Divination and the Lesser of Two Evils

For the last three election cycles, I (along with many others) have been badgered by various versions of the “lesser of two evils” argument in response to my hesitancy to vote for any representative of the two dominant political parties. I expect such arguments from the secular world, whose role is to act with calculated efficiency as the top priority. I do not expect this from fellow followers of the Almighty, whose role is only to reflect His righteousness. But how did we get to this place where the secular and Christian communities are both proffering the same arguments, exposing a lack of function in the Church. I propose three reasons why Christians need to abandon the pseudo-probabilistic model for evaluating political candidates.

An Exploitation of Human Psychology

I want to start this work-in-progress thought in a weird place. Some time ago, (while reading a bit of Daniel Kahneman[1]) I became alienated by the realization that humans simply do not naturally (if ever) consider outcomes in rationally probabilistic ways. In fact, we seem rather incapable of it. Our perceptions of the future are almost evolutionarily designed to be incompatible with modern phenomena. This flies in the face of everything I feel, very strongly. Half of me really believes I can predict events far above chance, and the other half understands the data that stands against this conviction. The biases humans have constructed over our collective development reliably steer us in the “wrong” directions in this modern, industrialized world. So, my question was this: why were we not designed to think probabilistically, but designed to believe (with intensity) that we can? This seems like a bias that is just ripe for exploitation. And it is.

Some of our strange tendencies, like negativity dominance bias, make sense (noticing negative stimuli more saliently than positive ones[2]) because it is better to be overly cautious than overly risky. This skews our perception of the world in a way that actually improves our chances of survival. However, humans also tend towards being overly optimistically, overconfident, and sometimes entirely unable to intuit likely outcomes. Most gambling enterprises (including the lottery) hijack humans’ inability to think probabilistically. The panoply of irrational structures in the human mind led me to believe that probabilistic minds, hypothetical as they are, would suffer some great deformity in compatibility with our souls, since neither nature nor God selected them for us. However, the problem is that the distance between our ability to think probabilistically and our desire and confidence in thinking probabilistically is vast, and this wide gulf is, time and again, exploited by those in power to manufacture something that resembles consent or public approval.

Probability is a lure that draws the mind into illusory worlds. The trick is that these false worlds look a lot like our own, just a bit more mature. Probability is conceived of as a reality that exists, always, before a given event. However, not only does probability die upon commencement of a given outcome, but I would also argue that it often reveals itself to have never existed at all. The mistake is thinking probability describes the future. It doesn’t. Supposing I make a prediction that I will draw an ace from a full deck of cards with an 8% chance of being correct, upon completion of the act, there is no world where I am 8% correct. Probability splits our world into countless reflections (which all contain unidentifiable variations) and then aggregates the events of each. However, we only live in one of these worlds and supposing what’s going on in the others is useless because we can never interact with them.

By what then can one justify a behavior when it turns out to have been based upon an inaccurate expectation of the future? Of course, the common rejoinder is that the incorrect choice, if thought to have been statistically more likely at some expired point in the past, was still the “best” choice. This isn’t a claim that can really be justified or refuted because, since the widespread acceptance of statistical probability as the default mode of future sense-making, statistical probability has become the very foundation for defining a “good” choice. It is both a categorical axiom and a strategy.

When this strategy is used at scale the results are always nasty. There is the matter of raw complexity and opaqueness. The strategy of prioritizing “probabilistic” models for any social phenomenon is indefensibly vulnerable to outside influence (manufactured consent, misleading polling data, etc.), partly because the variables which determine “likeliness” are always in flux and sensitive to intentional reification. Public opinion is not like a law of nature. It functions differently when it notices itself; and, more dangerously, when it notices an illusion about itself. Returning to my previous point of the gulf between human ability and conviction of ability to think probabilistically, one could hardly be blamed for supposing that the continued institutional attempt to convince us that we can adequately weigh the options of potential candidates on the basis of likelihood is a trick to manipulate that very likelihood. Put simply, we can’t do it, and trying to do it at scale always leaves the public open to exploitation.

Willful Blindness

There is also the matter of willful blindness, which is perhaps an equally unforgiveable factor in this whole broken affair. In a proper system of evaluating one’s fitness for leadership (political or otherwise) there should be disqualifying features. The election of 2024 taught me that such disqualification is no longer enforced by voters. The “lesser of two evils” strategy, of course, indicates this eventuality from the very beginning. If some behavior violates an established and revered norm, the evaluating public must be able to eliminate the offending party from consideration without a second thought (if the system is to have any legitimacy at all). We should be able to draw lines in the sand and say, “if you cross this, you’re disqualified, no matter the context.” The reason this doesn’t happen is that the offending behavior may be enough to put one into the “evil” category, but if it does not quite measure up to the “evilness” of another, they are still in the running because of their likelihood of beating the “greater evil.” Probabilistic thinking justifies evil acts, and even incentivizes others to invent justifications.

