Embracing Uncertainty: The Wild Ride of Election 2024

1. The Neural Basis of Decision Making: Suppressing the Alternatives
2. Understanding Uncertainty
   1. Insights from Maggie Jackson on Embracing Uncertainty
   2. The Perils of Carryover Mode in Politics
3. Use Uncertainty to Explore Possibility
4. Image Attribution

Can we all agree that Election 2024 is a big fucking deal? The outcome will 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 enacting the GOP fascist authoritarian dystopia. On the global stage, it’s about whether we hand over weaker nations to predators like Russia, China, North Korea (they would if they could), or Iran or maintain the globalist capitalist liberal democratic order. Truth b told, neither option will prevent the climate collapse fueled by greed, short-sightedness, cognitive dissonance, and self-indulgence, but it will determine how fast it happens and how bad it gets. Argue about all of these presumptions in the comments, please.

The nature of the race has changed significantly since this post was written back in February 2024. Back then, it was the lesser-of-two-evils race: We were going to have a fucked up old white guy in the Oval, the only questions were how white, how old, and how fucked up? Now, we’re staring at the possibility of a Black-Asian WOMAN president and the inner racist misogynist of the average white American is going ape-shit crazy! How else do you explain Trump’s continued support? Who could possibly consider voting for him but a racist-misogynist?

How ever you slice and dice it, Election 2024 is fraught with uncertainty. The polling shows a too-close-to-call race. Previous presidential elections were just as close. We really don’t know what will happen, so we cling to whatever flotsam drifts past like drowning rats in a flood.

How do we explain Trump’s continuing support and his widespread acceptance as a viable candidate? He’s accepted by his base, by his fellow Republicans, and our failed, miserable, for-profit press. Then, there are the uNdEcIdEd VoTeRs or whatever name-of-the-moment the failed press is giving them. Why are they STILL undecided ten days out from the election?

There are two psychological findings that not only help us understand all of these groups of people, but also point us in the direction of getting them to choose democracy over fascism, sanity over lunacy, and status quo over radical change. Neurons Guide Decisions by Suppressing Alternatives from Neuroscience New explains to us how hard it is get people to change their minds once a decision has been made. And, Maggie Jackson on what we can learn from uncertainty on Vox helps us understand how we cope with uncertainty when making decisions.

There are several reasons that voters and the press are having difficulty quitting Trump and understanding them will help us weather the last few days of the election.

The Neural Basis of Decision Making: Suppressing the Alternatives

The principle that “thinking is hard, so we try to avoid it” has been supported by some recent research findings on the neurological basis of mammalian decision-making. We can use these findings to explain why Trump supporters have been so difficult to persuade to stop supporting him.

The long and the short of it is that once a decision has been made the neural circuits involved in making or considering alternatives are inhibited. In other words, to change your mind you first have to overcome a motherlode of neural suppression, just like to vote in Georgia, you have to overcome a ton of voter suppression.

Once someone has committed to supporting Trump, their brains, literally, cannot and will not consider other alternatives. The neurons in the brain along the circuits that have differing possibilities have been shut off. It’s nearly impossible to actually consider something else. It helps explain the stubborn support that Trump enjoys no matter how outrageous his statements, claims, and lies. He can be as fascist as Hitler and people will still support him. Probably because a number of them are also as fascist as Hitler, but also, because it is so damned hard to change your mind once you’ve committed to a group in this case racist, misogynistic fascism.

It not only explains MAGA and MAGA-leaning voter support for Trump, but also the bothsidesism of our for-profit access-based political press. The media has spent the better part of the past decade treating the Old FART as if he were some kind of common garden-variety run-of-the-mill politician. Trying to get them to do anything else is, literally, fighting their biological make up.

To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, “It ain’t their fault, they were born that way.” By now, support for Trump is practically hardwired into the brains of many Americans. Harris being such a newcomer doesn’t have that same advantage.

However, Election 2020 showed us that there are more Americans who don’t want Trump in office than there are those who do. Never-Trumpers are biologically built to be never Trumpers. Now, we just need to convince them to vote.

Understanding Uncertainty

Insights from Maggie Jackson on Embracing Uncertainty

In Election 2024, we find ourselves in a unique situation in human history. The election should be a no brainer. Harris should be running away with it. Where there should be no uncertainty, there is. How do we explain that?

According to award winning journalist and writer, Maggie Jackson, we’ve evolved to live in a world where prediction and predictability are paramount. We live in an object-permanent world. 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. The sun rises every morning in the east and sets every evening in the west. As we go through our days, we predict everything that is going to happen around us from traffic to co-workers to lunch options. From moment-to-moment and day-to-day, we know what is going to happen and what is going to be where.

We accomplish all this valuable and necessary predicting by evaluating the accuracy of our past predictions based on how closely they resemble what did happen. If an error occurs, we make adjustments.

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 who were whining about Biden and are antsy about Harris because wE dOn’T kNoW eNoUgH aBoUt HeR or are ewwing because she’s BLACK, ASIAN, and a WOMAN will pull their heads out of their asses, and vote Democrat in 2024.

One of the problems, though, was that things seemed so dire under Trump that it seemed like the worst would happen or at least something very very bad or at a minimum a big Himalayan sea change, but nothing did. Other than Biden having a bad debate and corporations taking the golden opportunity of our recovery from the #COVID19 pandemic to gouge us with greedflation and blame it on Biden. Other than that.

It’s like our dire predictions never came true, so we’re updating our prediction machinery to account for it. That’s part of the carryover mode phenomenon.

The Perils of Carryover Mode in Politics

Carryover mode is the psychological tendency to use past experience and knowledge even when it no longer applies. Hello!… Oh, the ’70’s called and they want their presidential horserace coverage back!

We still think Republicans are better at the economy when every Republican administration in the Twentieth Century with the exception of Ike has destroyed the economy. The Great Depression? Gerald Ford’s laughable Whip Inflation Now and Nixon’s price controls? The Reagan Recession? It’s the economy, stupid? The Great Recession? The debacle of Trump’s #COVID19 response?

We still think Republicans are better on immigration when they scuttled every bipartisan immigration bill considered in the past twenty or so years, right Marco Rubio and the Gang of Eight?

No where is the effect of carryover mode clearer than in the bothsidesism of the press. But, Republicans are still coasting on Reagan’s lies because of the neurological basis of decisions and our tendency to use the past to predict the future.

Use Uncertainty to Explore Possibility

Both candidates have made their plans for the US really clear. One is trying to address the problems of climate change and the rise of the fascists head on, the other wants to team up with the fascists and create an oligarchical dystopia. 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 we really can build an opportunity economy and create a more perfect union where everyone really is created equally. We can take Trump at his word, and really believe he is who he says he is, and that the GOP really does want a single-party, pseudo-democratic, minority-rule oligarchy. We just have to open our minds to the possibilities and vote accordingly.

Image Attribution

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