How do we win?
TV commercials are being produced, carefully worked around key themes and key words, speeches are given, and many people spend long hours calling down lists of names to win the GOTV contest.
We work for a candidate we think has the best chance of winning this election, and we work to pursue a particular policy goal we have.
But this is just a part of life and it goes on through life's decades, from one election to the next and the next beyond that into losing count. Are we doing this through naivete, through sheer momentum and not knowing what else to do? Is there such a thing as political wisdom that we might ultimately attain? Is there a purpose to all this beyond the obvious?
What brought this up as a Sunday meditation was a conversation at dinner last night. It was pointed out to me that something like a quarter of the population of New Mexico is on Medicare and essentially in the category of being "people on welfare."
The question that came next was about how the 3/4 of the state's two million people not in this condition can continue to pay taxes that support people who are not able to participate in the economy as workers or producers. What should be built? More prisons or more schools?
Whether one lives in New Mexico or anywhere else, this is the question at the heart of all our politics, really. In a poor state, where can people find work? Who or what really creates an expansion of the economy that can produce jobs?
If education is a key, in a state that hovers along near the bottom of all the states in the statistics, how can one address a deep and profound anti-education attitude that is not only pervasive, but historically embedded in the culture?
These are questions that at the heart of every election everywhere. One state has a bit more or a bit less of something in the makeup of the specific issues, but at the root of it all is the question that we really address, over and over and over.
That question is what kind of a civilization are we? What aspirations do we have?
Most everybody who has worked in political campaigns or who has done some sort of public policy advocacy with public officials has experienced the same frustration: the political system moves with aggravating slowness. The system's attention span is short and once it gets something, it might forget. Persistence is required that far exceeds the average person's patience. Many become cynical as a result.
The problem is really one of culture. How does one address culture? How can we gain some sort of consensus about the need to address issues when getting a consensus on what issues we should focus on is so difficult? We approach the political system because it seems the easier part of the culture to address, only to find that the cultural context matters.
Our naivete at the outset is partly due to a lack of there being a way to explain what is really going on, the way in which we need to protect our ego from hurt, and the way in which human beings are contradictory. What we can describe in words may only be a sort of proxy for what we really feel, some representation at the moment that is good enough but not really quite it.
This allows TV commercials to be produced and brochures to be written. But the effort we expend may not really address the true life concerns that ought to be addressed but which don't work in terms of soundbites.
We limit ourselves. We extend the bounds or our naivete, but we set those bounds at the point of some acceptable compromise. We set up fences to guard that perimeter.
We are, meanwhile, at a point that humans have never been before and it is not comfortable to really be open to what is there when we connect all the dots. We reinforce that fenceline and even electrify it.
When I graduated from high school, I was most concerned about my naivete and lack of exposure to what the world contained. The subsequent journey I went on actually became more or less, a perpetual endeavor. You never rid yourself of naivete, since it is the ego's perspective. We can only be one person at a time, although we can try to overcome this.
I think what it largely takes is a realization that this would be a good thing to do, to go outside of one's comfort zone, and to have a certain minimal empathy when encountering others. The trick is not to be satisfied that one has finished.
But, I think it is natural that, as we get older, to lose empathy and focus more on our own selfish concerns. So, the struggle to become more conscious becomes harder. I now meet a lot of people my own age who really alarm me because they seem more rigid than they ought to be, less flexible in terms of taking in new information and less willingness to address naivete. I worry that, having gained some semblance of control over my own mind, I might lose it as I approach a long held horizon.
That I suppose is what a Buddhist observer would point out, is the paradox of existence.
Paradoxically, this isn't about this year's election, except that it is.
The real issues that we deal with have taken hundreds of years to develop, perhaps going back thousands, even to the origins of mankind.
We are facing unprecedented circumstances which require our greatest and most evolutionary capacities. We have the ability to understand problems, to share analysis of the way they break down and to assemble new approaches through sharing this among minds. This is the essence of real communication and it is our most fundamental survival trait.
We need to operate this on a new level, and to get beyond the more specific things we are more comfortable with, to take down those fence lines that limit our outlooks.
The political system moves too slowly. Culture moves even more slowly. But we are not in a situation in which there are decades and centuries. Somehow, we need to speed up the entire system, not just the political system in the US, but the entire worldwide human overall culture.
It is hard to get one's mind around that when winning one local election can seem to be such an insurmountable challenge and when there seem to be so many people that prefer ignorance to enlightenment. It is true. A great many people seem quite stupid.
Are people who seem that way to us, really without intelligence or is it that we are like radios tuned to different wavelengths? If we could figure out the adjustment in frequency, perhaps we could share our minds. That of course is quite a trick. The ability to really communicate tends to be workable to the degree we see common purpose in being in tune.
We fall out of tune and become disenchanted with each other quite quickly and become instead, something between being put out and enemies. We quit trying. That tendency has destroyed a lot of potential progress that otherwise could have been made. It will continue to dog our efforts and it would be wise, if we could be wise, to overcome this.
Of course, this is a central human tendency and our most difficult issue.
Many, many people pass through airports without seeing what is going on there. Not one thing about airline travel could be possible without fantastically interdependent systems being in place, which have developed through the efforts of millions of people over many years.
Airports and airplanes are as good as any other places to reflect on the unprecedented nature of our civilization and its true issues. You can take this in without stopping along the way between gates.
The mathematics of navigation which make it possible to fly planes safely, depend on hundreds of years in which the problems associated with finding safe ways to get somewhere were solved in brilliant increments by people overcoming disastrous limitations. Many sailors drowned for lack of ability to avoid rocks before systems for developing charts came to be developed.
Many airplanes have crashed as we have worked on ways to improve a variety of conditions that being airborne have added to the old problems. When we arrive safely and on time it is because of all that went before that we do not have to be aware of.
Smaller government? What does that mean when regulations are there to continue the progress of centuries?
Airlines are a lot more visible than the banking system, which also is a worldwide in an unprecedented way and more complex than anyone would like to believe. But it isn't materially different as a system and it is certainly not beyond our understanding.
Perhaps we could ask the question, "What would we be like if we invested trillions?"
I think the problem we have is that the rarified atmosphere of the upper floor environments in the tall bank buildings in the major cities is a world apart. Another way in which humans have become estranged by their huge numbers and complex systems needed to serve those numbers. It is unprecedented.
The people there all have truly great educations from places like Harvard, The Sorbonne, Stanford, etc. and mostly only talk to other people who are world travelers who regularly go see plays on Broadway.
The world map is in front of them and they think in terms of it being a game board where trillions of dollars in investments can be placed.
How can most of us, who are doing good to maintain a small amount of savings and might have some money market funds identify with these people? How do we get a handle on the risks that they pose for the rest of us? How do we engage in a dialogue about what we all need?
Most of these people who work in the rarified upper floor atmospheres don't consult the people they might rub elbows with at a lunch counter or on a commuter bus. If there is a conversation it would avoid the subject and instead be about baseball. The issue there is protection of the ego, and maintaining the boundaries of naivete.
Your congressman, if he meets such people, is most likely very impressed. The lobbyists that spend a lot of money interacting with congress and with each state legislature are all great, wonderful, impressive people.
It isn't purely the money. There is a world there that speaks of the ultimate attainments of the university system, or the broader international culture, of ultimate human potential.
Every cap and gown seen at graduation time is a direct link to the origins of the modern university system, as a truly international institution supporting greater civilization, in the time at the end of the Middle or Dark Ages when the enlightenment began. Every cap and gown renews the promise of that time, of the greatness to which humans can rise.
That is what is beguiling about anyone who has managed to attain a great education. I think to fail to understand that is to fail to discern where to engage in the argument that must be had about the nature of our civilization and how to create a future that is equitable for all humans.
A lot is going to have to change. But as we assume a sense of depression over the prospects, we should reflect that we now live in a world that is different from the world we inhabited 50 years ago. Many people don't realize that, even if they say they do.
The main factor is really the population size. 50 years ago, the population reached 3 billion. We have been adding another billion about every decade.
As we continue that path, we are faced with stark realities that will be really difficult to deal with if we don't learn to figure out what to think about them.
I suspect that the Bush tax cuts represent a withdrawal from the rest of society behind a gated community fence, and that the proposed solution to the larger population and the problems associated is to retreat behind armed barriers and obscured remoteness. It is a fear of the larger mass of humanity, and the consequences of there being such a large number of people.
The better solution is to figure out how, as a whole species, we can deal with our economics and our resource distribution and with regulating our population.
I think those will be the challenges that we, as a civilization must master over the next 50 years and which will be the test of civilization itself.
Those issues aren't generally emphasized in speeches, soundbites or TV commercials, but they are the tectonic plates on which the ground we stand on rests.
What do we want for the next 50 years? If we want to see it, we need to begin to wrap our minds around ways to answer such questions.