The worst part about this situation is that some bad acts are advantageous. Lying is the best example. It should be so costly to tell a lie that if one is found out, they are eliminated from consideration of public office.  Lying can confer enormous short-term advantages, and so if it is not severely punished in the public perception, lying becomes a winning strategy. Thus, in a competition of public sentiment, when the “lesser of two evils” strategy is adopted by all, the end result tends to be the two greatest “evils” fighting for first and second place.

The prioritization of likely outcomes is more often a distraction, and it is not a requirement for acting rightly. The stoics taught us to live in accordance with nature, most especially our own. Our nature is expressed while performing the means toward an end and never in the end itself, which ever remains hidden despite our half-brained attempts at proffering likelihood as a justification for acting only towards a given end. The ends never justify the means. The belief that they do: I call this the inexhaustible permit delusion.

The ends are never certain; and so, acting under the inexhaustible permit delusion, one may find themselves providing ever more significant aid to evil in service of an end that never arrives. I am reminded of a quote from Dostoevsky, “your worst sin is that you’ve destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”.[3] Our judgments of moral magnitudes, under the spell of a pseudo-probabilistic delusion, are always compromised. So, profound regret seems inevitable when choosing the lesser of two evils as a default mode of decision-making.

Quite often “the ends” (all ends) are illusory, an eternally receding horizon that taunt our sinful efforts. Time would not stop even if our contrived outcome occurred. Another end always rises into view. How many times has the “most important election of our lifetime” occurred? Will you stop your “evil” ways after the first end arrives, or will you look to another looming end on the new horizon? Too often we find that it is means all the way down.

A Note on Impossible Sets

Before moving on to the next section, I want to note that the idea that the correct strategy of behaving rightly is to consider the behavior itself rather than the outcome of the behavior is rather easy to challenge by using a thousand manufactured and entirely unlikely scenarios. I do not consider such responses useful.  Some amended trolley-problem can be contrived to generate a hypothetical scenario where knowing the end is absolutely necessary for acting rightly. However, there are two compounding features of these hypotheticals that disallow anyone from using them as a measuring stick in the real world. The first is that these issues almost never actually appear in real life. Of course, the justification offered for this lack of practical application is that the most extreme examples expose first principles. That’s fine for a purely philosophical discussion, but such hypotheticals are not useful here because of the second feature. That is, invariably these hypotheticals are unique enough that no process can be implemented to select a workable principle which incorporates all the possible variations and allows one to propose a consistent set of solutions. They load the problem with context but require universal principles for solutions. The solutions to these hypotheticals in the real world would be equally (and in most cases far more) unique and contextual than the problems themselves, but the questions are set up in such a way as to disallow this kind of analysis.

Premodern Attempts at Addressing Uncertainty

Uncertainty is far older than the modern attempts to master it. This made me wonder what the scion of modern probabilistic thinking might have been. Statistical models were nascent for most of civilized history, and even when they started to mature, they were really relegated to academic settings. Thus, what we find for most of that time is the use of omens and religious observances to make decisions in the face of cosmic ambivalence. There are many Biblical examples of this. When Gideon wanted to know if his army would be able to defeat the Midianites, he laid out a fleece and looked at how the dew fell upon it.[4] To our modern eyes, he created a mental microcosm of a slightly more mature world, with only two relevant variables. So simple. And the manner of assigning the variables was completely immaterial. We know this because he conducted his experiment twice and reversed the variables for each test (the dew falling on the fleece versus falling everywhere but the fleece). This was the kind of divination by which the ancients attempted to master uncertainty.

Such forms of divination were so common in those days that Deuteronomy [5] explicitly forbids the performance of such omens. What’s interesting is that this prohibition does not seem to be a warning in anticipation of being misled. The practices worked. When Jonah fled from the Almighty, he was found out because his shipmates engaged in the practice of casting lots.[6] In fact, from a Biblical perspective, divination seems to be reliable more often than not.

I would make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between performing omen rituals and seeing signs, the latter of which I intend to explore in more rigor some other time. I do not believe all signs are offensive to the Almighty, but there are clearly ritualized divination practices which are forbidden, even though they produce correct assessments.

If correct though, why the prohibition? I think this prohibition can be justified by a combination of two truths. First, as already stated, one does not need to know the likelihood of an outcome in order to act rightly, as a rule. Second, the divination-seeking mindset shifts our focus away from hearing the voice of God. The adoption of this mindset in an individual results in the confusion that comes with pursuing self-determined ends. However, the adoption of this mindset in a nation creates a system whereby the most corrupt and most predatory hold all advantages in a democratic system. I see the “lesser of two evils” model of decision-making as a direct result of the probabilistic mindset. And the probabilistic mindset is the more destructive descendant of divination, more destructive because it carries all the shortcomings of divination and is far more exploitable by corrupt forces.

[1] Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus Giraux

[2] Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus Giraux, p. 300-303

[3] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Translated by Constance Garnett (2006) The Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2554/pg2554-images.html 

[4] The Holy Bible: New King James Version. (1982). Thomas Nelson, Judges 6:36-40

[5] The Holy Bible: New King James Version. (1982). Thomas Nelson, Deuteronomy 18:10-13

[6] The Holy Bible: New King James Version. (1982). Thomas Nelson, Jonah 1:7