Helping Each Other Think

Approximately eight years ago, I was asked by anxious friends how to think about the 2016 win of the U.S. presidential election by Donald Trump. The best I could come up with at the time was “Don’t let it spoil your day”.

Now the world is once again on the eve of a U.S. presidential drama. My response this time is “How dare you do this again to the world! You have placed millions of people in a state of acute anxiety because they believe, rightly and wrongly, that the outcome of November 5th’s choices could be apocalyptic to the ordered flow of their lives.”

Only time will tell which direction that country will go, and I am grateful as a Canadian to have at least a mental buffer from American events with the help of the albeit fantasy of a national border between us and no direct jurisdiction over me by the American government.

What I resent is the setup of apocalyptic choices. I have lived with such choices for most of my 76 years, first as a post-war baby boomer who was taught as a child how to hide under a desk in a ridiculous attempt to mitigate the possible effect of an all out nuclear war. I spent endless hours as a child reading about and contemplating how to navigate life in a fallout shelter as the world collapses around us. As a teenager and young college student I became knowledgeable about the modification of the world’s climate and the depletion of species and accumulating global pollution. As a young adult and environmental consultant I worked on the insidious effect of low-level chemical pollutant exposures on people’s health, including my own. And I watched an endless see-saw between politicians who would acknowledge impending problems and pledge to work on them, and politicians who would deny the reality so obvious in front of them and con others into inaction in the face of these challenges.

So here we go again. On one side, which I favour, the nominees are offering to work diligently on a variety of real and unfortunately now-urgent problems, and to consult everyone in the process, no matter how messy those arguments may become. On the other side, which I resist, a practiced con artist and former President promises to ignore burning realities and to convert an albeit imperfect democratic country into a dictatorship in which many circumstances may be designed by a small number of very conservative individuals to impose their poorly reasoned views on millions of other people, in a manner similar to religious organizations.

What creates the world’s anxiety, while we witness this bizarre process, is that both sides are arguing against the apocalyptic consequences of the other. The con artist has convinced his following that continuation of the existing system and all its imperfections will be so untenable that their world will fall apart. (While I will be the first to itemize the imperfections of the U.S. system, it has not proven to be on the verge of falling into immediate disaster, though it could be argued that many people within it are getting a much poorer deal than others.) The other side has projected the practices and motives of the con artist on all our screens in such vivid detail, and the con artist has so amplified this picture with visions of explicit revenge against those who oppose him, that we are left wondering equivalently whether our lives or freedoms will be at immediate risk if the con takes power.

Throughout my life my hopes have been yanked back and forth as the power struggles continue between those who want to face reality and those who want to deny it. The bottom line of all of this is that we need much better thinking without interruption. Most of the problems of the world have arisen because of poor human thinking. They will need good thinking to address them, though some have argued that if humans would just step aside, nature would do the thinking and things could return to balance without us.

While it often takes very courageous individuals acting alone to put forth new ideas that can penetrate the fog of some of the poor thinking of the past, I think it is more generally true that some of our best thinking arises from a slow and deliberate consideration by many people of each other’s viewpoints and verified facts. Simply said, we think better by helping each other think. We think better by being proactive than reactive, though we will probably never run out of serious problems that have become so severe that reactivity feels like the only option left.

I am hoping that when the dust settles this week the world can feel that it is back within reach of creating dialogue where neither side is feeling that their existence is being threatened by the other. Back to a world where change is necessary but proceeds slowly enough to think it through and bring everyone along. Back to a world where human rights proceed in the right direction. And to a world where our physical environment and our individual and collective chance of survival become as stable as actual reality will allow.

So no matter what happens tomorrow, my current response must be “Just keep thinking; we will figure it out!” But let’s try doing that together, rather than from opposite sides.