The political climate we find ourselves in today is radically binary; for this, we must give thanks to the luminary influence of this presidential election. There seems to be much class, racial and ideological resentment, all of which are rising to the surface of the American conscience. Sadly, all it took for such contempt to become public and commonplace was an election. The vitriol with which both sides of the aisle — both sides — hate the other candidate, party and platform simply boggles my mind.
And yet, it doesn’t surprise me at all. What we are witnessing in our public square, I believe, is the human need for purpose being wrongly placed on our presidential candidates. In a secular society, in which faith in a god is not common, it makes sense that citizens will try to fill that empty pedestal with politics. In other words, I think it a fundamental human truth that we all are living for something, hoping and trusting that whatever the object is we are living for will satisfy our hearts, bridging that gap between what we long to be and what we really are. And currently this desire is finding its home in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The late David Foster Wallace captured my point in brilliant surgical prose in his famous Kenyon College commencement address. “There is no such thing as not worshipping,” he said. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
It is a sobering quote — one that certainly penetrates my heart. It reminds me of my motivations in life, why I do certain things and care so deeply about, or fear so profoundly, certain scenarios or possibilities in my life.
I loathe thinking about how deep my need for approval and recognition has rooted itself into my everyday thoughts and actions. But as Wallace reminds us, we all are living for something. And that is what I see in our political discourse — people who are not looking to Trump or Clinton for just a political revolution but for something much more. We are putting both candidates on a divine pedestal, above any and all reproach or criticism from the other side. We do not want to hear any dissenters speak their minds, because we fear that maybe their words are too closely related to the truth. We do not want these candidates to be president; we need them to be. If they are proven wrong, if they lose credibility or candor, then we, sadly, lose a sense of who we are as a consequence.
I see both political parties so entrenched in themselves, so absorbed in their own infallibility of platform and policy, that they cannot even fathom the notion that maybe the other side, the enemy, is right about some things. During this election, we have all witnessed people desperately clinging, with the force of a frightened child, to their political leanings, regardless of reason or evidence. It seems as if we have built our very identities on which party is better.
But the way out of such nonsensical behavior is not simply empathy or a humanistic understanding. No, we need a much deeper solution, one that cuts near to the heart. Maybe we are seeing in politics what Wallace saw in everyday life: that what we have chosen to live for, like everything except religion, is eating us alive.
Scott Stinson is a UF English and philosophy sophomore. His column appears on Tuesdays.
