All that you presently behold will change in no time whatever and cease to exist

A somewhat celebratory post-election musings edition

Better than politics

So in the future, remember to retreat into this little plot of earth that is truly your own, and above all, do not distress or overstrain yourself, but preserve your freedom, and look at things as a man, a human being, a citizen, a mortal creature. And among the precepts which you keep most closely at hand for frequent reference, let the following be included: firstly, that things of themselves have no hold on the mind, but stand motionless outside it, and all disturbances arise solely from the opinions within us; and secondly, that all that you presently behold will change in no time whatever and cease to exist; and constantly reflect on how many such changes you yourself have already witnessed - Marcus Aurelius

We need to take our country back - many people in recent days who didn't like their election result

This is who we are - ibid

There is very little doubt that Trump will sign a national abortion ban. After that, we can expect he'll come after abortion pills and contraception as well - email received here from openDemocracy

We're about to face an onslaught against everything we stand for. From climate breakdown to the horrors in Gaza, and from the extinction crisis to the assault on women's rights, Trump is a human blowtorch in our tinderbox world - 'emergency fundraiser' email received here from Avaaz

She raised more money than him, her rallies were packed, she was intelligent and joyful while he was simulating blow jobs on a microphone. By the end his rallies were half empty. None of it makes sense. None. Of. It. So enough with the “she was shit”. No, she wasn’t and neither was her campaign. By any visible metric she was smashing it - a well-known progressive name on Substack Notes (receiving 6,883 ❤️s at the time of writing)

The first 1m 37sec of Dr Arlene talking about her election day champagne purchase expedition.

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? - Zhuangzi (aka Chuang Tzu)

Liberals have been wringing their hands about America’s increasing political division - gender, racial, generational - for years. Well, as they say, you may not like it, but this is what depolarisation looks like - Ian Leslie in The Ruffian

Now I am going to make a statement here. I don't know if it fits into the category of other people's statements or not. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn't, it obviously fits into some category. So in that respect it is no different from their statements. However let me try making my statement.

There is a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between this being and nonbeing, I don't really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something - Zhuangzi

A central question of moral epistemology is, or should be: Am I a jerk? Until you figure that one out, you probably ought to be cautious in morally assessing others - Eric Schwitzgebel

There is much more going on inside us all the time than we are willing to express, and civilization would be impossible if we could all read each other's minds - Thomas Nagel

[Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I'm fucking crazy - Donald J Trump

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No one needs to read the received opinions of someone who couldn't vote in America the other week.

All I'll say is that it seemed to me a choice between optimism and divisiveness and I'm glad that optimism won, notwithstanding my prior reservations.

Everything else I could say would be recycled from the following sources, which were among the most lucid early reactions I saw from both the pro and anti-Trump sides.

Even though they are often mutually contradictory, they are all onto something.

The Peasants Win - Stoic Observations

Election Lesson: The Media Needs a Makeover - Pesca Profundities

The Trump Restoration - The Hinternet

The Counterattack Isn't Coming - Chris Bray (really for laughs)

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives - Musa al-Gharbi

Are Trump Voters Misinformed, Or Were Harris Voters Just Not Given A chance To Be Misinformed - Singal-Minded

The Looming Tribulation - Terry Glavin

How Steve Bannon Baited The American Left Into Overplaying Its Hand - Joseph Heath

And, if you only read one of them, make it this one

Love Your Neighbor Of Opposite Politics

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Lots of people were baffled about America's recent choice because liberalism is so obviously great (I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal) and they think that liberalism just lost.

There's a tendency to believe that your version of a principle is the correct understanding and that other people who don't agree must be working off an entirely different principle of which you naturally disapprove (because you have certain immutable values which cannot be merely personal heuristics but objectively true and correct in some way).

Yet, as time went on (and were it not for J6 I'd have been more comfortable about expressing it) I sensed that Trump was the liberal choice last week. His not-so-quiet building of a multi-racial, working class coalition in opposition to the smug pieties of a self-anointed enlightened caste of educated Brahmin leftishists who expect intellectual and moral deference by dint of who they are will probably spawn hundreds of books in the next few years.

