October 29, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
We are a week away from the 2024 presidential election. At the beginning of the year I wrote that I anticipated this election would be fraught. Now that the election is upon us, I have new thoughts to share.
The first is just the level of anxious energy I feel. I personally feel a tremendous amount of anxious energy coming from me, but also notice and sense it in many around me. In my note yesterday I observed how I have struggled with mental chatter since completing my fast; the energy I feel around the election very much complicates my ability to calm the noise.
For me, one source of anxiety is just how close this election appears to be. Unlike any election I can remember, this election cycle has looked like a coin-flip for practically the duration of the campaign season. Whether one looks at polling information, handicappers like Nate Silver, or betting markets, all show this election appears to be very, very close. When the odds have deviated, they have remained closer to a coin flip than any substantial lead or reason to be confident in any sort of certainty of outcome. What I observe from this is just how much my ego hates the uncertainty. I really want to know what’s going to happen, and the circumstances’ refusal to bend to my desire frustrates me more than I would have anticipated. My takeaway: our egos loathe uncertainty.
My second source of anxiety is my attachment to the outcome. I’m not particularly attached to who wins; I trust that God’s plan is greater than this election. Even if I don’t understand how or why, I have some faith that God’s will is unfolding. I’m open to the possibility God will tilt this election one way or another, but I suspect God has bigger plans and considers this election something of a trifle. But while I’m less attached to who wins, I find myself particularly attached to what we learn from this election.
As you know by now, I grew up in small town East Texas. My hometown was part of the Bible Belt, where fundamentalist-evangelical Christianity dominated. Partly as a result, I was condemned to hell a lot, despite growing up Protestant (in my case, Presbyterian) myself. Every Sunday I attended church, Sunday school, and youth group. I participated in extracurricular activities ranging from church camps and other fellowship activities to charity work. I was baptized and confirmed. Apparently, though I never understood what nor why, my peers often found something lacking in my pedigree such that they intimated or implied that I would go to hell for not following the path they themselves were on.
Another thing I noticed: the fundamentalists in my hometown often had a tightly-held but shallow understanding of their faith. When I challenged their understanding of abortion or homosexuality, I generally (though certainly not always) found that they hadn’t thought through their positions and typically regurgitated lines they learned from their elders. When I declined to accept these declarations at face value, my interlocutors typically responded with emotional outbursts, often resorting to ad hominem attacks.
I always assumed the problem with the fundamentalists of my hometown was a lack of education (and, if I’m being honest, maybe even intelligence). My assumption was that in adulthood I could avoid these confrontations if only I found a more intelligent, educated community. Influenced by this assumption, I sought more knowledge and education, and communities of increasing intelligence and education. This search for education and intelligence yielded a graduate degree from MIT and residence in Silicon Valley, one of the most educated and intelligent communities on the planet.
I notice a strange phenomenon along the way. Boston and Bay Area California are as liberal as East Texas was conservative. The hyper-educated communities of my adulthood are as liable to believe convenient falsehoods and reject inconvenient truths as the relatively under-educated communities of my childhood. Coastal liberals have tightly-held but shallowly understood beliefs just like fundamentalists do, and coastal liberals are just as likely to resort to ad hominem attacks when those beliefs get challenged. Coastal liberals might not invoke hell, but their attempts to “cancel” those they wish to excommunicate effectively serve the same purpose as the evangelicals’ condemning one to hell. Finally, coastal liberals are just as tribal, just as emotional, and just as susceptible to being blinded to logic as fundamentalists.
Perhaps said most simply, coastal liberals are every bit as human as fundamentalists, a realization I must confess crushed me. Remember, my assumption was that the tribalism and shallow spirituality of East Texas was related to a lack of education (and maybe even intelligence). Watching the most educated and intelligent corners of the country (and globe) behave in the same manner prove that assumption wrong, at least to my satisfaction. While one can (and should) take this discovery optimistically (we are all equally flawed, and thus all equally redeemable), I personally experienced a bit of an existential crisis.
In the midst of this existential crisis I realized the degree to which I had taken education (and intelligence) as articles of faith. I believed implicitly that education and intelligence were good and to be pursued as a matter of priority. At some level, education and intelligence became false gods for me: things I believed in so implicitly, and so deeply, that I was not willing to entertain the possibility that they could be anything other than the keys to personal salvation. Even more humbling, I realized I had put education and intelligence where belief in a higher power typically belongs.
From here, I realized a few things. First I came to appreciate how deeply humans need to believe in something, to the degree we turn things into God in the absence of a practice of faith. Second, I came to understand and appreciate how “false gods” take root. Third, I began to appreciate how no human has the capacity to reason everything from first principles, and as a result inevitably takes some truths on faith (these might be the things we learn in school, in church, from our parents, or from our understanding of the scientific literature). Fourth, I realized how our most deeply adopted articles of faith tend to become intertwined with our personal identity; thus, when the things we accept implicitly become challenged, we feel as though our very identities are being attacked.
How do these discoveries tie back to the election? Well, I see my tribe (my hyper-educated, hyper-intelligent community) behaving increasingly tribally. Lacking an explicit faith tradition (backstory: in the 1980s and 1990s, evangelical Christians became increasingly vocal and political; as a result, many intelligent and educated folks left Christianity for fear of being associated with the often hypocritical bigots who increasingly became the public identity of Christianity), my tribe has I think increasingly worshiped at the altars of education and intelligence. We assume all things are knowable with enough education, enough data, and enough research. The 21st century, through accelerating technological progress, institutional breakdowns, and globalization backlash, is reminding humanity that our brains are not capable of holding, even collectively, the overwhelming magnitude of what is true or possible. For those of us who have invested in worshiping at the altar of education, current trends are terrifying.
Sadly, my tribe resists the truth that we do not and cannot know everything. Instead, we do what humans tend to do when our gods get challenged: attack the perceived threats. In this particular case, my tribe vilifies Republicans (particularly Donald Trump and his loyal base of supporters known as MAGA – an acronym for Make America Great Again – Republicans). We’d much rather cling to the belief that humanity could resume its quest to know and master everything, if only those blasted Republicans and their evil leader Donald Trump would get out of the way. On a deeper level, we all know the truth: Trump is a distraction from the bigger challenges. For me, the only question remaining is how long it will take those who loathe Trump to let go of their resistance and allow what is to simply be. From what I can tell, all human suffering is a result of resistance to what is.
And we are resisting. Twice people have attempted to kill Donald Trump. The news media regularly compares Trump to Hitler, attempting to wield the largest insult they can muster in labelling Trump a fascist. They claim Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and that he will prosecute his political enemies. But the facts barely paint the picture: I do not know how to convey with words the pain, suffering, and resistance I see amongst those who really, really want Donald Trump not to be president again.
What my tribesmen fail to recognize is the degree to which we are projecting our own shortcomings onto Donald Trump. We are the ones undermining democracy: through attempts to silence dissent on social media, capturing and wielding institutions ranging from academia to journalism to the federal bureaucracy, through our relentless attacks on the Supreme Court (with it’s 6-3 conservative majority). My tribe doesn’t want to see the degree to which they are ready to give up on the Constitution because, well, we think we know better now; we fail to see how our shallow hubris presents as much or more of a threat to American democracy than anything Trump or his followers might muster. My tribe desperately doesn’t want to acknowledge how refusing to enforce American immigration laws undermines the rule of law and, by extension, democracy itself. And my tribe really doesn’t want to acknowledge the painfully obvious truth that we, in fact, are the ones prosecuting our political enemies. My tribe continues to inflate Trump’s apparent evil precisely because we need bigger and bigger blinders to avoid seeing the truth that Donald Trump serves to hide us from our own shortcomings. My tribe, the progressive tribe, the intellectual tribe, cannot see the irony that we are the ones blocking progress.
And therein lies my attachment. I’m ready for my tribe to wake up, to see a little more clearly, or at least show some openness to the deeper truths that we seem so desperately stubborn to avoid.
I can almost hear my tribe responding “But what about…”. A pretty good litmus test for one’s resistance to what is, at least in this context, is their insistence of batting away inconvenient observations by pointing to allegedly worse behaviors from the other side. I’ll readily admit that I would be having a very different conversation if I still lived in East Texas and my community were still dominated by fundamentalist-evangelical Christians. But that’s not my community: today I live amongst the hyper-educated coastal progressives. I can only help those I encounter, and the pain I encounter most commonly are my tribesmen suffering from blind rage directed at Donald Trump.
The most common question I get from people navigating their spiritual journey who sense I might be farther along and able to offer some guidance is some version of the following: my spouse isn’t showing an interest in doing the spiritual work that I do…how do I deal with that? I’m very familiar with that line of thinking, because I struggled with it myself. My answer: don’t make your spouse an excuse to avoid doing the work you know you need to do. The idea that we need our spouses to do the work alongside us is a codependent delusion. No one can do our work but us, and we don’t need any one person’s support or permission. I convey this with compassion and grace, because I needed compassion and grace in order to recognize I was making excuses for doing the work by imagining that your mom was blocking my progress. I tell this story just to observe the parallel between the my progressive tribesmen and the codependent spouse: we don’t need the other (spouse or political tribe) to do our own work. In fact, in my experience, when we do our work, we create space that invites our spouse to do their work. Said differently, I’m quite confident that if my tribe began our healing process, we would invite those infernal Republicans to do the same.
A metaphor hit me the other day. God is coming, in the form of a storm. The purpose of the storm is to knock down and wash away some old and unstable artifacts, in order to make room for new life to grow. Those of us who have built castles meant to protect us from outside threats face a temptation to retreat into said castles, to lock the doors and windows, and retreat to the base of the castle. We might even choose to chain ourselves down in an effort to anchor ourselves to a perceived source of safety. But when the storm comes, knocks down the castle we’ve built, and floods the area, we are likely to find our castles offer poor protection. In fact, we risk trapping ourselves in a hell of our own creation.
The other option is less clear. Are we to build a boat? A plane? Learn how to fly like Superman? I’m not sure which metaphor to use. What is clear, at least to me, is that we are invited to develop the capacity to weather the storm (without the castle) lest we suffer unnecessarily when the storm arrives. The cost of navigating the storm will be releasing our attachments to false gods, a cost many will find too dear.
And so…what do I do now? What have I learned from this exercise? The truth is, I still don’t exactly know. I do sense that I’m invited to sit in the discomfort of uncertainty, both with the election result as well as whether my tribe will accept the invitation to release our attachments. I’m increasingly learning that I need to let go of my attachment to convincing those stuck in logic using logic. The deeper truths I’ve learned have come from…something else. Call it intuition, call it a connection to the universe, call it divine inspiration: I honestly don’t know how to describe how I know. But speaking from that place, where I learn things by way of metaphor (which likely means speaking in metaphor) is likely to yield better results than attempting to translate what I have learned into a language of logic.
I tend not to think as linearly as I did a year ago, and so find these posts challenging: I see connections everywhere, and want to explore those connections all at once. Today I’ll resist the temptation to go further, and just offer that I hope to return soon with other learnings that connect, but perhaps only loosely. In the meantime, I need to pick you guys up from afterschool so that we can go to Everett’s piano lesson before partaking in a birthday celebration…and Leland’s extracurricular math class. And so I say goodbye for now.
Until next time, I love you.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 