I’m at an age where thoughts of death – my death – visit me daily. Maybe it’s the morning before I get up. Maybe it’s in my commute to or from work. Maybe it’s before my evening meal, or just before I go to bed.

I’m not religious, so I don’t believe there is some magical soul in my body that leaves at the moment of death, destined for immortality. From all I know, one’s brain and inner thoughts are two sides of the same coin. There are no thoughts without a working brain. If the brain goes, so do you.

And when you go, then all your memories, every experience, everything and everyone you ever encountered, it all disappears. As if it never was.

The Great Transition.

That moment between being and not being. Consciousness and oblivion. The moment the brain stops forever. Knowing and remembering, then nothing: either past or future.

This is our inevitable fate.

Simple.

And yet.

There is something about being. It kind of goes to the ‘why’ question. Why consciousness at all, in this great unconscious universe that doesn’t care if we exist or don’t?

And I have no simple, logical answer for that.

I think the reason we keep on seeing people like Tr*mp and Farage continue to make gains is because of this asymmetric difference between intolerance and hatred on one hand, and empathy and collaborative problem solving on the other. They simply don’t speak the same language as each other.

We are in a world where the desire to destroy the perceived enemy is in the ascendant. There is no interest in rapprochement or dialogue. We can call the Tr*mpers and Farageists idiots all we want, but so long as they are in possession of all this hatred and desire to destroy, it wont make a difference.

Hopefully the pendulum will swing back at some time in the future, but not with a lot of pain having been experienced along the way.

I’m beginning to see the French Revolution as a template to understand these crazy times.

Trump, Musk, Bannon and Vance: bizarre, damaged characters; who in more enlightened times would have been consigned to prison, or the madhouse. Now finding themselves cast as Danton, Saint-Just, Desmoulins and Robespierre.

The sans-culottes: not impoverished peasants, but as the disciples of MAGA: vengeance on their minds. Ah, ça ira!

The Áncien Régime? The technocrats. The educated. All those who benefited from the world order post WW2, where physical might was replaced by intellectual might, allowing masses of outsiders to become insiders, and to thrive under a progressive dispensation.

Louis XVI? The democratic leaders of the older world. Biden, Trudeau, Starmer. Macron.

Winners and losers: were there any winners from the French Revolution? Any at all?

This is still a very unformed thought, but it has prompted me to look at the French Revolution anew. As Simon Schama has written “The French Revolution was, after all, a great demolition”. How are these times much different? Maybe only in scale, and in frightening possibilities offered by modern technology

A slightly more panoramic photo to the one I just posted on Instagram. Wild seas illuminated by the sun with the foreground shaded in cloud.

When I was a child, my grandfather used to bring me and my siblings on short walks close to our house. Sometimes he would meet up with old friends, and they would reminisce over stories of yesteryear. One of his friends was a retired priest. He was a chaplain with the US Army during the Normandy Invasion of June 6th 1944.

On that day and in the days following it, men died in their thousands so they could comprehensively destroy an idea: the belief that, in civil society, only the views of the mightiest should prevail, that undesirables be ruthlessly weeded out and all dissent be crushed utterly, to the point of mass, licensed murder.

And yet today, one day after the 80th anniversary of Normandy, on the same continent, millions are sure to vote for people who wish to promote modern versions of that same malignant idea.

The voices of unfreedom are on the rise. We hear them when they call immigrants scum and refugees spongers. We hear them when they threaten public servants and public representatives with violence. We hear them as they pushing their messages of hatred from the internet into the squares and streets of our cities and towns. These voices are seeking to get into elected office. I don’t remember a time in my life where such voices had such a strong platform.

And yet, millions of others will not vote at all today, preferring cynicism over action at the ballot box. They look at democratic politics as messy, and democratic politicians as corrupt. They see the frustration and the disagreements, the bluster, the confusion and the false promises, so tonight they will decide to stay home and watch Netflix.

For me, the messiness and turbulence is the price we pay for our democratic freedoms. Being free means that we allow others to be free too. Anyone can stand to vote and anyone can vote, so disagreements and salesmanship and outrageous promises and hypocrisy will inevitably occur. Freedom looks like this when it’s working correctly. The seeming chaos is a feature of freedom, not a bug.

If I have to choose between the chaotic underwhelm of democratic freedom and promises of simple solutions underwritten by intolerance and violence, I know which option I will always go for.

And that is why I will always fucking vote.