What “A Bug’s Life” Can Teach Us About Fear-based Voting
On Election Tuesday, CNN released an exit poll that revealed that 60% of voters polled did not actually like either major party candidate. Let’s be totally arbitrary and say that half of the people who responded that they didn’t like either candidate voted for Trump, and the other half for Hillary, and that half of the participants who said they were enthusiastic about their choice voted for Trump and half for Hillary (leaving third parties and write-ins out of it).
Half of 60% = 30% voted for Trump even though they didn’t like him
Half of 40% = 20% voted for Trump and actually liked him.
That means that (if we stick to our completely arbitrary half and half theory), about 20% got a President they actually wanted, and about 80% got a President that they didn’t actually want. Check my math here:
30% voted Trump and didn’t like him
30% voted for Hillary because they were even more scared of Trump
20% actually liked Hillary and didn’t like Trump
Total: 80%
Obviously, there is a broad spectrum of how much each voter disliked the winner, but the fact of the matter is that we gave ourselves something that most of us — in fact a huge majority of us — didn’t actually want. We would have preferred someone else on the ballot. Someone who “didn’t have a chance”. But we didn’t vote for them. We voted for the lesser of two evils.
It wasn’t the government’s fault, it wasn’t the “establishment’s” fault, or corrupt politicians’ fault: it was 100% our own fault.
In “A Bug’s Life”, the movie begins by showing us a situation where one very large group (the ants) is spending their precious time and resources to feed a smaller, but individually more powerful group (the grasshoppers). Flick, the movie’s protagonist, is an innovator who is always trying to think of new, better ways to do things, but he is shut down by a culture where free thought and individuality are not encouraged. In this culture of “we’ve always done things this way”, the ants, year after year after year, keep gathering food for the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers come once a year — “they come, they eat, they leave”, as the Queen Ant says — and in return for this favor from the ants, the grasshoppers are gracious enough to not squish them. From the ants’ perspective, spending most of their lives working to gather food that they won’t eat stinks, but it’s definitely better than being squished.
It never occurs to the ants to stand up to the grasshoppers. But it does occur to the grasshoppers. In fact, it’s what the head grasshopper (named — in one of Pixar’s less original moments — “Hopper”) fears the most. Hopper knows that his power is an illusion that he has to keep up through fear and intimidation. He knows that even though he or any one of the grasshoppers could keep one or two or even five or six ants in line, if the ants ever realized the power of their numbers, the game would be over.
The status quo is finally upset by a catastrophe caused by Flick, who clumsily upsets the “offering” to the grasshoppers, leaving the ants with nothing to give them when they come. To the ants, it seems like a disaster, but it is actually the catalyst that eventually results in them being free of the grasshoppers forever.
The stakes become higher when Hopper demands that the ants gather twice as much food as usual and have it ready before the last leaf falls. If the ants give all their food to the grasshoppers, they won’t survive the winter themselves.
For most of the rest of the movie, Flick and the rest of the ants try a variety of tactics to save themselves from disaster: they try to gather enough food. They try hiring a group of what they think are “warrior bugs” to fight the grasshoppers on their behalf. They build a giant bird to scare Hopper away. But the whole time they overlook the obvious: they are what Hopper fears the most.
The ants allow fear and panic to blind them to their own power. They keep accepting a way of life that all of them hate, because they keep telling each other that there’s no other way to survive.
I heard countless people over the last several months say that they wanted to vote for someone besides the two major party candidates, but that we have to live in reality: the two major parties are the only choices. We all keep telling ourselves that it can’t be done. We can’t keep the parties accountable. We can’t keep our government accountable. This is the way it is. This is the way it’s always been. We are so afraid of the bogey-man of what could happen, that we won’t reach out for something better, even though most of us want it.
We are a Constitutional Republic. We are the last line of defense in the checks and balances of our government. We decide what our reality is going to be. We are many. And we are more powerful than we know.
