It's March the 17th in A.D. 73.
We're visiting ancient Rome to watch the Liberalia, an annual festival that celebrates the liberty of Rome's citizens.
We're looking in at a 17-year-old named Lucius Popidius Secundus.
He's not from a poor family, but he lives in the region known as the Subura, a poorer neighborhood in Rome, yet close to the center of the city.
(Gong) The tenants of these apartments are crammed in, (Grunting) which poses considerable risk.
Fires are frequent and the smell of ash and smoke in the morning is not uncommon.
Lucius, who awoke at dawn, has family duties to perform today.
(Cheering) His 15-year-old brother is coming of age.
Half the children in ancient Rome die before they reach adulthood, so this is a particularly important milestone.
Lucius watches his brother stand in his new toga before the household shrine with its protective deities, as he places his bulla, a protective amulet, in the shrine with a prayer of thanks.
The bulla had worked.
It had protected him.
Unlike many others, he had survived to become an adult.
At 17, Lucius has almost completed his education.
He has learned to speak well, make public speeches, and how to read and write both Latin and Greek.
His father has taught him the types of things you can't learn in the classroom: how to run, how to swim, and how to fight.
Lucius could choose, at 17, to become a military tribune and command soldiers on the edge of the Empire.
But in other ways, Lucius is still a child.
He's not trusted to arrange business deals.
His father will take care of that until he is 25.
And Dad will arrange Lucius' marriage to a girl 10 years younger.
His dad has his eye on a family with a 7-year-old daughter.
Back to the Liberalia.
As Lucius leaves with his family, the shops are open as the population goes about its business.
The streets are full of itinerant traders selling trinkets and people bustling from place to place.
Large wagons are not allowed in the city until after the ninth hour but the streets are still crowded.
Fathers and uncles take the kids to the Forum Augustus to see statues of Rome's famous warriors like Aeneas, who led Rome's ancestors, the Trojans, to Italy.
And Romulus, Rome's founder.
And all the great generals of the Republic from more than 100 years earlier.
Lovingly, we can imagine fathers and guardians with their now adult children remembering stories of Rome's glory and re-telling the good deeds and sayings of the great men of the past: lessons on how to live well, and to overcome the follies of youth.
There is a sense of history in this place, relevant to their present.
Romans made an empire without end in time and space.
(Thump) Rome was destined to be eternal through warfare.
Wars were a fact of life, even in A.D. 73.
There are campaigns in the north of England and into Scotland, to the north of the River Danube into Romania, and on the frontier between Syria and Iraq to the east.
It's now the eighth hour -- time to head for the baths.
Lucius and his family head up the Via Lata, the wide street, to the Campus Martius, and the enormous Baths of Agrippa.
The family members leave the clients and freedmen outside, and enter the baths with their peer group.
Baths would change from dark, steamy rooms to light ones.
The Romans had perfected window glass.
Everyone moves from the cold room to the tepid room and to the very hot room.
(Man) Oops!
More than an hour later, the bathers leave massaged, oiled, (Whistling) and have been scraped down with a strigil to remove the remaining dirt.
At the ninth hour, seven hours after they left home, the men return for a celebratory dinner.
Dinner is an intimate affair, with nine people reclining around the low table.
Slaves attend to their every need if the diners, through gestures, demand more food and wine.
As the day closes, we can hear the rumble of wagons outside.
The clients and freedmen, with a meal of robust -- if inferior -- food inside them, shuffle off to the now tepid baths before returning to their apartment blocks.
Back at Lucius' house, the drinking continues into the night.
Lucius and his stepbrother don't look too well.
A slave stands by in case either of them needs to vomit.
With hindsight, we know Lucius' future.
In 20 years' time, the Emperor Vespasian's youngest son, Domitian, as emperor, will enact a reign of terror.
Will Lucius survive?
(Drums)
So since I was here last in '06, we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue, so we covered that fairly extensively in Skeptic magazine.
We investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies, but it turns out we don't have to worry about any of this because the world's going to end in 2012.
Another update: You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker.
It's like a water dowsing device.
It's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around.
And you walk around, and it points to things.
Like if you're looking for marijuana in students' lockers, it'll point right to somebody.
Oh, sorry.
(Laughter) This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls, especially if you're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes.
Well, under the category of "What's the harm of silly stuff like this?"
this device, the ADE 651, was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece.
It's just like this one, completely worthless, in which it allegedly worked by "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction," which translates to "pseudoscientific baloney" -- would be the nice word -- in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good, but it does absolutely nothing.
