By

Bill Cottringer

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” ~Ernest Benn.

         Well, that is a few good surface reasons why to believe the title of the article! But let us delve into this on a little deeper level.  We currently have the worst political divide in this country since the civil war. Everybody is partially responsible for buying into the problem and aggravating it further. We are all taking our own perspectives on this matter a little to0 seriously for our own good

     This is especially so with the candidates and their parties—for their collective, definitive ‘do or die, my way is the only way’ campaigns. All to widen the divide and get your vote to keep it that way by proving they represent the absolute truth and salvation, while  the other side is absolute fiction and doom. There is no wiggle room with such double avoidance dogma, as an all or nothing, win-lose mentality shield. Too much negativity, vulgarity and fear mongering and not enough humility, cooperation and compromise.

         The truth is very elusive, always changing and evolving, according to the time and place it is captured, along with the vast conscious and unconscious influences from the mindset of the capturer.  The paramount fact of science is that there is no objective quality in nature that is independent of the observer. Both Plato and Aristotle were at least partially right.

    Unfortunately, the brain knows this truth process very well. However, our thoughts and feelings about it are out of sync with the brain. Instead, they have an insatiable taste for finding and knowing the truth and craving the sense of well-being that comes with the confidence that we have the truth that others may not have. The more certain we talk ourselves into being about this, the more the sense of well-being grows.

    Let me ask what may seem as a rather odd question to substantiate my point about the truth being somewhat elusive and ever-changing. How many linear feet does the entire coast around England total up to? Now before you answer this odd question, stop to think about when and how you are going to measure this distance.

      Next comes the problem with the ever-changing coastline from tide fluctuations and the coastline eroding or expanding from the waves according to how much and in what direction the wind is blowing, plus other weather anomalies. How much would just one inch forward or backward movement of the actual coastline, contribute to the total linear footage? Several miles? There is no certain answer to the question, other than “it depends.”

    I tend to think life is pretty good at regulating itself without our puny interventions, which usually just make matters worse. Maybe the harshness of the current divide is becoming so widely apparent and painful for the purpose of showing the ridiculousness of all this nonsense--of mandating absoluteness of the personal truths we discover and claiming sole ownership over. Now given the plethora of all the misinformation from the Internet and media, the truth has become virtually unknowable. So why in the world are we so adamant and stubborn with our chosen perspectives as to what is true and what is false and which side we line up on to defend to the death or maiming?

    The answer is fairly easy, but so full of unknowns that several books couldn’t clarify things, let alone a single article. But at any rate here is the simple answer for consideration. We have a very strong drive to know and own the truth even though our brains are not hard-wired to be successful in this quest. So, we end up tricking the brain into being satisfied enough that we are confident enough to be sure that what we think we know to be true , is so. We then have no reason to question this belief. It becomes sacred.

     This then becomes all we need for the brain to give us the needed chemical hit to spread a sense of well-being that becomes an impenetrable shield for considering any alternative that someone else may want to try and argue us into believing. And of course, the more we defend our belief as true , the more resistant it becomes to unbelieving, even despite compelling evidence to the contrary. That is as bad as saying politics are honest and government is efficient.

    Now the divide in this coming election will be compounded by the outcome, because whoever wins will say the vote count was accurate and that is why they won and whoever loses will claim it wasn’t and that is why they lost. The problem here is that there are too many things that would make a totally accurate vote count virtually impossible.

     So, the next best thing is to rely on reasonable precautionary measures to remove a high chance of false ballots being counted in the wrong direction or even counted at all. Our minds and hearts will have to settle on the best truth we can arrive at, but that is easier said than done. This is because emotional beliefs don’t take too well to being challenged any more than rational ones like being out-rationalized.

    There is only one way out of this impasse and that is to realize that none of us have the real truth, just our own personal version of it to fit with others to eventually get a bigger picture.. Then the challenge of understanding this reality sets in—understanding that our busy minds are full of things that we are convinced are true , without ever verifying them. The truth be known, most of what we think we know is not necessarily so. Big wake-up call and reality check.

     Giving up political beliefs is no different than pushing the delete button on any other type of belief. All it takes is the realization that we don’t really need any belief to feel secure. In fact, it is only when you shed these needless security blankets, that you start to feel more secure without them than you do with them. That experience is very enlightening and refreshing, but unfounded fears must be overcome first. What will happen if I am wrong? Nothing any different that if you are right.

     I seem to have backed myself into an intellectual corner here, so let me change strategies. There is absolutely no sensible reason or any benefit in arguing things like politics, because nothing changes. We’ve seen that with all the millions spent in political advertising. People believe this way or that way and they won’t change when the choice is an either-or one, putting us between a rock and a hard place.

     A room full of doom and gloom, at least until the wisdom of insecurity becomes more popular in people’s hearts to become the truth that sets us free.  There is the truth that we may know someday, but the truth we think we know is just that—what we think we know. The two shouldn’t be mixed up or trouble is brewing. We don’t need any more trouble, just solutions and a whole lot of humility and cooperation.

“Those who think they know are amazed. Those who know they know are amazing.” ~Alan Watts.