It was truly ironic that on Memorial Day yesterday we honored those who in every generation who died fighting to save our democracy, yet, here we are today facing the possibility that we, the American people, will voluntarily give away our democracy to a man who in normal times we would never want as a member of our own family, must less President of the United States.
It is also possible that we will re-elect men and women who will help him tear down our form of government and way of life.
We know he betrayed his Oath of Office when he was President numerous times, and that his sycophant political supporters in Congress are doing so today.
And yet, it’s very possible even as impossible as it sounds that we will voluntarily betray the Constitution that has guided us for the last 236 years by putting them in charge.
It feels absurd to say that, yet it isn’t in the least. I don’t want to believe we might make such a mistake. I tell myself we are smarter than that, better than that.
And then I hear Michigan Democratic Representative Rashida Harbi Tlaib declare to a Muslim gathering that she and they together will express their disagreement with President Biden’s support of Israel by not voting for him in November.
I see college students blaming President Biden for Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians as if he is doing nothing behind the scenes to accomplish what they want.
It’s clear the unthinkable is very thinkable to them, and there just may be enough of them to defeat Joe Biden and bring the mother of all chaos on the nation.
In my last blog I cited several examples of similar kinds of bad decisions people have made throughout history and wondered out loud what they were thinking when they did.
A former academic colleague read that blog and suggested I might want to read Steven Novella’s book, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake.
It was a timely suggestion, and I am grateful for his recommendation and deeply appreciative of the fact that he took the time to make it.
The book explains in lay language how the brain functions, how the perceptions of all of us are biased, and how our memories are never exactly like the events we think we remember. Novella explains the numerous logical fallacies to which we – meaning all of us – are susceptible, most especially confirmation bias which is the most common.
I now have a better understanding of how the human brain works, how it helps us to be brilliant and ignorant, how we make sense and nonsense at the same time.
And yet…and yet, knowing this human condition is something all of us share whether we know it or not, admit it or not, has not, perhaps cannot, relieve me of my anxiety about what we may do to ourselves as a nation next fall.
I say that because I’ve spent a life-time in ministry and I’ve seen what good people can do to one another, to people they don’t know, how truly foolish and self-defeating they can act.
Spending a life-time in church leadership I know first-hand that even when some, even many, of us engage in what Novella calls “metacognition,” that is, “thinking about thinking” to monitor ourselves in order to minimize the delusions and fallacies our brains allow us to embrace, there are always those who don’t.
The question is, how many of them are there this year? How many of them are there who know what they are doing and don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing and don’t want to find out?
I’ve seen Christians speak and act in the most un-Christian ways, Christians who believe they know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as if they are God, when their brains are stuck in biased perceptions or logical fallacies that make it impossible for them to see truth at all.
When you’ve seen people who have shown the capacity to be loving, generous, and wise, at the same time embrace a message of prejudice, moralistic judgmentalism, and divisiveness, you know it is very possible for a nation to bring itself down.
But I don’t have to look back to my experience in church to see that possibility. I see it now in the fact that Donald Trump is the Republican candidate for President again is enough in itself.
There are so many reasons that is mind-boggling, none more telling than the fact in 2019 Trump was forced to pay more than $2 million in court-ordered damages to eight different charities for illegally misusing charitable funds at the Trump Foundation for political purposes, and even used some of that money to buy a portrait of himself.
How morally low does a person have to go and how dishonest do they have to be to be disqualified from being President of the United States?
That we even have to wait until November to find out is enough to make me worry. The polls should be showing that he has no support at all, none, but they don’t. Some have him leading the race. Truly incredible.
I hate the fact that this is a worry. I hate the fact that any of us has to spend one single minute thinking about Donald Trump.
But I know our brains allow us to refuse to see what we’re doing to ourselves. That is evident in the fact that his supporters insist he will never do all the non-democratic things he says he will do, and fail to see that they are admitting that the man they want as President is a liar who doesn’t mean what he says.
They are hopelessly delusional because they are being controlled by brain functions that won’t allow them to see the truth or recognize the fallacies in their own thinking.
But there is hope for the rest of us if we are willing to engage in “metacognition,” to take the time to think about what we’re thinking.”
If so, we have the chance to limit the influence of our own logical fallacies on the decisions we are making, and also better see the fallacies in the positions and arguments of others.
That said, though, metacognition requires being brutally honest with ourselves, something that takes a strong will. Self-awareness doesn’t come naturally. It is the result of a desire to be and do better than we otherwise would.
In light of what is happening in and to our nation, and the realization that our brains can trick us into believing things that are not true, seeing things that are not there, remembering things that didn’t happen, viewing other people critically and ourselves through rose-colored lenses, looking at what is good and calling it evil while seeing evil and calling it good, in light of all of that, the future of our nation does indeed hang in the balance.
We often worry that people are too caught up in their own lives to pay attention to the larger issues we are facing as a country.
That may be true, but I suggest the more pressing worry – and need – is whether or not we are paying attention to ourselves enough to think about what we are thinking.
If we aren’t, we may sooner rather than later find ourselves in a country where what we think about anything won’t matter at all.
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