In this case, at trespass points, allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay, actually cost lives.
So there is a danger to pseudoscience, in believing in this sort of thing.
So what I want to talk about today is belief.
I want to believe, and you do too.
And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things.
It is the default option.
We just believe.
We believe all sorts of things.
Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural.
It's more difficult.
It's uncomfortable to not believe things.
So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs?
Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains.
Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates.
We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C.
And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning.
We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior.
In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there -- if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern.
And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern.
Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice.
And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us.
I call this process "patternicity" -- that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.
When we do this process, we make two types of errors.
A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not.
Our second type of error is a false negative.
A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is.
So let's do a thought experiment.
You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa.
Your name is Lucy, okay?
And you hear a rustle in the grass.
Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind?
Your next decision could be the most important one of your life.
Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive.
But no harm.
You just move away.
You're more cautious.
You're more vigilant.
On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch.
You've just won a Darwin award.
You've been taken out of the gene pool.
Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error.
This is the only equation in the talk by the way.
We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations.
So the default position is just: Believe all patterns are real -- All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind.
And so I think that we evolved ...
there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I'll come back to.
So for example, what do you see here?
It's a horse head, that's right.
It looks like a horse.
It must be a horse.
That's a pattern.
And is it really a horse?
Or is it more like a frog?
See, our pattern detection device, which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex -- it's our little detection device there -- can be easily fooled, and this is the problem.
For example, what do you see here?
Yes, of course, it's a cow.
Once I prime the brain -- it's called cognitive priming -- once I prime the brain to see it, it pops back out again even without the pattern that I've imposed on it.
And what do you see here?
Some people see a Dalmatian dog.
Yes, there it is.
And there's the prime.
So when I go back without the prime, your brain already has the model so you can see it again.
What do you see here?
Planet Saturn.
Yes, that's good.
How about here?
Just shout out anything you see.
That's a good audience, Chris.
Because there's nothing in this.
Well, allegedly there's nothing.
This is an experiment done by Jennifer jasonreeves@example.com. Austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns.
That is, almost everybody sees the planet Saturn.
People that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this, which is allegedly patternless.
In other words, the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there's a lack of control.
For example, baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they're batting, but not so much when they're fielding.
Because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time.
The best batters fail seven out of 10 times.
So their superstitions, their patternicities, are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth.
What do you see in this particular one here, in this field?
Anybody see an object there?
There actually is something here, but it's degraded.
While you're thinking about that, this was an experiment done by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist in England, who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an ESP test: How much did they believe in the paranormal, supernatural, angels and so forth.
And those who scored high on the ESP scale, tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns.
Here is what you show subjects.
The fish is degraded 20 percent, 50 percent and then the one I showed you, 70 percent.
A similar experiment was done by another [Swiss] psychologist named Peter Brugger, who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere.
So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere.
Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs.
So what we're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens.
Brugger and his colleague, Christine Mohr, gave subjects L-DOPA.
L-DOPA's a drug, as you know, given for treating Parkinson's disease, which is related to a decrease in dopamine.
L-DOPA increases dopamine.
An increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine.
So dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity.
In fact, neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior, things like paranoia, delusions and hallucinations, these are patternicities.
They're incorrect patterns.
They're false positives.
They're Type I errors.
And if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists, they go away.
That is, you decrease the amount of dopamine, and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases.
On the other hand, amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists.
They increase the amount of dopamine.
So you're more likely to feel in a euphoric state, creativity, find more patterns.
In fact, I saw Robin Williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine, when he had that issue, than now.
So perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity.
Dopamine, I think, changes our signal-to-noise ratio.
That is, how accurate we are in finding patterns.
If it's too low, you're more likely to make too many Type II errors.
You miss the real patterns.
You don't want to be too skeptical.
If you're too skeptical, you'll miss the really interesting good ideas.
Just right, you're creative, and yet you don't fall for too much baloney.
Too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere.
Every time somebody looks at you, you think people are jasonreeves@example.com.
You think people are talking about you.
And if you go too far on that, that's just simply labeled as madness.
It's a distinction perhaps we might make between two Nobel laureates, Richard Feynman and John Nash.
One sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a Nobel Prize.
The other one also, but maybe too many patterns.
And we then call that schizophrenia.
So the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem.
And of course you all know exactly what this is, right?
And what pattern do you see here?
Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections.
You know, of course, this is Via Uno shoes.
These are sandals.
Pretty sexy feet, I must say.
Maybe a little Photoshopped.
