VOTING DEMOCRATIC - IT IS A HOBSON’S CHOICE
In an ideal world there would be more choices, but we have only one viable choice
I looked for a term to define the false choice we have in an era of a major political party actively attacking democratic rule in all they do, and as a result of the immense danger they present, we only effectively have one choice in our leaders, that is to vote Democratic always. I found the term Hobson’s choice to fit fairly well. I define it in my verse, but here is a little more about its origin to peak your interest.
According to a plaque underneath a painting of Hobson donated to Cambridge Guildhall, Hobson had an extensive stable of some 40 horses. This gave the appearance to his customers that, upon entry, they would have their choice of mounts, when in fact there was only one: Hobson required his customers to take the horse in the stall closest to the door. This was to prevent the best horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become overused. Hobson's stable was located on land that is now owned by St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Having my origins from a Montana ranch I found interest in this story, and find this term Hobson’s choice perhaps valuable in today’s world in describing false choices. Here is my verse to start it off:
I went to X to find what a word search of ‘choice’ might bring up. I really found it used seldom in the same context which the verse addresses, but it certainly is an important word for the more liberal minded American.
I decided to find out what the word ‘choice’ might mean to the MAGA Republican by doing the same word search on Truth Social. I believe there is a great difference in these posts from below and those from X above.
I found an interesting article from a 2006 Harvard Business Review, in research on how we make decisions, and the various parts of our brains which are involved. I’ve put an excerpt from most of the article in the following. Although the act of making political choices is not specifically mentioned within the piece, I think inferences can be made from it. The reason part of the brain must work with the emotional part of the brain in making good decisions. I found this rather fascinating. I made an image to accompany the article showing the parts of the brain for easy reference. I’ve included X handles for the people named in the article where possible.
Harvard Business Review
Decisions and Desire
From the Magazine (January 2006)
The closer scientists look, the clearer it becomes how much we’re like animals. We have dog brains, basically, with a human cortex stuck on top, a veneer of civilization. This cortex is an evolutionarily recent invention that plans, deliberates, and decides. But not a second goes by that our ancient dog brains aren’t conferring with our modern cortexes to influence their choices—for better and for worse—and without us even knowing it.
As offers became increasingly unfair, the anterior insula, a part of the animal brain involved in negative emotions including anger and disgust, became more and more active, as if registering growing outrage. Meanwhile, part of the higher brain, an area of the prefrontal cortex involved in goal orientation (in this case, making money) was busy, too, assessing the situation.
Sanfey mapped what appeared to be a struggle between emotion and reason as each sought to influence the players’ decisions. Punish the bastard? Or take the money, even though the deal stinks? When the disgusted anterior insula was more active than the rational goal-oriented prefrontal cortex—in a sense, when it was shouting louder—the players rejected the offer. When the prefrontal cortex dominated, the players took the money.
And they’re beginning to expose the complex dance of primitive brain circuits involved in feelings of reward and aversion as we make choices. In the ultimatum game, it certainly looks as if our dog brains sometimes hijack our higher cognitive functions to drive bad or, at least, illogical decisions. But, as we shall see, our animal brains play an important part in rational decision making as well.
Emotion and Reason
Most of us are taught from early on that sound decisions come from a cool head, as the neurologist Antonio Damasio [@damasiousc] noted in his 1994 book Descartes’ Error. The last thing one would want would be the intrusion of emotions in the methodical process of decision making. The high-reason view, Damasio writes, assumes that “formal logic will, by itself, get us to the best available solution for any problem….To obtain the best results, emotions must be kept out.” Damasio’s research demolished that notion. Building on the work of many thinkers in the field, including Marsel Mesulam, Lennart Heimer, and Mortimer Mishkin, Damasio showed that patients with damage to the part of the prefrontal cortex that processes emotions (or, in a way, “listens” to them) often struggle with making even routine decisions.
Though brain scans revealed isolated damage to the central (or ventromedial) portion of Elliot’s frontal lobes, tests showed that his IQ, memory, learning, language, and other capacities were fine. But when Elliot was tested for emotional responses, the true nature of his deficit emerged. After viewing emotionally charged images—pictures of injured people and burning houses—Elliot revealed that things that had once evoked strong emotions no longer stirred him. He felt nothing.
There’s something critical to decision making in the conversation between emotion and reason in the brain, but what?
