Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
Tomorrow – if we are so lucky – there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later.
A red sun sets over DC. The marble monuments are stained crimson; the statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and the rest look like they writhe in hellfire. The people seclude themselves in their houses. A city where even the Christians are atheist kneels in prayer.
On some level, they know – we know – it was never just about choosing a leader. It was all for this – the same urge that drove the games of the Colosseum and sacrifices of Tenochtitlan. The need for a single moment of unconditioned reality. For one evening, the people of the richest and most secure nation in history, fat off the spoils of six continents, will know the same fear as the starving Catalhuyuk farmer, staring at the sky, wondering if the rains will come. For one evening, everyone – rich or poor, religious or secular, Democrat or Republican – will join in the prayer of the poet:
“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet
Lest we forget – lest we forget!”
More here.
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