Election 2024: The Roots of Our Uncertainty of the Outcome!

Can we all agree that Election 2024 is a big fucking deal and propel the world down one of two stupendously different futures? In the US it is the difference between continuing in our efforts to build a more perfect union and do we enact the GOP fascist authoritarian dystopia. In the world, it is do we hand over weaker nations to predators like Russia, China, North Korea (they would if they could), and Iran or do we maintain the globalist capitalist liberal democratic order? In truth neither choice is great and neither will prevent the collapse of the climate due to greed, short-sightedness, cognitive dissonance, and self-indulgence, just how fast it happens and how bad it gets. Argue about all of these presumptions in the comments, please.

However you slice and dice it, Election 2024 is fraught with uncertainty. We really don’t know what will happens and we keep cling on to whatever flotsam drifts past like common drowning rats in a common flood, only ain’t none of this common. It makes sense for us to take a closer look at how people relate to uncertainty and how we make decisions. Lucky for us I read Neurons Guide Decisions by Suppressing Alternatives on Neuroscience New and Maggie Jackson on what we can learn from uncertainty on Vox.

We’ll be analyzing Election 2024 the effects of neural inhibition on decision making, Jackson’s reporting on uncertainty, and two of Ye Olde Blogge’s foundational beliefs: (1) Thinking is hard, so we avoid it whenever possible. And, (2) people hate change, unless they face certain loss. We’ll mix it all together to see what we get.

The 2024 presidential election has been cast as the lesser of two evils, a damned if you do and damned if you don’t horserace by our miserable MSM profit-seeking political press. With our partisan polarization, it looks like we’re going to have some fucked up old white guy in the Oval no matter what we do, so the only question is how fucked up and how old, right? So, what’s there to analyze?

The Neural Basis of Decision Making: Suppressing the Alternatives

Thinking is hard, so we try to avoid has been supported by some recent research findings on how mammals make decisions and explains why changing your mind might could be so hard. The long and the short of it is that once a decision has been made the neural circuits involved in alternative decisions become inhibited. In other words, to change your mind you first have to overcome a motherlode of neural suppression. The nerves in the brain along those circuits have been shut off. It’s nearly impossible to do. It’s not so unbelievable since this is standard neural architecture used in numerous other situations. When you flex your bicep to move your arm, you inhibit your triceps from flexing. If your triceps flexed at the same time, your arm wouldn’t move, so ya kinda sorta gotsta, right? Once something evolves that works, it gets conserved, so it makes sense that the same neural design works in our decision making.

Thinking really is hard, so once we’ve made up our minds, it’s really hard to second guess it or revisit the decision. Applied to Election 2024, it means whoever can bake in their version of reality first into the most voter’s minds, wins! The problem is that we shoulda had this decision reified in 2020, right? No one should be taking a Trump candidacy seriously, but here we are.

Understanding Uncertainty

Insights from Maggie Jackson on Embracing Uncertainty

Where there should be no uncertainty, there is. Maggie Jackson reports that we’ve evolved to live in a world where prediction and predictability are paramount. We live in an object-permanent world, right? We don’t have to worry about our couch morphing into a terrifying cave bear like we might if we lived in some fantasy RPG video game, right? As we go through our days, we predict what is going to happen and what is going to be where and all of that. We evaluate the accuracy of our predictions based on how closely they resemble what does happen happily making adjustments as we go.

Problems occur with this system when the outcome of decisions gets too far removed from the decision. For example, a lot of us seem to have forgotten Election 2016 when a lot smarmy liberal types either “protest” voted for Jill Stein or sat out the election to punish Democrats for nominating the flawed-candidate HiLlArY cLiNtOn. We seem to have forgotten how our 2016 vote led directly to Dobbs and the 6 January insurrection. Hopefully, all those whining about Biden will take our refresher course, the Alabama Supremes decision that we should be following god’s law and embryos have more rights than their parents, pull their heads out of their asses, and vote Democrat in 2024.