You just watch. There will be a particular strand of condescending stuff about how you can't blame people for wanting Bad Things because something something capitalism or something.

As ever, my sense is of a world in which political philosophy is shallowly understood. You can read as much Alexis de Tocqueville as you like, but if hardly anyone else does there isn't much point in trying to discuss the election that just happened in terms of principle. Just as when people think that the Enlightenment was just a shift to following evidence rather than faith, there is no substantive discussion possible.

So I won't be bothering.

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What I learned about my own frailties from an election thousands of miles away

I'm so glad it's over. Don't @ me with 'it's never over', because you're right and I don't want to acknowledge that.

It needs to be over, at least for me to save me from myself. For example, my weary complaints of the thinness of the average opinion-holder's grasp on political philosophy. Oh I'm just so clever for knowing about some things that they never noticed or cared to investigate. Let them think what they will. It really is none of my business that they never did the reading or thinking and consequently think they know everything, displaying that obvious inverse relationship between depth of understanding and intransigence.

And I must stop correcting people who won't be persuaded to consider another perspective.

Those who read Rarely Certain via email might not know that the Substack reader app includes a Twitter clone called Notes.

It has been flooded with angry leftishists venting about the one field I have investigated to any depth. This makes me vulnerable to The Need To Be Right About Things when people opine on stuff I consider to be in my wheelhouse.

It turns me into one of those dull people who argue on the internet.

I must own this failing. Because the more dispassionate part of me sees The Need To Be Right About Things as a weakness rooted in sensing a threat to your identity when others see things differently. Argument and debate looks to me like self-comforting through identity-bolstering more than a search for insight and I'm consequently wary when I feel like arguing.

The urge to bend others to my will suggests that I'm losing contact with the qualities of curiosity and equanimity with contra-perspectives that actually make me a happier person.

Mostly I'm able to resist the temptation to 'correct' someone who is Wrong About Something but when it comes to popular motifs around the information environment my resistance sometimes collapses. I suppose this is something to do with clinging onto an old identity that I once constructed as a minor 'disinformation expert'.

So Notes has been flooded with the claim that it was media reporting Wrong Things that made people vote the way they did.

The main complaints are of pro-Trump 'disinformation' from right-wing media and 'sanewashing' of Trump by mainstream media.

Regular readers already know my position on media influence, which is that there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it changing minds.

I want to post my thoughts on Notes mainly to annoy those people. Things like ...

It's interesting that you attribute rejection of your candidate to influence from the right-wing social and other media sphere while denying any role of social or other media influence on rapid onset gender dysphoria. (Happily this never made it out of my head and onto Notes)

Obviously, it isn't interesting that they think this. It’s boring and predictable. So I would only be trolling. I would be giving vent to contempt for people who think they are enlightened when they are really just believing a thing that keeps them in good standing with their tribe.

This trolling urge is quite annoying. 

At one point I wanted to begin this piece in trollish fashion. The intro was:

Last week's election was the clearest sign yet of something malevolent and seemingly unstoppable arising in the United States. It feeds on fear, disgust, hate and ignorance. But, that's enough about partisan Democrats ...

The trolling urge is strong. Those confused liberal-identifying people, heads crammed with material facts from which they derive 'rational' worldviews and moral convictions while never noticing the vacuum labelled 'grasp of political and related philosophy' are always asking for a good trolling.

Well done me for not doing that. But, unfortunately, I have picked a few fights along the way and regretted it each time.

I've been explaining that they need to provide evidence for their claims, which of course they can't.

(I'd be having the same disputes with Trumpkins, if Harris had won. They'd be blaming the obviously biased 'msm' and I'd still be arguing that content is just a commodity that we choose to feed our existing logos unless we take the unusual step of trying not to).

Ultimately these fights represent moments of my life that are gone forever which I could have spent more healthily, like playing with the dog or reading something interesting and I've noticed that I'm succumbing to that old-fashioned craving from teenagehood to be right about things because that's how educated people like me were indoctrinated to be.

