Intentions, Ideas, and Idiots

Part 1: Your pretending doesn’t mean they’re intending

That dreadful day draws ever closer. For some it will be a day of reckoning. For others still it will be a day of great hope and expectation.

For many of us it will be both our sanity restored and finally lost. A chance for a collective sigh. One part owing to our exhaustion, another part being a function of our doubts moving forward with the election’s results.

For a few more days, then, we’ll continue to hear the likes of:

An outsider.

An insider

A woman.

A misogynist.

A crook.

An imbecile.

A liar.

A racist.

A robot.

A bigot.

A predator.

An enabler.

Take your pick, there are plenty of adjectives being used to describe our forthcoming President-elect, whichever we may find ourselves stuck with for the next few years. Few of them are inaccurate, too.

No matter the case, as I’ve tried to stress throughout the last several months, we’ll still be stuck with one another. And it’s at that point that things get a bit scary for me.

As such, I’d like to attempt to tackle some big thoughts through a short series of posts. I get much less traffic on the heavier posts that I publish, whether measured by volume of words or the mass of their ideas. Breaking it up will hopefully help them to see a little bit more daylight.

To begin with, we’ll dive into intentions.

Intentions

The reason I mentioned above that I’m a bit anxious about how things play out after the election regardless of who actually wins is related to the fact that we have become so very adept at knowing the intentions of our opponents.

It’s quite odd to see so many Americans who can’t name their preferred candidate’s running mate, know who won the Civil War, or know if their candidate would say a thing or not, still possess such an incredible giftedness for understanding the inner motivations of those with whom they disagree.

Who knew we had so many savants running around?

If you aren’t yet picking up on my sarcasm then please add that fact to the above list of items that prove we’re not always the sharpest pencils in the drawer—a point proven still further by your most recent contribution.

In more honest moments (the sort we need much more of) we would likely conclude that there are many times that we aren’t entirely certain of our own intentions.

Why did you click the link to this post instead of watching the cute cat video posted beneath it? Why did I decide to write the above sentence the way I did instead of in some other syntactical format? Ditto that last one? Did you think much on it? Did I?

When you start peeling away the general flow and progression of our experiences you quickly become mired in brain-melting regressions of why and how.

Who and Why am I?

We live largely according to our subconscious. Currently, neuroscientists estimate that a whopping 95% of our cognitive happenings occur at the subconscious level. 1 Let that sink in…if your subconscious will allow it.

Put in other terms, our subconscious processes around 40 million bits of data per second. Our conscious processing, on the other hand, operates at about only 40 bits per second. 2 Feel free to laugh out loud. We’re talking a difference 10 million times over.

Put that into perspective. A rocket ship travels at about 17.5k miles per hour. 3 A snail, on the other hand, clocks in at about 0.03 mph. 4 The velocity disparity here is only about 580,000x different (worse, actually: 583k). And how many times can you fit 580,000 into 10,000,000?

Sixteen times.

That is how vastly different these two things are. Five hundred and eighty thousand times sixteen times over.

That is how slow your conscious level of brain activity and cognitive processing is in comparison to that of your subconscious’. It’s mind-bendingly different.

Seeing how we see

The habits we employ daily, the people we surround ourselves, the laws that govern our society, the cultural mores that we find ourselves swimming in by dint of the lottery of birth, and the biological predisposition(s) we inherent are all contributing factors as to how we see the world around us.

Oh ya, and the way that our subconscious subconsciously decides to see it— without asking our permission beforehand.

And seeing the world a certain way isn’t the same as seeing the world the way it actually exists. Someone who is colorblind can only tell you the way they see the sky, not how it actually is. The data they have to work with, or more accurately the data processing they have at their disposal, comes up short.

Thus, saying how you see a thing isn’t necessarily the same as describing the thing as it truly is. We tend to forget that our experiences and perceptions are nothing more than that: our own.

All of these things, most of which are entirely out of our control and all of which are somewhat out of our control, are what make you you and me me. Or, as Dr. Seuss so aptly put it:

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.

Pretending my intending

With all of this in mind let’s get back to my primary point today: how do you know your own intentions?

You usually don’t sort through them to begin with. When you do, you actually have to do just that: sort them out. Why? Because they are not readily obvious in most cases.

Yet so much of what passes as political dialogue is is based off of assuming an opponent’s deepest motivations. We rarely take into account the slippery idea of intentionality unless it happens to be in relation to saving our own skin (or, naturally, that of our team’s candidates; more on this in the next post).

We use intentions as our lifeline and our opponent’s noose.

Such an approach is immoral in all contexts. It’s irrational for the secularist and it foregoes the Golden Rule for the religious. This is quite simply no decent way to treat our fellow man, still less so our fellow Americans.

If we are to have any hope for our democratic process to be a beacon of political truth once more then we will have to find a way to remain intentional as it relates to our presumptions concerning the intentions of those with whom we disagree. Put another way, we must be very intentional to avoid jumping to conclusions concerning our opponent’s internal drivers.

In the next post we’ll look at how this translates to disagreements with political opponents by way of moving the ground war to the realm of ideas rather than improperly and unfairly based ad hominem style attacks.