This year’s presidential election cycle has drawn into clear
focus the irrationality of our collective political decision-making. With no admirable candidates running for the
most important office in the world, otherwise bright, thoughtful people have
been forced to retreat to party affiliations or unimportant candidate
attributes to decide who to support in this race.
While “The Donald” has trouble with anything beyond bald,
fifth-grade level assertions laced with fantasy in his extemporaneous speeches,
Hillary carefully parses her phrases to stave off the indictment she so richly
deserves for FBI confirmed misuse of our country’s secrets and continuous
recounting of her fantastic beliefs about how those secrets were handled. Where on Earth does one find inspiration or
comfort in Donald’s assurances that everything will be "huge" or "great" or
Hillary’s abject denial of mistakes she made that everyone has watched.
We don’t. We retreat
to other decision-making practices. Many
of us base our voting decisions on our perceptions of the parties these
candidates represent. That these perceptions are likely as flawed as the
candidates themselves makes little difference; we do it, anyway.
These strongly held perceptions are referred to as memes by
many scientists and philosophers these days.
These memes often take on the controlling force formerly reserved for
the most controlling of ideas, religion. There’s quite a lively
debate afoot in the philosophical world about whether or not we have free will if we are
encumbered by strong memes that influence, outside our recognition, what we
want to want. While organized religion has historically had the best meme
generating machinery, memes of all sorts have enjoyed increased amplification
with the growth of mass media and social media. Ideas pass at light speed
looking for fertile minds to populate. Once
those ideas take root, we identify (note the memetic use of that word) as
Progressives or Libertarians or Evangelicals or feminists or Catholics or Jews
or, or, or.
This identification makes candidate selection a much easier
matter than weighing the attributes and flaws of individual candidates. We’ve watched as the Republican Party has
worked at forcing the “Republican meme” to garner support for its nominee among
candidates who might have freely chosen a different candidate or no vote at
all. We’ve watched as Hillary has
reinforced the “first female President meme” in an effort to capture more of
the female vote than she might otherwise get.
If we are to make an attempt at choosing rationally between
two demonstrably unworthy candidates during this election cycle, I guess the
best we can do is try to imagine which of the prevaricators says he/she intends
to lead the country in a direction we favor, and then hope the substance of
that articulated intention actually drives the candidate’s behavior…not the
self-aggrandizement or enrichment that seem to be significant drivers for both
candidates today.
