JANUARY 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Do we really have to hate each other? Remember Rodney King? “…can’t we all just get along.” I dunno. Maybe it’s not really about politics. Maybe that’s just a catchall trigger for fundamental differences in the way we’re wired. In my heart I know the distribution of differences is a nice bell curve, but I keep trying to see us as an “either-or” that would simplify understanding it all. For instance…

Some people zigzag down the highway of life, ignoring traffic signs, ignoring tourist traps, always seeking the “road less traveled.” Lane markers mean nothing to them, while detours and potholes beckon them like billboards. They may travel full-time off-road, camping in the wilderness and living off the grid, or they may drive obedient to the rules of the road 9-to-5, then leap the drainage ditch and fishtail into the woods for nights and weekends. 

Other folk travel mostly lockstep with society’s rules written and unwritten. They provide order and stability. Their civility extends to protocols – laughing on cue, emoting on cue. The middle of the road is their comfort zone, a conformity and righteousness that seem to accept even aging as if it happens by agreement. Norms, averages, expectations – the hum of a 10-lane Interstate – are as reassuring to them as the bleat of a flock. What they lose of individuality they gain in belonging. They are the central tones and trends that drive a culture, a society, a nation, the tenor of an age that may change with the tropes and cliches of the next generation.

There is no inherently right or wrong way to take the journey of life. To each his own, be it dynamic and challenging or dull and safe. But switching from one way to another is uncommon. We seem to become hard-wired early-on (if not right out of the cradle), our GPS locking on what we “feel” is true north. Maybe that’s why those who actually do switch interest me. What does it take to break with your starting point, your emotional core, perhaps your birthright of instincts and intuition? Remember the phrase “cognitive dissonance”?

We all have anchoring premises in our bedrock, those deeply held preconceptions that trigger knee-jerk reflexes. Formed in the genesis of our fears and desires, they remain foundational. We confirm them by the way we interpret life. No surprise then that when rational truths build a case against them, our common sense comes into conflict with our emotions. Logic may try to reconcile the core emotions (hence, cognitive dissonance). It may even succeed for a moment, a day, a phase; but over time we are very likely to preserve the core emotion rather than the logical correction. In my OSHO, as a nation, a society, a culture, we’ve overwhelmingly experienced that failure of rational thought colliding with the self-righteous rush of political correctness in recent decades. It is the heart of our polarization.  

Enflamed by medias (news, social, education reform), emotions out-rank common sense. Orwellian groupthink and doublespeak demonize prudent judgment. Values that underwrote the meritocracy upon which America was founded are often vilified. Basic virtues and definitions that range from self-reliance to work ethics and genders have been upended if not inverted. The enshrined cornerstone of equal opportunity has mutated into equal outcomes. Call it societal cognitive dissonance. SCD? And the winner of that conflict within the hard-wiring of perhaps half our population has been emotions. That’s duck soup for manipulators. Create a false or hyped-up news story that provokes outrage, hammer home its emotional impact, then correct it months or years later, and the false story might as well have been true, because what you remember in the complexity of the tale are your entrenched emotions.

Of such are manias, derangements and hysteria built, especially if smoothed and spun with still more emotional appeal. And once again, the drivers of such baggage have been our dominant liberal news media, a radicalized Leftist culture of celebs, and “woke” education agendas. So, the election surprised me with its grass-roots resistance to the one-sided financial and star-power advantages. For me, 2024’s silent stand was more about common sense than all the failed campaign money and cultural icon testimonials.    

In retrospect, the seeds of hysteria must have taken root long before the current candidates came on the scene. But from where? Judeo-Christian guilt? The 60s? Youth culture deposing adult common sense? As is often attributed to Churchill: “if you’re twenty and not a liberal, you have no heart; and if you’re forty and not a conservative, you have no brains.” Or was it aided by shifting gender dominance? Presidential election data over decades (with the exception of JFK who men voted for) is remarkably constant: close to 55% of men and 45% of women vote conservative, while 55% of women and 45% of men vote liberal.

Whatever the combination of factors that produced decades of mounting hysteria, it came to us through media saturation. Using emotion to sell content is the nature of entertainment and spectatorship. As a novelist, I practice that sell. Pitch emotional empathy, and your message wins every time. Extra points for merging reader/viewer identification with the hue and cry of the underdog. As for blame, let those who make opportunity work be the villains; use class envy and demonize successful efforts. Illegitimize the American dream. Alienate the process. No mystery how an entertainment culture inculcated us into its emotional thrall. Hollywood tech and New York sophistication have come a long way from the Perils of Paulene tied to the railroad tracks and evil landlords evicting the poor. Clumsy caricature, cliches and tropes, meet slick AI…

Purely as fun, it’s interesting to me that evolution traces our roots through a common ancestor of apes. With a little fudging, I extract from that a gene pool to include both bonobos and chimps. These two simian groups have contrasting strategies for survival. Bonobos pacify and make love. I see them holding hands at the equator and singing Kumbaya! Chimps compete through strength and dominance. Needless to say, the groups don’t intermix. Sigh and alas! But then, the lion and the lamb are not likely to do lunch together unless one of them is on the menu or the other goes vegan.

But what if there was only one group? Can we say “extinction”? One-of-a-kinds are very, very vulnerable. Natural selection thrives on competition and variety. So, we’re left with the ideal of balance both as driver and status quo. My mantra. Symmetry. Parity. The Golden Rule. The Golden Mean. Quid pro quo. Did we just move closer to that after a decades-long slide Left?

There. Some thoughts delivered for the new year. But no debate invited here, please. None. Political rants verboten! January – named for Janus, the Roman god who looks both forward and backward – deserves no less than a careful review of where our thoughts and emotions should meet. Thanks for reading, some holiday photos below, and Happy New Year…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan