Letter: Our nation needs to unite after the election no matter the results

October 30, 2024 at 10:39 p.m.

Next Tuesday citizens of the United States will come together for the 60th time to elect a new president. Clearly, this political season has been one of the most tumultuous in our history with the last-minute replacement of one of the candidates and two assassination attempts on the other principal candidate.

It is also clear that our nation is deeply divided with passionate supporters on both sides. Protagonists on one side are claiming that if the other side is elected it will be the end of democracy, while actors on the other tell us that if their opponents win it will be the end of civilization.

As I approach my 70th year on this planet Earth, I have never been more worried for our nation’s and our planet’s future. One of my principal concerns is that both sides—that’s right both sides—are incapable of seeing their blind spots. It is clear to me that our nation has lost its capacity to have a fair-minded, respectful exchange of ideas.

What is also clear is that the next four years will be the most important and eventful four years in human history. Dramatic advances in AI are providing humanity with the ability to create a new Renaissance world of abundance where we have the potential to eliminate poverty and hunger. At the same time, the consensus that built the peaceful post-World War II order is rapidly disintegrating.

In 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group created in part by Einstein and Oppenheimer, published a Doomsday Clock where they attempted to measure how close humanity is to self-annihilation. The closer to midnight the more likely we destroy ourselves.

In 1947, the Bulletin started the clock at seven minutes to midnight, following the fall of the Berlin Wall our world became far more peaceful and the clock was moved to an all-time safety high of 19 minutes to midnight. Today the Doomsday Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight!

This means we are living at the most dangerous time in human history. At the same time, we are living at a time of great promise. If we can find a way to bring humanity together, we can create a new Renaissance of Abundance.

This concept is not new, as our 35th President, JFK, made this clear in his inaugural speech way back in 1960 when he explained:

“The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

The next four years may very well determine which way we go. And which way we go will in large part depend on how we react to the election results of next Tuesday.

This past Sunday my pastor encouraged all his parishioners to take the high road no matter whether their candidate wins or loses.

For those interested in a novel, bipartisan approach to politics, I recommend Mark Halperin’s innovative Two Way Platform where he brings together people on both sides of the fence to exchange ideas and learn from one another. He too is encouraging Americans of all stripes to accept the voting results.

There can be no doubt that humanity is at a crossroads, as is the most powerful nation on Earth. I believe that how we respond to next Tuesday’s results can in large part determine the future of humanity.

In closing, I would like to share with you why I believe the stakes are so high. In December 2011, my good friend Dick Hubert shared an opinion piece with me from Charles Krauthammer. In the piece, Krauthammer feted the finding of a new planet and then explained the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation that predicts that the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy should be quite high.

In trying to explain why we have not come across multiple advanced civilizations, Krauthammer wrote: “Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.”

I have since learned that this theory has a name—The Great Filter Theory—and that NASA scientists studied this theory in 2022, publishing a paper entitled: “Avoiding the Great Filter: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe.”

Krauthammer closes his piece with these thoughts:

“In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe—an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so…”

“Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics—understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.”

No one in our nation can doubt that our politics is in a horrible, horrible state of affairs. Far too many point the finger rather than look at themselves. How we react to next Tuesday’s results will hopefully bring an end to the finger pointing and a new united beginning where we all rally behind the new president no matter who that might be.

Nothing less than our nation’s and our species’ survival hangs in the balance.