Call it gut. Or hunch. Or, more precisely, “prehunch,” to use Damasio’s term. In a famous series of experiments designed by Damasio’s colleague Antoine Bechara at the University of Iowa, patients with Elliot’s emotion-dampening type of brain damage were found to be unusually slow to detect a losing proposition in a card game. (Malcolm Gladwell offers an account of this game in his best seller Blink.)
[I found the notion of a ‘hunch,’ a gut feeling being a ‘conversation’ between two parts of the brain interesting. In Eastern religion, the chakra in the solar plexus is the location for instinctual feelings. That it is actually said to be in the brain fascinates me, and I’m contemplating this all.]
From the toddler climbing the shelves to get candy to the teenager sneaking off for unprotected sex, kids have a dangerous shortage of common sense. Their bad behavior often looks consciously defiant (and sometimes it is), but the real problem may be that their brains haven’t yet developed the circuitry that judiciously balances risks and rewards to yield level-headed decisions. This is where the neuroscientists can offer special insight.
The brain’s frontal lobes, so critical to decision making, don’t fully mature until after puberty. Until then, the neuronal wiring that connects the prefrontal cortex to the rest of the brain is still under construction. Meanwhile, the parts of the brain that incite impulsive behavior seem particularly primed in teenagers.
[I can not but wonder about the actual physical maturity of the brains in today’s MAGA population. Are their frontal lobes in some cases not fully developed? Are the pathways not properly developed? I do not have the expertise to know but this seems a possibility to me.]
In a sense, teenagers have yet to complete the wiring that manifests as willpower. The prefrontal cortex, it appears, is the seat of willpower—the ability to take the long-term perspective in evaluating risks and rewards. As such, this area of the brain is in close contact with the structures and circuits of the emotional animal brain that seek gratification and alert us to danger.
Much of the traffic between the primitive and modern parts of our brains is devoted to this conscious calculation of risks and rewards. Though animals’ reward and aversion circuitry is a lot like ours, unlike most animals, we can look out at the horizon and contemplate what might flow from a decision to chase immediate gratification. And we can get immediate pleasure from the prospect of some future gratification.
The brain’s desire for rewards is a principal source of bad judgment, in teenagers and adults alike. But it would be wrong to assign blame for ill-advised reward seeking to a single part of the brain. Rather, the brain has a complex reward system of circuits that spans from bottom to top, old to new. These circuits interact to motivate us to search for things we like and to let us know when we’ve found them. Hans Breiter, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, was among the first to use fMRI to explore this reward system. In collaboration with the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman [Nobel Prize Winner @kahneman_daniel] and colleagues, Breiter showed that the brain regions that respond to cocaine or morphine are the same ones that react to the prospect of getting money and to actually receiving it. It’s perhaps no surprise that chocolate, sex, music, attractive faces, and sports cars also arouse this reward system. Curiously, revenge does too, as we shall see. (Though Breiter’s work suggests there’s great overlap between the brain’s reward-seeking and loss-aversion circuits, for simplicity this article will discuss them separately.)
[In those with active addictions, one can only be skeptical of their ability to make rational choices. I think about this as well. Take Rudy Giuliani for example. This seems to be a case of an alcoholic (according to reports) with an out of whack decision making brain. This thought, based upon personal experience in myself, has some basis for speculation in my opinion. How many of the MAGA are suffering some form of addiction? This seems relevant within the context of the discussion.]
The reward circuits depend on a soup of chemicals to communicate, chief among them the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is often referred to as the brain’s “pleasure chemical,” but that’s a misnomer. It’s more of a pleasure facilitator or regulator. (The writer Steven Johnson @stevenbjohnson calls it a “pleasure accountant.”) Produced in the ancient structures of our animal brains, it helps to regulate the brain’s appetite for rewards and its sense of how well rewards meet expectations.
Well-regulated appetites are crucial to survival. Without these drives, our ancestors wouldn’t have hunted for food or pursued sexual partners, and you wouldn’t be here to read this article. By the same token, unchecked reward seeking isn’t very adaptive either, as patients with disrupted dopamine systems demonstrate.
Cases like Bruce’s reveal the extraordinary power of our dopamine-fueled appetite for rewards—as distinct from the rewards themselves—to ride roughshod over reason.
Among the brain regions that lit up in this experiment was the nucleus accumbens, signaling in its primitive way, “You want this.” (Rats with electrodes planted near the accumbens will press a lever to stimulate the area until they drop from exhaustion.) The higher the potential monetary reward, the more active the accumbens became. But activity ceased by the time the subjects actually received the money—suggesting that it was the anticipation, and not the reward itself, that aroused them.