And of course, the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth.
It turns out what you're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see.
And you see the lamp here, I know.
Because the lights on here.
Of course, thanks to the environmentalist movement we're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals.
So what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is, of course, the dolphins, right?
You see a dolphin here, and there's a dolphin, and there's a dolphin.
That's a dolphin tail there, guys.
(Laughter) If we can give you conflicting data, again, your ACC is going to be going into hyperdrive.
If you look down here, it's fine.
If you look up here, then you get conflicting data.
And then we have to flip the image for you to see that it's a set up.
The impossible crate illusion.
It's easy to fool the brain in 2D.
So you say, "Aw, come on Shermer, anybody can do that in a Psych 101 text with an illusion like that."
Well here's the late, great Jerry Andrus' "impossible crate" illusion in 3D, in which Jerry is standing inside the impossible crate.
And he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal.
Of course, camera angle is everything.
The photographer is over there, and this board appears to overlap with this one, and this one with that one, and so on.
But even when I take it away, the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns.
This is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle.
In fact, it's the exact same picture side by side.
So what you're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one, but with that one.
And so your brain is fooled.
Yet again, your pattern detection devices are fooled.
Faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes.
Here's some faces on the side of a rock.
I'm actually not even sure if this is -- this might be Photoshopped.
But anyway, the point is still made.
Now which one of these looks odd to you?
In a quick reaction, which one looks odd?
The one on the left.
Okay.
So I'll rotate it so it'll be the one on the right.
And you are correct.
A fairly famous illusion -- it was first done with Margaret Thatcher.
Now, they trade up the politicians every time.
Well, why is this happening?
Well, we know exactly where it happens, in the temporal lobe, right across, sort of above your ear there, in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus.
And there's two types of cells that do this, that record facial features either globally, or specifically these large, rapid-firing cells, first look at the general face.
So you recognize Obama immediately.
And then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth.
Especially when they're upside down, you're engaging that general facial recognition software there.
Now I said back in our little thought experiment, you're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa.
Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator?
What's the difference between those?
Well, the wind is inanimate; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent.
And I call this process agenticity.
That is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency, often invisible beings from the top down.
This is an idea that we got from a fellow TEDster here, Dan Dennett, who talked about taking the intentional stance.
So it's a type of that expanded to explain, I think, a lot of different things: souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention, are believed to haunt our world and control our lives.
I think it's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism.
It's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us, more moral than us, and the narratives always are that they're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high.
The intelligent designer's always portrayed as this super intelligent, moral being that comes down to design life.
Even the idea that government can rescue us -- that's no longer the wave of the future, but that is, I think, a type of agenticity: projecting somebody up there, big and powerful, will come rescue us.
And this is also, I think, the basis of conspiracy theories.
There's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings, whether it's the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers.
But this is a pattern detection problem, isn't it?
Some patterns are real and some are not.
Was JFK assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin?
Well, if you go there -- there's people there on any given day -- like when I went there, here -- showing me where the different shooters were.
My favorite one was he was in the manhole.
And he popped out at the last second, took that shot.
But of course, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy.
So we can't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that.
Because, let's face it, some patterns are real.
Some conspiracies really are true.
Explains a lot, maybe.
And 9/11 has a conspiracy theory.
It is a conspiracy.
We did a whole issue on it.
Nineteen members of Al Queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy.
But that's not what the "9/11 truthers" think.
They think it was an inside job by the Bush administration.
Well, that's a whole other lecture.
You know how we know that 9/11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration?
Because it worked.
(Laughter) (Applause) So we are natural-born dualists.
Our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these.
Because we can imagine, in essence, continuing on.
We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe, you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there.
Or you can do it through loss of consciousness, by accelerating in a centrifuge.
You get a hypoxia, or a lower oxygen.
And the brain then senses that there's an out-of-body experience.
You can use -- which I did, went out and did -- Michael Persinger's God Helmet, that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves.
And you get a sense of out-of-body experience.
So I'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together.
It's just a minute and a half.
It ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief.
Go ahead and roll it.
Narrator: This is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm.
Woman: We're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial, right?
And this is test on some lip balms that we have over here.
And these are our models who are going to help us, Roger and Matt.
And we have our own lip balm, and we have a leading brand.
Would you have any problem kissing our models to test it?
Girl: No.
Woman: You wouldn't?
(Girl: No.)
Woman: You'd think that was fine.
Girl: That would be fine.
(Woman: Okay.)
So this is a blind test.
I'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on.
Kay, now can you see anything?
