Election Vs Selection

Every two years or so I am seduced like most Americans into the believing that my most important choice in life is the one I make in a voting booth. I am pulled into the clamor of the political spectacle like a lonely, wide-eyed innocent to a summer carnival. I listen to loud pundits, who like barkers, call out the exceptional value of their opinions. I watch commercials with amusement, and listen to thunderous oratory. Despite the boisterous and burlesque tone of election campaigns, I am admonished time and again to take the process seriously and to be informed. Presented with various candidates, I am warned that my choice will have lasting consequences in my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others. The process ends when I enter a booth behind a plastic drape, pull switches, yank a lever—elect!

The hype about elections is the biggest scandal in American life. The notion that my choice of pre-selected politician will define or change my life is as preposterous as the assertion that which TV show I watch will have lasting impact on my health.

At best, the election is a surrogate for all the smaller decisions in my life that are vitally important and more difficult to make—my selections.

As we muddle along we tell ourselves that our electoral decisions are meaningful and that we would be wise to prepare ourselves to make the right choice. We fantasize that our elected officials from president to surrogate judge will save us. By electing the right politician we will be made whole again, our problems will be solved, our bad luck reversed, our choices—those that were good but soured and the ones bad from the start—will be rectified and redeemed. Elections by this measure become a secular rite of ablution and healing.

Only afterward, when we see that whomever we elected did not appreciably change anything, and that they either blundered or were besmirched by scandal, do we see the error of our false hopes. And of course, we react with one more dose of the same purgative—we vote the rascal out.

Elections are a symbolic quick fix to distract us from real choices that are more personal and private—and more urgent—the choices that really matter and that truly affect the course of our lives—let’s call them “selections.” Elections are the periodic consolation prize for the choices that would matter most if we could make them—the selections we don’t have an opportunity to make, or those we make poorly. These are selections like what job we ultimately get, who our bosses really are, and what our colleagues are like.

The election process is a generalized and symbolic representation of the selection process. In the former, we are given more information than we can possibly use and much of it is worthless. In the latter, we are always given less information than we need. Selection is a far more critical to our individual happiness than an election, and far too complex and specific to discuss with others. Elections can agitate you, become a part of your life and burrow inside your psyche, but their impact dissipates like an alcoholic beverage. Selection penetrates you to your very depth and its impact never leaves you. Each selection you make enters your personal history, become a feature of your psychic topography, a tattoo no laser can remove. You wear it behind your eyes and in the bend of your smile.

Indeed, selections are so personal and indelible that nobody except maybe your mother and car salesman would offer to help you make one or even discuss it. When you try to talk about your quandary in making an important and difficult selection, those whose opinions you solicit will tell you they cannot help you—selection is an act you must perform on your own. This same hands-off dread of guilt for squandering or destroying someone else’s life by tampering with their choices does not apply to elections—the surest proof of how unimportant elections truly are. Loud people carrying signs shout at you as you approach the polling place about the candidates they want you to vote for right until you open the door of the polling place and walk in. the moment that you enter the official polling place.

The torture of selection was never more vividly and humorously depicted than in the game show Let’s Make a Deal. We felt little rubber hammers of pain on our hearts as we watched endless mini-tragedies that poor selection could bring. As avaricious contestants squandered money in hand for a donkey behind door number two, we cringed because we knew we could do the same. Selection is just too hard.

If selection were not so hard, we wouldn’t care so much about elections. They are public rituals that permit us to release personal steam from the selections that we make with imperfect knowledge and are stuck with. They give us the chance to talk openly about choices that have little personal consequence while we deal privately with those that bend our twist our lives. Since elections really don’t change our lives so much and selections do, perhaps we should think less about being an informed electorate and more about being wise selectors.

Of course, corporations and wealthy private contributors would have little interest in influencing or helping us with making wise selections. A fortune can be made exploiting public policy, but no money to be made in promoting personal happiness