Politics and Democracy occur, they don’t exist the way physical objects, or things, exist.
Hopefully, this won’t be too heady for you. Politics is based on convention, agreement. I want to just develop a sense of this concept in this article. We’ll look a bit more at it in the next article, and then we’ll come back to politics in the third one.
There are no elections
Elections don’t exist in the same way that physical things exist. Just like a birthday or an anniversary, it occurs because we observe it. Let’s look at two senses of the word “observe.” The first is to observe, like seeing or noticing. When the flags are placed outside the school and church doors, we see them and think election. We see the news and the letters of the word “election” and we think election. We are not really seeing the election. We are seeing physical things and thinking election.
The other meaning (#3 in the above page) is to observe them like one observes a religious holiday. We behave in a way that recognizes the election. We go to the poll and vote, or we “don’t vote.” Even by “not voting,” we acknowledge the election. If we forgot the election was today, it might not exist at all for us. And then we hear it on the news and think “Oh, right! The election is today!” Suddenly the election occurs.
There’s no election for a dog.
If you ask a dog if there’s an election, he can’t see it. Nor can he smell it or hear it. He might see and smell people, some with their dogs, walking to vote. But there’s no meaning of election to the dog. For the dog, It doesn’t exist. But it exists to us.
Often we think something like, “there’s an election, but the dog doesn’t know it.” Not really. It’s more accurate to say, “An election is occurring for us, but not for the dog.” There’s no such thing as an election. It’s a complex pattern that we recognize and agree on.
Things occur over time
On the evening of Monday, November 7th, 2016 no election will be occurring yet. But we’ll expect it. We’ll be ready to interpret lots of things as signs of the election. There’ll be actions consistent with the election, and ballots and flags consistent with the election, and news announcements and parties and celebrations and tears and TV and radio broadcasts consistent with an election. People will ask questions about who’s ahead. Has the party picked up seats, or lost them? Everyone will agree there’s an election. Even though there’s no thing which is the election.
The election occurs in phases, from the vote-by-mail envelopes being mailed, being opened and filled in and mailed back, to the first polling places opening on the east coast to the last ones closing in Hawaii. Did you notice that you didn’t really think about these parts of the election when you were reading the first paragraph, above? But as you read them, ideas about them occurred for you. As if the words conjured them into existence. You saw the string of letters and your mind made those into words and in your mind’s ear, the phases of the election occurred for you.
And then the winners are announced and with those proclamations, the election is over. It no longer exists, except in history.
It happens. Stuff occurs because we agree to it. In other countries things occur differently because they have a different culture, a different agreement.