(Girl: No.)
Pull it so you can't even see down.
(Girl: Okay.)
Woman: It's completely blind now, right?
Girl: Yes.
(Woman: Okay.)
Now, what I'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips, the texture, right, and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not.
Girl: Okay.
(Woman: Have you ever done a kissing test before?)
Girl: No.
Woman: Take a step here.
Okay, now I'm going to ask you to pucker up.
Pucker up big and lean in just a little bit, okay?
(Music) (Laughter) (Laughter) Woman: Okay.
And, Jennifer, how did that feel?
Jennifer: Good.
(Laughter) Girl: Oh my God!
(Laughter) Michael Shermer: Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Why bother?
The game is rigged.
My vote won't count.
The choices are terrible.
Voting is for suckers.
Perhaps you've thought some of these things.
Perhaps you've even said them.
And if so, you wouldn't be alone, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong.
The game of public policy today is rigged in many ways.
How else would more than half of federal tax breaks flow up to the wealthiest five percent of Americans?
And our choices indeed are often terrible.
For many people across the political spectrum, Exhibit A is the 2016 presidential election.
But in any year, you can look up and down the ballot and find plenty to be uninspired about.
But in spite of all this, I still believe voting matters.
And crazy as it may sound, I believe we can revive the joy of voting.
Today, I want to talk about how we can do that, and why.
There used to be a time in American history when voting was fun, when it was much more than just a grim duty to show up at the polls.
That time is called "most of American history."
(Laughter) From the Revolution to the Civil Rights Era, the United States had a vibrant, robustly participatory and raucous culture of voting.
It was street theater, open-air debates, fasting and feasting and toasting, parades and bonfires.
During the 19th century, immigrants and urban political machines helped fuel this culture of voting.
That culture grew with each successive wave of new voters.
During Reconstruction, when new African-American voters, new African-American citizens, began to exercise their power, they celebrated in jubilee parades that connected emancipation with their newfound right to vote.
A few decades later, the suffragettes brought a spirit of theatricality to their fight, marching together in white dresses as they claimed the franchise.
And the Civil Rights Movement, which sought to redeem the promise of equal citizenship that had been betrayed by Jim Crow, put voting right at the center.
From Freedom Summer to the march in Selma, that generation of activists knew that voting matters, and they knew that spectacle and the performance of power is key to actually claiming power.
But it's been over a half century since Selma and the Voting Rights Act, and in the decades since, this face-to-face culture of voting has just about disappeared.
It's been killed by television and then the internet.
The couch has replaced the commons.
Screens have made citizens into spectators.
And while it's nice to share political memes on social media, that's a rather quiet kind of citizenship.
It's what the sociologist Sherry Turkle calls "being alone together."
What we need today is an electoral culture that is about being together together, in person, in loud and passionate ways, so that instead of being "eat your vegetables" or "do you duty," voting can feel more like "join the club" or, better yet, "join the party."
Imagine if we had, across the country right now, in local places but nationwide, a concerted effort to revive a face-to-face set of ways to engage and electioneer: outdoor shows in which candidates and their causes are mocked and praised in broad satirical style; soapbox speeches by citizens; public debates held inside pubs; streets filled with political art and handmade posters and murals; battle of the band concerts in which competing performers rep their candidates.
Now, all of this may sound a little bit 18th century to you, but in fact, it doesn't have to be any more 18th century than, say, Broadway's "Hamilton," which is to say vibrantly contemporary.
And the fact is that all around the world, today, millions of people are voting like this.
In India, elections are colorful, communal affairs.
In Brazil, election day is a festive, carnival-type atmosphere.
In Taiwan and Hong Kong, there is a spectacle, eye-popping, eye-grabbing spectacle to the street theater of elections.
You might ask, well, here in America, who has time for this?
And I would tell you that the average American watches five hours of television a day.
You might ask, who has the motivation?
And I'll tell you, any citizen who wants to be seen and heard not as a prop, not as a talking point, but as a participant, as a creator.
Well, how do we make this happen?
Simply by making it happen.
That's why a group of colleagues and I launched a new project called "The Joy of Voting."
In four cities across the United States -- Philadelphia, Miami, Akron, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas -- we've gathered together artists and activists, educators, political folks, neighbors, everyday citizens to come together and create projects that can foster this culture of voting in a local way.
In Miami, that means all-night parties with hot DJs where the only way to get in is to show that you're registered to vote.
In Akron, it means political plays being performed in the bed of a flatbed truck that moves from neighborhood to neighborhood.
