Vote
How death can help you make up your mind
Dear Death,
While I doubt you are political, can you give me any guidance about who to vote for in the upcoming election?
I mean, I think I know who I’m voting for but I’m still curious what you think. How is one to decide on firm principles rather than trivial senses of identity and tribal allegiance?
And long term, how do we create a politics that isn’t so polarized?
Best,
Democracy Fan, Just Less So Right Now
Dear Democracy Fan,
Politics is a business of life. You have a short time under the sun and you must decide what you will do with it. And in a democracy you get a vote in what kind of world it will be.
Death and disease will always be part of this world but with your vote you get to influence what kind of healthcare options you will have and how affordable it will be. You can’t stop that people around the world will migrate because of environmental, economic and political catastrophes but you do get a say in the laws of how you welcome people to your nation, keep them out or in what circumstances you do each. You cannot stop that some men will become violent, but you do get a say in whether he will have easy access to a knife or an assault rifle. And in this world, some people will work harder than others (or start life wealthier than others) and you get a say in how much wealth you will let that person amass and just how poor everyone else will be.
In short, death and disease are real. Calamities of all kinds will follow human beings and a sane politics will seek to make life as good as possible for all citizens while they get to be here and not add to the suffering that’s inevitable because I exist and will take everyone in the end.
Here are three principles I would think about when deciding how to vote in this election and every election to come.
Get out of Anger. Get out of Fear.
People will try and influence your vote through making all kinds of arguments and psychological tactics. However, there are two states of mind that will make any human being 1,000 times easier to manipulate. Those two states are anger and fear. If you are hearing a political argument, and find yourself becoming fearful or angry, it’s likely someone is trying to manipulate you.
So before doing anything else, get out of anger and fear so you will actually be able to think for yourself about your values and make your own decisions. Think of the world 300 years from now when everyone who is alive today is dead. All the petty squabbles matter little. What kind of world did you want to live in? Get out of anger and fear and you will have a much better chance of making up your own mind.
Insist upon the real world
To solve any problem, you have to face it honestly. Climate change is real for example. It’s been proven by science a thousand times over.
If you care about having fewer climate catastrophes, don’t expect any solution to come from the people who deny the basic facts.
Guns are the #1 cause of death of children in America. If you care about protecting children, that is the number one issue to talk about. Someone pretending something else is the main problem isn’t living in the world as it is today.
Whether you prefer solutions proposed by one side or another is up to you. What issues you care about most is also up to you. However, don’t trust the people who aren’t living in the real world. People solving pretend problems solve nothing.
Talk to your neighbors and listen
Politics is the art of the possible. Local elections matter to your lives often as much as national ones. You will have to reach out and talk to your neighbors to get a sense of where people are and what’s possible to achieve that you care about.
If you think of yourself as a consumer with one vote to spend, you will play only a small role in solving the common problems you face in your communities. However, if you start talking to people, building coalitions, and encouraging people to get out of anger and fear, you’d be surprised what’s possible.
One thing that is for sure true is that the world needs more clear headed people on the left and the right talking to each other and facing the real problems all people face together.
After all, death is real. Disease is real. You have a lot of problems without making more for yourself.
Sincerely,
Death
P.S. Death needs more questions! Send yours to AskDeath@WeCroak.com
Death is woke then....
Who knew?
Climate change? Really?
"It’s been proven by science a thousand times over.".
Um. Nope.
It's been bribed, cherry picked and coerced a thousand times over though.
Most gun crime happens in gun control areas and the criminals who commit them, unsurprisingly don't follow any laws.
Good luck with this "blog(?)," Hansa.
Too many of us seem not to do well with mortality.
But why should anyone expect us to do well with mortality? We're humans. As such, I subscribe to the findings and conclusions of Daniel Kahneman, co-author of "Thinking Fast and Slow." Essentially whatever we've evolved to be capable of, reason and awareness are not generally two of our long suits. We've only been out of the forests and jungles for 15,000 of our currently estimated 300,000 years as a species. We evolved to find food, to try to not become food, or to lose our lives competing for food or other limited resources, and to procreate. Our brain plasticity gives us the ability to go somewhat further, but relatively few of us seem to make good use of plasticity. The Greeks invented the first alphabet-based language about 6,000 years ago. Yet after 6,000 years, reading and writing remain one of our most common technological hurdles.
If we're going to try to live in some kind of democracy, we're going to have to acknowledge how primitive forces still guide most of us. In fact, paradoxically or not, it may be that democracy was easier for hunter-gatherer and forager tribes, even up through and including the indigenous peoples Europeans encountered when they arrived in numbers on the American continents, than it is for us more "advanced" humans. If you haven't yet, I recommend you take a look at David Graber's and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything." I'm still trying to get through it. But for the next now less than 2 months, Death has advised me to do everything I can to most effectively and efficiently try to get the Harris/Walz ticket elected in the U.S. presidential contest, since we're not simply choosing between two candidates, two tickets. The November 5 election is in fact a referendom for U.S. citizens: Do we want to continue to work our way toward a real democracy? Or, do we want to abandon our democratic experiment, and choose a dictatorship. The thing about this choice is, one cannot most from both to the opposite with equal ease. It's always easy to abandon a democracy. All one has to do is NOTHING. It's much more difficult, if not impossible, to move from a dictatorship to a democracy. On that basis alone, I think people should prefer to keep trying to make democracy work. But at present, about 40% of the electorate, Trump's least shakeable base, believes that the only way they get their agenda attended to is thorugh dictatorship. And they may indeed be correct. BUt I don't think the MAGA Republican rank and file has given much thought to the conseqeunces most likely to obtain should they be granted their will. I don't find it too difficult to make a case that the MAGA Republicans will be at least as worse off as most of the rest of us. The people they choose to blame for their circumstances have little or nothing to do with their circumstances. I'd assert, through sins of commission or sins of omission, we're all pretty guilty of taking democracy for granted for too long. Now, we're all reaping the consequences of that neglect. Whatever happens on November 5th (And that won't be the end of it. The MAGA Republicans are committed to stealing this election. They will not stop simply because, say, Harris/Walz might win. They believe the only acceptable outcome is a Trump/Vance victory. And Trump and the MAGA majortiy Supreme Court Justices have all wiped their asses with the U.S. Constitution. Trump and the MAGA majority Supreme COurt Justices have decieded that they are all not only above and beyond the law; They ARE THE LAW.).