Relational

People all over the world seem to want a strongman to impose order: Putin, Trump, Erdogan, Chavez, Duterte. Sometimes we gather information for the purpose of accurate understanding, but far more often we cherry-pick information to support what we've already made up our minds to believe. Narration is the reordering and reframing of information to make it satisfying and streamlined, and there's a purpose for that, but it's always a distortion. I am baffled about the stubborn refusal of my political opponents to confront reality, but I've spent a generation blinding myself to the imperfections of reality because I stayed locked to the world to which I aspired, and now my world is eclipsed while theirs is most salient.