Part of my morning ritual now includes watching the latest Youtube video that Thomas Wictor posted overnight. This morning's drop,contains no particular details or analysis about what is going on at the moment. Instead Wictor takes to task those on our side who are nattering in fear.
Warning: this video includes some extremely graphic content (starting at around 16:30 and up to 19:30), regarding his first-hand experience in Venezuela with what happens to a human head when shot at close range by a high-caliber rifle round. I like how Wictor pronouncing the name of that country old school, so that it rhymes with "Cinderella." Wictor has alluded to this incident many times on Twitter, in some of his many long Tweet threads that have no been scrubbed from the Internet with the banning of his account. But this is the first long-form description of this that I recall. It is one of the reasons I'm glad he has been forced to retreat toYoutube. It is a form more suited to him, overall.
"You have no business being this afraid. [The Democrats are] a party of drunk weirdos, of people who do really bad things to defenseless victims, and who are delusional. They are acting as if it's a done deal, as if Trump has no ability to discover what they did. They are depending on the press to cover for them. None of them know how the government works. They think the press is going to tell Trump to leave, and he gonna go, uh, ok....What are the odds he made no preparation?"
Wictor, as he describes himself, is motivated more by rage. If there is a critique one can make of him, it's that he gets too invested in battling the trolls and haters. He diatribe about people in fear doesn't apply to most of the people I am seeing on Twitter, where morale is very high on our side. It certainly doesn't apply, it would seem, to Trump and the people around him.
But even I succumb to the fear at moments. I am not as natural calm and cool and Wictor's father, a fellow Iowan, in the car in Venezuela. I need this morning pep talks to remind myself of the situation on the ground, the reality.
The fear, I know, comes from my imagination. A couple years back when I was doing my self-designed virtual college degree from academic courses on Youtube (majoring in Comp Sci at MIT), one of my "electives" I chose was one of Jordan Peterson's psychology courses from the University of Toronto, called "Maps of Meaning". He had recorded the videos in a crude way. Watching them felt like sitting up front in his class in the small lecture room. Having spent enough years in college classrooms, my imagination can make it very real, as if I really did take the course.
Peterson is very eclectic in his style of teaching. My favorite lectures were his ones on neurology, where he speaks of how the brain is wired to cope with the unknown. He described what science knows about what happens to our brain when the surety of our surroundings in disturbed. In normal circumstances we have an entire projection of what is "out there," both in a spacial sense and a temporal sense. If something happens which disturbs our knowledge on the proximate level (i.e. uncertainty about what is close by in time or space), then this entire knowledge chain can collapse at one, leaving us naked in our minds about our position in the world.
As a defense mechanism, meant for biological survival, we go into fight or flight mode. We want to build back our knowledge outward in space and time as quickly as possible. If you are literally in the dark, tand you can't "turn on the lights," hen you can't do this.
When I heard him talk about this, I immediately recognized how this process had operated in certain specific times in my life, when sudden incidents had thrown my entire picture of the future into doubt. My immediate reaction was usually one of panic. I wanted desperately to rebuild that picture as soon as possible. Nothing less than an immediate solution would satisfy me. Above all I needed "to do something." That was the hard-wiring in my brain kicking in. I am probably particularly susceptible to it, given my vivid imagination. I want the whole picture back immediately, or my brain goes into hyperdrive spinning up a new one to replace it. If it can't, it is stressful.
Even before learning about this, I had developed coping mechanisms. Among other things, I had learned to identify what my worst fear was, and to embrace it. When I travel, I am the master of logistics in terms of planning for everything to go wrong. Things still go horribly wrong whenever I travel---Morocco in 2014 was a humiliation that way, one blunder after another, caused by my pride that led me to overlook taking care of certain details. But so long as the things that go wrong are things I legitimately could not have anticipated, then luck inevitably pulls me through. The angels protect me. The things that get me are the things that I should have foreseen, given experience, but was lazy. Then luck is not on my side. The angels stand by and shake their heads. This whole psychological experience of preparing myself, then trusting luck, is perhaps the main reason I still enjoy traveling at all. To me, it is a test. Some of my calmest moments are in these crises, when I can effortlessly switch from Plan A to Plan B while hardly losing stride. I look forward to them, and plan for them.
At this moment, my psychological state centers around these things:
1. A deep gut-level conviction that Donald Trump is going to win the election. This is backed up by an inner peace I feel.
2. A surface-level anxiety caused by my inability to know how this is going to happen. Part of this is that neurological mechanism. Part of it is pride that I should be allowed to know this details of the plan right now.
3. Anxiety from #2 that I need to "do something". For #1 to happen, there is nothing I need to do. But I know I can provide insight and comfort to others, so this blog has become part of the way by which I release the pent-up desire to do something, instead of pacing around my apartment like a caged leopard. It lets me focus on my work.
4. (and this is very important). Rational observations of the world (mostly through Twitter) that, when examined lend support to #1 above. There is plenty of this. I am described some of it, for example the fact that the Republicans are closing ranks around Trump when they are clued into the situation. They are not doing this out of obstinacy. They are doing it based on things we haven't been told yet. Every time I pause to survey the situation, and ask myself what my real impressions are, it is clear to me that things are going very well. I asked myself this morning: if I were a Democrat, what would I be feeling right now? I remember how I felt like in 2000, when I wanted Gore to win. The answer is: I'd being feeling fear.
The point #2 above means that like many of you, I am constantly scouring my sources of info---for me, it's mostly my Twitter feed---for new bits of information, "breakthroughs" that would prove to me that we are about to declare victory. But there is no guarantee that any of the way it will happen will be connected to any particular piece of information or analysis that is being circulated. Nevertheless I want to know what all of these pieces might be, so my mind vacuums them up, and it begins building scenarios out forward in time. But these are susceptible to that sudden demolishing if some underlying assumption falls apart, that I made in building up my mental picture. It's a vicious emotional cycle. I know it is the cost of being aware of the details as they happen, namely I will wrong more than I am right, on any particular thing. All I care about in the end is #1. Everything I do a sounding of my gut, it comes up with the same reading. Every time I go through the process in #4, it tells me rationally the same thing.
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