Bertram's Blog

I read an article where the author mentioned two powerful human motivations: the need to belong and the need to reduce uncertainty. He was using these motivations to explain why so many young white liberals are voting for communist/socialistic candidates. Apparently, that party gives them the identity and the certainty they need without their ever having to look beyond the belonging to perhaps a different truth than what they “feel” is true. If that’s the case, I can understand the young falling for the fallacy of getting everything for free, but apparently, in a few of the primaries where the socialists have won, even older white liberals have voted for the so-called socialist.

This need to belong is also the reason (rather a reason) why the leftist media so gleefully touts the avalanche of new people joining that party (the membership stands at little over 100,000 which is not much of an avalanche, and yet their wins make it seem so). The reason this is so damaging is that people want to feel as if they are winners, so they jump where they think the winners are, especially if those winners promise free everything. It explains, too, why people don’t always vote for who they really want — they vote for who they think will win. I suppose that’s part of the need for certainty and belonging. If the person they vote for wins, it validates them. If the person loses, it leaves them feeling uncertain about themselves.

You’d think that after a certain age, people would have learned to live with both a feeling of not belonging and a sense of uncertainty, but apparently not. For me, that acceptance came during my years of grief after Jeff died. Since he was my home, and since we did everything together, being left alone catapulted me into free fall, not knowing who I was, where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to be doing. I still don’t know any of those things, and despite my being settled in my own home, I still feel uncertain and alienated at times. Working in a garden helps with accepting that reality, where every day is a lesson in unbelonging (a garden belongs to itself; a gardener is merely a caretaker since so much is beyond human control) and a lesson in uncertainty (there is no guarantee that a seed will grow, that a plant will survive the weather conditions, that hordes of insects won’t come to feast).

I also see another powerful human motivation at play in the political arena — a need to be agreed with. If you belong to a group that validates you, you never have to deal with unbelonging, uncertainly, or being disagreed with. Although I have come to an accommodation with the first two motivations for human behavior, the third is something I still struggle with. Most of what I know has come from serious study, and it tends to irk me when people just wave that off because they “feel” differently, but it’s their prerogative to feel however they want based on their own experiences. I am learning (trying to learn) to simply let their disagreement pass me by, realizing that that what others think has nothing to do with me, but feeling it inside where it counts is something else.

Still, I wish that those understandable motivations aren’t leading so many people toward an economic policy that has never worked before and certainly can’t work today, because if it ever succeeds, then what they think will matter tremendously, no matter what I think.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One