I was taught at a young age that the world made sense but when I grew up I found that it made as much sense as we had made sense of it.

I suppose as a child being made comfortable with the idea that the world made perfect sense made me easier to deal with.

Some people never seem to get past the need for the world to make sense. The very idea that we don’t understand the world is too much for most of us. I wake up every day wondering about something I don’t yet have the answer to – at least one thing. Every morning when I wake up there’s an implicit acknowledgement that the world doesn’t make sense and it’s fun learning new things.

Some people don’t see the world that way. Some people fear new things. Some people prefer the comfort of belief that they do understand everything. These people trouble me. In fact, they trouble other people who believe different things. No, I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about politics, which effectively is another religion. If I point out weaknesses in a candidate, these people default to thinking I must be on the ‘other side’. That’s almost never true.

People pick their own narratives, and there is nothing wrong with that. The only side anyone should pick in a democracy, in my humble opinion, is their own. You’re supposed to vote your interests in a democracy.

In this past election, some people voted for the building that they sought comfort in. Some voted for the wrecking ball because that building bothered them for some reason, though there are no plans to build anything in it’s place. This election is a reset on a lot of things in that regard, and the next one could be better, or it could be worse, and everyone will have an opinion on that and some will be told their opinion by people with impossible hair on their favorite news channel.

All you need to be a pundit is to get people to believe that they are less intelligent than you are, and it’s alarming how easy it is. Cherry picking facts, painting with a broad brush, and hair that defies the body it’s on.

Part of getting past that is understanding our own biases. Someone in an urban setting sees the world one way, someone in a suburban setting sees it another way, and someone in a rural setting sees it in yet another way. Each one grows up in a different culture and while we like to think they have the same values, there are small differences because of the different cultures.

If you can step outside of your biases long enough, the world is not the same. Yet political pundits like you right there where you are. The systems, many of which seem broken, are designed to keep you where you are – that’s the role of bureaucracy, to stall change. And the people who profit from it all? There you are.

Does it make them bad people? Nope. Being ‘bad people’, too, has a lot to do with culture. Famously, the Greeks called anyone who wasn’t Greek a barbarian, and here we are still waiting for the barbarians.

…Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy

For lack of actual barbarians, maybe the political pundits should be who we call barbarians.

That would make more sense to me.