No, I'm not being snarky. It is a serious question. I am a person who has studied the human mind since college and have written much about it. Our new book is called Global Insanity so you might get a clue of what I think I have learned from that. A week ago most of you would have been less inclined to take Jim Coffman, my coauthor, and I seriously. Now you get some really good evidence about a huge number of your fellow citizens. They are not well! At least not by the standards of rationality I have learned. They continue to post their delusions and are often doubling down on them. This is not a light matter. Before the election I was ready to become a hermit rather than go about my daily business among people who collectively buy into that massive delusion. It is not over. They go on and on throwing out these incredible snapshots of total loss of touch with reality. Oh yes and so many of them have guns! The maps of the country are instructive because they clearly show that the Civil War never really ended. Yet look at Ohio, for example. Like Virginia, where I now live, they are being governed by insane people! So read on below for this is not going to go away but we did get some clues.
First of all, I think we can safely say that sticking to our concept of truth and to the values that arise from that concept we put enough people on the line so that they could no longer play like it was merely a "difference of opinion". Fortunately (really unfortunate) there was help. So many of the mentally sick "leaders" for one reason or another felt free to express their idiotic world view and misconceptions about science, women, and other things that the thing became a clear ugly mass of garbage that had its effect on the others. The voters showed that.
That is something to consider. I heard these things and thought about how fascism must have come to power In Europe just before my birth in 1936. The things that were preached then were as ugly as much of what we had now. Yet somehow our prople were able to sort it out. I can not shrug this away as totally due to Romney's person. He is far from charismatic. No I think human kind has evolved socially since then. I do think our country's myths do have power if we can bring them into people's consciousness in the correct way. I do think hate has the seeds of its own destruction built into it but that it also can be used to give downtrodden people a scapegoat to focus on instead of those who keep them down.
Complex systems evolve and emerge. Their whole is far more than the sum of their parts and can not be understood buy merely examining the parts. Here is my punch line based on that. The President seems to know what I am saying. He has expressed part of it more than once and, in fact, I would say it is essentially his theme. The little efforts here there and everywhere were a almost unnoticeable wedge into the old republican and other right wing memes and frames. We did it here and on facebook and on the phone and face to face and in other places. It all came together for enough people that we overcame the lunacy.
So to answer my own question in the title, I think the human mind is evolving. I think as it evolves it is changing the context for that evolution. Like climate change the feedback here makes the change nonlinear and accelerating. Let's assume that is true and ride this wave as far as we are able. Our kids and future generations will look back to this moment and thank us. And I thank us!