For some reason it's usually easier to draw Gigantic Cosmic Conclusions from big events rather than small ones. It doesn't have to be that way, though "gigantic" and "big" do have an affinity with each other.
Why does death or a disaster move us to ponder the meaning of it all more readily than loading the dishwasher does? If there are grand principles underlying our human experience of reality, why can't we recognize them in the smallest of events as well as the biggest of events?
Don't know.
Maybe because rare big events grab our attention while everyday small events are so familiar, we pass them by. Regardless, my attention certainly was grabbed by the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump that culminated in Trump's victory last Tuesday.
So here's some Gigantic Cosmic Conclusions that I've drawn from the election. They're rather obvious, which argues for their veracity.
Determinism rules, while unpredictability takes center stage. Prior to the election, people had all kinds of ideas about what would happen. Now there's only one defensible idea: Trump won. There are reasons why this occurred. No one really knows what they are, though theories abound.
Looking forward, nobody was able to predict in any detail the outcome of the election. Looking backward, after the results were known, lots of people are (retrospective) experts in why Harris lost to Trump.
So life is uncertain until it isn't. The movement of inanimate entities, like planets orbiting the Sun, can be predicted with great accuracy. How American voters will cast their ballots can be predicted, but not with any sort of guaranteed accuracy.
Thus don't believe anyone who claims to know for sure what will happen next in American politics. The only certainty is that nothing is absolutely certain. When I started loading the dishwasher a little while ago I expected that I'd be able to finish that task.
However, I could have been distracted by a phone call, then forgot to resume what I was doing. Or I could have suffered a heart attack prior to the last glass being placed on the top rack. Life is more predictable than a roulette wheel, but less predictable than an eclipse.
Ups and downs, actions and reactions, are a basic feature of reality. Constancy isn't part of the cosmic equation. Nothing remains precisely the same for very long. Whether it be the tiniest subatomic phenomenon, the hugest happening in the universe, or everything in between, including presidential elections, change is ubiquitous.
Consider the results of presidential elections in my lifetime.
In 1948 a Democrat, Truman, was elected. In 1952 and 1956 a Republican, Eisenhower, was elected. In 1960 a Democrat, Kennedy, was elected. In 1964 a Democrat, Johnson, was elected. In 1968 and 1972 a Republican, Nixon, was elected. In 1976 a Democrat, Carter, was elected. In 1980 and 1984 a Republican, Reagan, was elected. In 1988, a Republican, George H.W. Bush, was elected. In 1992 and 1996, a Democrat, Clinton, was elected. In 2ooo and 2004, a Republican, George W. Bush, was elected. In 2008 and 2012 a Democrat, Obama, was elected. In 2016 a Republican, Trump, was elected. In 2020 a Democrat, Biden, was elected. In 2024 a Republican, Trump, was elected.
American voters bounce back and forth between choosing a Democrat or Republican for president. In the past 76 years, the longest stretch of single party rule was 12 years, 1980-92, when Reagan and the first Bush held the White House as Republicans. And in those 76 years, a Democrat was in the White House for 36 years and a Republican for 40 years.
Yin and yang. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Whatever you want to call it, transformations from one state of affairs to another are the normal condition in not only politics, but everything. So if someone isn't happy with how things are now, just wait. They'll change. Eventually. Patience may be required.
(This is the basis of a post I wrote for one of my other blogs, "Fellow Trump opponents, here's what gives me hope.")
We humans don't see reality as it is, but how it appears to us. While I'm a big fan of "objective reality," those words deserve the quotation marks because they're an aspiration, not how things actually are.
This truth is on plain display on a presidential election night, when a split screen will show members of one political party cheering wildly as results favorable to their candidate are announced, while at the same time members of the other political party are dejected at the news that their candidate isn't faring well.
Same numbers. Same results. Very different reactions. This is the mystery, and the glory, of human subjectivity. Even if a group of people are privy to the same information, their personal desires, experiences, wishes, and all that will typically cause them to disagree about what the information means.
I watched Kamala Harris's speeches with admiration, agreeing with almost everything she said. I watched Donald Trump's speeches with disgust, disagreeing with almost everything he said. Others had the opposite reaction, loving Trump and hating Harris.
Each of us is locked into our own way of perceiving reality. Science is a wonderful way that humanity uses to try to break out of that subjective prison, using a variety of methods to arrive at statements about reality that can be agreed upon by most scientists in a particular field.
But even in science, disagreements arise about the same phenomena, the same results, the same observations. Raw sensory data always is interpreted by the human brain. We never see things as they are in themselves, only as our brains lead us to see them.
While diversity of opinions can be annoying when we want other people to agree with us, this is an unavoidable feature of human cognition. And really, who would want it to be any other way? If everybody was just like us, life would be unbelievably boring, a hall of mirrors where our own reflection is the only thing we perceive.
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