It will only get worse on Substack Notes from here on.

There seems to be an influx of writers bidding for a place on The Good White Man Roster insisting that they will now make Substack their place of choice for rallying support. I have a hunch (I hope someone does look into this) that when the silly kerfuffle about Substack harbouring Nazis erupted lots of 'progressives' decided that this place would be their next stop on the Long March.

I know what they think already. I used to think all the same things. I too was a culture warrior on the leftish and I've moved on. You can't kid a kidder.

But they're coming anyway, with their special brand of hoity toity gnosticism. Consequently I have not been listening to my own advice.

These people are going to 'flood the zone with shit' of a different kind than Steve Bannon talked about and they will be magnetic to trolls like me, who will inevitably waste a lot of time reacting to them.

I'm confessing this here so that I may feel shame when succumbing. No one respects a hypocrite.

There will be an outcome

Decades ago I'd got myself into a stupid emotional tangle over a girl and all I could talk about was various projections on how it would turn out. And a friend said, over pizza, 'the only thing I can tell you for certain is that there will be an outcome'.

I suppose that this was my first exposure to anything resembling a stoic idea and I've thought of it often, down the years.

We often forget that things will go on in their own vein whether or not we insert our predictions and this seems to be a stupid oversight.

So the tension right now is between blabbing on about what election results signify and just being.

The latter urge has the edge once more, for which I have good old Zhuangzi to thank. If I were having pizza with him he might say:

daily there is the striving of mind with mind. There are hesitancies; deep difficulties; reservations; small apprehensions causing restless distress, and great apprehensions producing endless fears. Where their utterances are like arrows from a bow, we have those who feel it their charge to pronounce what is right and what is wrong; where they are given out like the conditions of a covenant, we have those who maintain their views, determined to overcome. (The weakness of their arguments), like the decay (of things) in autumn and winter, shows the failing (of the minds of some) from day to day; or it is like their water which, once voided, cannot be gathered up again. Then their ideas seem as if fast bound with cords, showing that the mind is become like an old and dry moat, and that it is nigh to death, and cannot be restored to vigour and brightness.

And he'd be right. I don’t want an old dry moat for a mind.

Dwelling much too much on high octane politics and the emotional fallout of (mostly) strangers has been contracting rather than expanding my mind.

A sad illustration of this is that I'm reading The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes and marvelling at how funny a book written more than 400 years ago can be to my modern sensibilities. Having written before about the nourishing quality of longer and deeper reading over digital 'content snacking' you'd think that I could just revel in this classic novel. But, no.

In the shower this morning I was shoehorning my thoughts about this infernal election fallout into my new mental Don Quixote appreciation model. And thinking 'ooh, this would make a fun Rarely Certain'.

[Don sees things that aren't there, because his brain has been addled by various highly emotionally arousing ideas in books. And no amount of common sense intervention from Sancho Panza can shift his views because he is hellbent on being a Good Person who always does The Right Thing for the downtrodden and victims of injustice. Which keeps earning him a good kicking, from the very people he has appointed himself to save. See?  You've just written the whole piece for yourself, in the moments it took to read that sentence, so I don't need to]

That's what I mean by mind 'contraction' rather than expansion.

I've been slipping back into old habits of seeing everything through the lens of one event that is already over and that will spawn countless other things that will also be over before you know it.

all that you presently behold will change in no time whatever and cease to exist

This includes me (and, obviously, you) and it seems unwise to consistently forget this.

It's how we waste so much of our lives.

At least it is for those of us who would always be NPCs in the War Over The Current Thing.

The tumult is loud, tiring to witness and even duller to participate in.

There will be an outcome and then another outcome and more outcomes and we'll forget what was driving us nuts 5 minutes ago because there will always be a flow of something elses to drive us nuts.

People will sagely refer to the ‘news cycle’ but really it’s just drama.

The only thing of which I'm confident is that on my proverbial deathbed the last thing I will look back on with satisfaction is that time I tried to explain that thing about media influence to some randomers on the internet.

Next time, no election stuff. Life is too interesting.

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