration.
Even though presidential candidates are our main focus here they are not the only bumps in the road. Media journalists sometimes add false realities, often by asking the questions of the candidates in such a way that virtually assures they get the response the journalists want. Another problem is polling which only give respondents a forced-choice format within which to answer. This method of inquiry only leaves room for an abbreviated top-of-mind response. Everyday folks can and do exhibit mundane eloquence. Polling does not give people the time and space to spin out their narrative which may be much more revealing.
All tolled: Voter Beware!
Moreover, emotions rule the roost and humans can associate one thing with a different thing based on what seems to another human, a little strange. I, myself, recently generated such an experience. I was asked to write an article about policing. I said “I can’t” because I’m not an expert on that topic. But as soon as I said that two names popped into my head: Vaclav Havel and Martha Stewart. I told this story to someone a few days later. The response was: “What!” I then explained my thinking. It had to do with the danger of following a recipe and the difference between explanation and understanding. From that I did write an article about policing.
So first let’s consider the human basics. The mind is not a logic machine, subjectivity is ever-present. Moreover, people are not wholly consistent across time and context. Consistency is an immature ideal. As Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps into the same river twice.” Everyone and everything exist in systems of interacting parts. Change is constant.
Neutrinos and Change
We can thank our lucky stars that at each level of organization — from considering a single person up to considering the entire universe — there are multiple variables all interacting, some even in unusual ways. The universe is a highly complex system. Take, for example, neutrinos. Just after the Big Bang, matter and anti-matter were produced, but if parity existed wherein each was negated by the other, nothing would exist. However, the universe (that includes planet earth and human beings) does exist. Why? Because neutrinos were shape-shifters: they had the capability to change. Neutrinos had different oscillations (what cosmologists call “flavors”) and this allowed perhaps one in a billion to escape annihilation by anti-matter.
We humans literally owe our existence to neutrinos having the capability to change. Yet, we humans have a tendency to worship constancy, to worship the familiar. The familiar is easier than dealing with novelty. We want “the easy” even while our experience of change is constant. All of us know our second-to-second experiences can change us, whether slightly or in a major way. This can be good. This can be a demonstration of learning and openness.
In 2024 Americans have a choice: to stay in the tightly strung, defensively aggressive, winner-take-all attitude, the hell with everyone else of Donald Trump or change to a more positive possibility of shared growth that Kamala Harris advocates.
Expanding One’s Time Perspective
Maybe the contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — and Joe Biden dropping out of the race — is the result of many events interacting, some very recent and some more remote. Alas, we never think about the long view — in half-centuries or in years numbering in the millions or billions — but perhaps we sometimes should. It would give us more of an appreciation of time and of change caused by such things as a meteor slamming into our planet, ice ages or a bullet assassinating a president.
Maybe our current culture wars owe much of their energy to events such as the assassination of JFK, of which there is still confusion about why and who planned for and fired that fatal shot in Dallas. Then there are the assassinations of MLK Jr. and RFK. Apart from those horrific shocks to America, there is racial injustice, the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9–11, Ponzi schemes, incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of Wall Street over Main Street together with the ascendence of our now-mediated life and the worship of celebrities.
All this while more Americans are finding it harder to put food on their tables and roofs over their heads. The dark mood that has spread over our land — a land “O’er the free and the home of the brave” — didn’t just form out of thin air. There is climate change, but the change is not just of the weather, the mood of America also has darkened and became more threatening.
Hopefully-maybe-perhaps the contest between Harris and Trump and how that abruptly came about with Biden dropping out of the race has been forming for years. You may laugh, but laughing may end sooner than we all think.
Is America in a Rite of Passage?
On the positive side of this longer perspective, perhaps America is at a tic of the clock that finds itself in a rite de passage where we are in a transitional period, Between Mythologies — a phase wherein how we relate to ‘The Other’ can be made wiser and where money and power do not make up the only definition for success.
Transitions create ambiguity and with that, stress. Meanings and identities are being fought over and negotiated. During this period, aside from extremists on both ends of the Bell Curve who hold tight to their previous beliefs, hopefully some people can find ‘elbow room’ in their positions such that tempers are lowered enough to allow more of us to hear how the other side — now only called “Them” — conceives of the world. If we can at least talk to each other as human beings, non-scripted conversation often leads to unexpected thoughts that can shift the tone of how each side perceives the other side.
Perhaps during this transitional period American culture can take a lesson from the shape-shifting of neutrinos to find a better design for a good life. As Kamala Harris rightly says we can’t go backwards (remember Heraclitus) and together as Americans we can emerge from the darkness and hate into light and joy.
Kamala Harris is a Real Person. She is in politics, but not of it. Her life has not been one of a selfish person born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Too many previous presidents have been fake in the sense that they know little of what a real life for most of us entails. They only know what they want — there is no “We, The People” in their conception of life. Trump was, and would be again, the epitome of this type of president. Trump: a threat to American’s freedom and to the American idea of freedom.
Life Is Paradoxical
Wynton Marsalis, the great musician, composer and conductor has said, Jazz is a model of the American promise: individually creative and communally innovative, where one can assert their individuality as a personal impulse and as a response, in this case, to the sound a group of musicians. You and others both as cause and effect.
Remember the Big Bang with its production of matter and anti-matter, and shape-shifting neutrinos? Well, Mr. Marsalis has also pointed out that Jazz is a combination of opposites that do not annihilate each other, but instead produce something profound: Jazz is an integration of the raucousness of Saturday night with the piety of Sunday morning.
As we feel the days pass quickly by until November 5, 2024 let’s try to consider each day from a wider time perspective. That can help you live in another paradox: feeling more relaxed and more energized at the same time.