The Perils of Carryover Mode in the Political Press

The political press seems to be having even more difficulty coping with uncertainty never seeming to have adapted to a world where the bloated narcissistic prevaricating orange Star Wars-bot, I2I4 with the feculent touch can exist. As a profession, they suffer from carryover mode in which past experience and knowledge is used even when it no longer applies. Hello!… Oh, the ’70’s called and they want their presidential horserace coverage back!

It’s like our press corps never got over Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal, Alzheimers, Southern Strategy, and oh shucks, folks, I’m just lying style of politics and what their role in our democracy is. The press couldn’t deal with the uncertainty of what the unraveling our democracy would bring to be able to update their ability to cover it, so when the laughable Clinton impeachment, W’s make-it-up-as-we-go-along, and McConnell’s et al.’s refusal to govern came along, they just stuck their thumbs up their asses and pretended that shit smelled like chocolate.

The Past as Prologue: The Influential Issues

Back to uncertainty and how we deal with it. We rely on past as prologue. We accept our beliefs about the world in the past as predicting our world of the future. Here are some things that we believed the past that are affecting the way we’re viewing the upcoming election:

Ageism as a Smear Tactic

AGEISM: Old people are gross old and useless who need to be put in an old folks home and left as someone else’s problem. That’s our collective belief. So, of course, the GOP and the MSM have smeared Biden as a doddering old incontinent codger who is unfit to be president. Somehow that negates the ample evidence of Trump’s mental incontinence and felonious disqualifications from office.

This ageist approach to Biden allows us to safely talk about a Harris presidency assured that Biden is bound to die in office. You know, the absolute certainty of having a BLACK-ASIAN WOMAN president and all of the terror that would involve.

The Fecal-Tinted Glasses of Trying to Hide Who You Are

HINDSIGHT BIAS: They say hindsight is 20/20, but it isn’t. In the case of Trump, it is putting on the shit-tinted glasses and looking back and seeing a chocolate world. The world, but most especially, the MSM political press seems to have forgotten what a corrupt train wreck the first time round was. I don’t know why they think round two wouldn’t be the 6 January insurrection on steroids.

FIG-LEAF RHETORIC: Gone are the days of dog whistles. That was so Ronald Reagan. Now, we have fig leaves to hide our embarrassing bits of beliefs and desires behind, like I’ll only be a dictator on day one! See? He’s no threat to our democracy. He’ll only do it for a day!

The Politics of the Tail Wagging the Dog

FOLLOW-THE-LEADER POLITICS: We don’t realize it, but we generally base our political beliefs and the policies we support on those of the politicians we like, except for some died-in-the-womb issues like gun control and abortion. You’da thunk anti-Russian sentiments woulda been baked into that cake, too, but you’da thunk wrong, so when Trump says Putin should be governing all of Europe, MAGA just nods their heads bobbling little heads and begs for more.

The problem with GOP politicians is that they’ve turned the FTLP politics into the tail sniffing the dog’s ass. Instead of relying on their constituents accepting their policies and stuff, like I dunno, “closing” the border and supporting Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, they hurry out in front of the mob as it bull rushes another china shop.

Use Uncertainty to Explore Possibility

All of the major players in Election 2024 have made the changes they want to the US really clear. The press is doing its level best to make it a politics-as-usual horserace election because profits are people too, my friend. The only real uncertainty here is what the squishy marshmallowy mehhy middle of the electorate will do during the election.

In spite of the closeness that the polls have the race being, other indicators suggest that most of the meh-voters will be voting Democratic thanks to Trump’s feculent touch: Dobbs, government grid lock, abortion bans, anti-LGBTQ librarian and teacher trials, improving economy, and foreign threats. The best the GOP can hope for is that the vast middle is just too exhausted and distracted by the latest season of Wednesday to vote and Democrats will be left pining for that perfect candidate and stay home to punish the party for not nominating one.

As Jackson points out, uncertainty is a marker for possibility, an opportunity to explore other avenues, and make changes like believing that 80 year olds do have something positive to offer society, our democracy can work if we commit to making it work, Trump really is who he says he is, and the GOP really do want a single-party, pseudo-democratic, minority-rule oligarchy. We just have to open our minds to the possibilities.

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, a political cartoon of an uncertain rat in a maze