As Knutson puts it, the nucleus accumbens seems to act as a gas pedal that accelerates our drive for rewards, while the relevant part of the prefrontal cortex is the steering wheel that directs reward seeking toward specific goals. When it comes to making money, having the accumbens on the gas pedal is often desirable—it motivates high performance at work among other things. But when you step on the gas, you want to be pointed in the right direction.
We do know that a desire to retaliate, to punish others’ bad behavior, however mild, even at personal cost, can skew decision making.
[Donald Trump is all about revenge, retribution. Many of his cult following share his spite. There apparently is a dopamine rush in enacting revenge. This phenomenon apparently is at play within many American brains.]
What’s more, the greater the activation of the striatum, the greater the subjects’ willingness to incur costs for the opportunity to deliver punishment. At the same time, the researchers saw activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, the deliberative part of the higher brain that’s thought to weigh risks and rewards. Once again, neuroscientists seem to have caught on camera an engagement between the emotional and reasoning parts of the brain.
These same brain regions—the reward-seeking striatum and the deliberative prefrontal cortex, both of which are activated by the pleasing possibility of revenge—also light up when people anticipate giving rewards to partners who cooperate. Though the players’ behaviors are opposite—bestowing a reward versus exacting punishment— their brains react in the same way in eager anticipation of a satisfying social experience.
This behavior is partly the work of the amygdala, a structure near the base of the brain. Colin Camerer [@CFCamerer], a behavioral and experimental economist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the amygdala an “internal hypochondriac,” which provides quick and dirty emotional signals in response to potential threats. It’s also been called the “fear site,” responsible for both producing fear responses and learning from experience to be afraid of certain stimuli. The amygdala responds instantaneously to all manner of perceived potential threats and pays particular attention to social cues. This leads to good and, often, very bad decisions.
On the one hand, we should be happy that our amygdalas warn us of potential dangers before our conscious brains grasp that something’s amiss. But a brain circuit that was indispensable to our ancestors, warning them away from legitimate threats like snakes, certainly contributes to an array of bad and irrational decisions today. In the case of our readiness to fear outgroups, think of the countless missed opportunities and just plain bad decisions made by good people who consciously hold no racial biases but who nonetheless have gone with an inchoate gut sense to withhold a job offer, deny a promotion, or refuse a loan because their amygdalas, for no good reason, said, “Watch out.”
[The Republican is assaulted with messages of fear incessantly by right wing media. They vote due to hate and fear, and have obvious problems with racism, so this all seems to have a bearing on many of their decisions. Their amygdalas are very active, perhaps more so than with the general population. I honestly think this is true. Fear will also drive me to spend time writing and posting this, as well as voting strictly Democratic. I must state that as well, my amygdala may be firing right now as well.]
Like our reward-seeking circuitry, loss-avoidance circuits involving the amygdala and anterior insula serve us well—when they’re not driving us to overact and make bad decisions.
Neuroscientists are showing that the emotional and deliberative circuits in the brain are in constant interaction (some would say struggle), and the former, for better or for worse, often holds sway. What’s more, with each new study it becomes clearer just how quickly, subtly, and powerfully our unconscious impulses work. Flash a picture of an angry or a happy face on a screen for a few hundredths of a second, and your amygdala instantly reacts—but you, your conscious self, have no idea what you saw.
Neuroscience research also teaches us that our emotional brains needn’t always operate beneath our radar. Richard Peterson, a psychiatrist who applies behavioral economics theory in his investment consulting business, advises clients to cultivate emotional self-awareness, notice their moods as they happen, and reflect on how their moods may influence their decisions. In particular, he advises people to pay close attention to feelings of excitement (a heightened expression of reward seeking) and fear (an intense expression of loss aversion) and ask, when such a feeling arises, “What causes this? Where did these feelings come from? What is the context in which I’m having these feelings?” By consciously monitoring moods and the related decisions, Peterson says, people can become more savvy users of their gut feelings.
[This is quite important to realize in my opinion, that the correct balance between reason and emotion are present within our political decisions.]
This advice may sound familiar; it lies at the heart of books like Blink and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition, which promise to help readers harness their gut feelings. But for executives taught to methodically frame problems, consider alternatives, collect data, weigh the options, and then decide, cultivating emotional self-awareness may seem like a dispensable exercise—or at least not a critical tool in decision making.
My image of the anatomy of the brain to supplement the article above.
So that is what I came up with. I learned quite a lot in this exercise, so it was worth the effort to put the time into this. I hope you agree.
93rd posting, September 16, 2023