We Usually Get the President We Deserve

Trump has been a far better president than we had any right to expect.

What? you say, No! Trump didn't implement any of your favorite hobby-horse ideals!

That's actually a good thing.

We have heard, over the last fifty years, how "The perfect is the enemy of the Good."

Pure and utter mental waste.

Perfect and ideal are two separate things, although it is easy to confuse one for the other.

Let's borrow some ideas from arithmetic. 

One added to one is two, right?

It's a perfect rule -- built on ideal principles. Some people think it a fundamental fact. 

But it isn't.

One crabapple added to one Fuji apple does not make two Fuji apples. Nor does it make two crabapples. 

One balloon's worth of air plus one balloon's worth of air may be two balloons' worth of air, but the volume does not double.

0.6 volts rounds up to 1 V, but 1 V + 1 V is not 2 V, if both 1s are actually 0.6 rounded up.

There are all sorts of ways one added to one might not result in two.

In order for this perfect rule to work we have to start with the assumption of an idealized non-compressible unit vector which adds linearly.

(Wrap your head around that before the next time you berate a pre-school child for having trouble with your mathematics. Arithmetic does not work without mathematics.)

Without the idealization of a non-compressible unit vector and the implicit single dimension in which it adds to itself, without the idealization of a number line, the arithmetic that we think is so basic just falls apart. 

It is basic. It is real. It's useful to understand. It is also limited in scope of application. In order to make it work for us, we have to get used to remembering to add Fuji apples to Fuji apples and crabapples to (the same subspecies of) crabapples. And it's still approximate, because not every apple on the tree is as big or as sweet -- or as small and as sour.

Each apple is different. 

A tree is a calculus of fruit, branches, and leaves.

A beach is a calculus of grains of sand, and when you look close, each grain of sand is different. 

Snowflakes? But a ski slope is a calculus of snowflakes.

Society is a calculus of individuals. We are not all our president. 

There it is. Say it big.

We are not all our president.

A president is not a king-for-four-years on whom we hang all our problems. At least he or she shouldn't be. Nor should we elect a man or woman to four years of taking the blame for all our own problems. 

We elect a president to represent us as a group, and, while he or she does not represent any one of us well as individuals, he or she usually represents us as a group pretty well. That's what the election process is about, finding someone who represents us as a group.

Recent elections have gotten us all excited about whom we choose for president. Most elections seem to be rather close. And then a winner is celebrated and installed into office.

But if you study statistics, you know that elections are a statistical experiment. And less than 2% difference in statistics is generally considered not statistically significant. Often, less than 5% is not significant.

Statistically, it made no difference whether we installed Trump or Clinton in the White House four years ago. And it will make no difference whether we install Biden or Trump in the White House for the next four years, because the United States of America is a calculus of individuals, and the president of the country is just one more of those individuals. And less than three percent is not statistically significant.

We think of the president as our leader, but we have it backwards. The president does not lead us.  

The choice of president is a synthesis, a projection of the public or social identity.

The president represents us.

Now do you understand why Trump was installed in the White House four years ago? 

All those contradictions are a synthesis of the calculus of the country, a reflection of the individuals that compose the country. We are a country of contradictions, and we have been focusing a lot on our contradictions lately. So we elected a president of self-contradictions.

And he represented us, complete with our internal contradictions.

As Biden and Harris's less optimal traits become clear, we will find something similar, because we currently compose a nation of factions.

And it wouldn't have mattered if Trump had won a second term. Less than 5% is not statistically significant.

What matters in the calculus of society is what each individual does. Biden/Harris, if the current numbers are confirmed, will represent us as a group. Biden is a politician, and Harris will soon feel the reality of what politics outside the California bubble is like, and know the burden of learning what a real politician has to do. (California's bubble is weakening, as well, but that's a topic for a rant for another day.)

For four years, we have been polarized. The choice of president was not what mattered. It was the calculus of individual discord that produced the polarization. If Hillary Clinton had been elected, it would still have been four years of polarization, because we chose to focus on how are differences don't fit together according to our ideals.

Are we going to continue to waste time and energy fighting each other? Or are we going to go back to finding unity in differences? We've done that before, you know. We have found unity in difference.

It takes many different types of people to make the world go 'round. 

We need our garbage collectors. We need our doctors. We need our farmers. We need our philosophers, including those who make rhyme and rhythm for their philosophies. We need our poor people and our rich people. 

I'm not sure we need our billionaires, their existence is a huge burden to society, warping the weave of social fabric around themselves in excessive and unnatural ways. But if they can quit trying to impose their visions of perfection -- their ideals -- on all of us, using the logic of the weight of their supposed personal worth, we should be able to get along with them.

We definitely don't need to keep our desperately poor in their condition of desperate poverty. If we can learn to let them be different, we ought to be able to find a way to let them get out of their desperate circumstances. (Let them out, not force them out.)

I had no preferred candidate in this election. I have had no preferred candidate in any of the last several presidential elections. (No, not even Romney was that close to what I would consider an ideal president. Maybe Reagan? It's been too long, but I think he represented our country pretty well as we navigated the world conditions that resulted in the breakup of the old Soviet Union. But still not my ideal.) It doesn't matter. I've continued to do the things I think are most important for me to do.

Society is made up of a lot of individuals. Society cannot exist without the individuals. 

Society cannot function if each individual does not do what that individual understands to be the best thing for that individual to do.

I can't do what you think is best for me to do, because your idea of what is best for me is, at best-formed, only a collection of "NO! NOT THAT!" and "YOU GOTTA DO THIS!" opinions -- uninformed opinions, since you have at best only a superficial view of what I'm up against.

If I were wasting time worrying about what is best for you to do, it would be the same. 

None of us really has any time to get more than a superficial view of the struggles others are having. You have to make your choices. I have to make mine.

To the extent we fight each other over the choices we make as individuals, we interfere with the functioning of society.

Sure, there are some choices which themselves interfere with a functional society. Taking bread from the poor man and giving it to the rich man is a wrong choice. And trying to persuade the rich man to share his bread with the poor is a far more functional choice than trying to force him to do so. (And, as individuals, choosing to fight each other instead of looking for places and ways we can work together -- can't we see how destructive that quickly becomes?)

Gender confusion? Yes, that's another place both (all) sides try to force others to conform to their own ideals. I think I could, if we could sit down and discuss it rationally, convince you that most gender confusion is derived from society's imposition on the individual of Machiavelli's false ideals. But we would argue about what that means. It's more functional for me to let you figure out what it means to you, if you will let me figure out what it means to me.

Insurance. Borders. Etc. There are lots of things we could fight about, if we choose to fight. But we don't all have to be thinking, doing, and saying the same things. 

Lasers are useful, but if laser light were all we had, we would have no colors, no warm spread of sunlight, just a bunch of idealistic monochrome beams randomly scanning the darkness, interfering with each other.

Everything we fight about, we can find ways to let each other be what we are -- different. 

And that is how we achieve unity, because it takes a lot of different wavelengths to light up the world, a lot of different people to make the world go 'round.