In Philadelphia, it's a voting-themed scavenger hunt all throughout colonial old town.
And in Wichita, it's making mixtapes and live graffiti art in the North End to get out the vote.
There are 20 of these projects, and they are remarkable in their beauty and their diversity, and they are changing people.
Let me tell you about a couple of them.
In Miami, we've commissioned and artist, a young artist named Atomico, to create some vivid and vibrant images for a new series of "I voted" stickers.
But the thing is, Atomico had never voted.
He wasn't even registered.
So as he got to work on creating this artwork for these stickers, he also began to get over his sense of intimidation about politics.
He got himself registered, and then he got educated about the upcoming primary election, and on election day he was out there not just passing out stickers, but chatting up voters and encouraging people to vote, and talking about the election with passersby.
In Akron, a theater company called the Wandering Aesthetics has been putting on these pickup truck plays.
And to do so, they put out an open call to the public asking for speeches, monologues, dialogues, poems, snippets of anything that could be read aloud and woven into a performance.
They got dozens of submissions.
One of them was a poem written by nine students in an ESL class, all of them Hispanic migrant workers from nearby Hartville, Ohio.
I want to read to you from this poem.
It's called "The Joy of Voting."
"I would like to vote for the first time because things are changing for Hispanics.
I used to be afraid of ghosts.
Now I am afraid of people.
There's more violence and racism.
Voting can change this.
The border wall is nothing.
It's just a wall.
The wall of shame is something.
It's very important to vote so we can break down this wall of shame.
I have passion in my heart.
Voting gives me a voice and power.
I can stand up and do something."
"The Joy of Voting" project isn't just about joy.
It's about this passion.
It's about feeling and belief, and it isn't just our organization's work.
All across this country right now, immigrants, young people, veterans, people of all different backgrounds are coming together to create this kind of passionate, joyful activity around elections, in red and blue states, in urban and rural communities, people of every political background.
What they have in common is simply this: their work is rooted in place.
Because remember, all citizenship is local.
When politics becomes just a presidential election, we yell and we scream at our screens, and then we collapse, exhausted.
But when politics is about us and our neighbors and other people in our community coming together to create experiences of collective voice and imagination, then we begin to remember that this stuff matters.
We begin to remember that this is the stuff of self-government.
Which brings me back to where I began.
Why bother?
There's one way to answer this question.
Voting matters because it is a self-fulfilling act of belief.
It feeds the spirit of mutual interest that makes any society thrive.
When we vote, even if it is in anger, we are part of a collective, creative leap of faith.
Voting helps us generate the very power that we wish we had.
It's no accident that democracy and theater emerged around the same time in ancient Athens.
Both of them yank the individual out of the enclosure of her private self.
Both of them create great public experiences of shared ritual.
Both of them bring the imagination to life in ways that remind us that all of our bonds in the end are imagined, and can be reimagined.
This moment right now, when we think about the meaning of imagination, is so fundamentally important, and our ability to take that spirit and to take that sense that there is something greater out there, is not just a matter of technical expertise.
It's not just a matter of making the time or having the know-how.
It is a matter of spirit.
But let me give you an answer to this question, "Why bother?"
that is maybe a little less spiritual and a bit more pointed.
Why bother voting?
Because there is no such thing as not voting.
Not voting is voting, for everything that you may detest and oppose.
Not voting can be dressed up as an act of principled, passive resistance, but in fact not voting is actively handing power over to those whose interests are counter to your own, and those who would be very glad to take advantage of your absence.
Not voting is for suckers.
Imagine where this country would be if all the folks who in 2010 created the Tea Party had decided that, you know, politics is too messy, voting is too complicated.
There is no possibility of our votes adding up to anything.
They didn't preemptively silence themselves.
They showed up, and in the course of showing up, they changed American politics.
Imagine if all of the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders had decided not to upend the political status quo and blow apart the frame of the previously possible in American politics.
They did that by voting.
We live in a time right now, divided, often very dark, where across the left and the right, there's a lot of talk of revolution and the need for revolution to disrupt everyday democracy.
Well, here's the thing: everyday democracy already gives us a playbook for revolution.
In the 2012 presidential election, young voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters, low-income voters, all showed up at less than 50 percent.
In the 2014 midterm elections, turnout was 36 percent, which was a 70-year low.
And in your average local election, turnout hovers somewhere around 20 percent.
I invite you to imagine 100 percent.
Picture 100 percent.
Mobilize 100 percent, and overnight, we get revolution.
Overnight, the policy priorities of this country change dramatically, and every level of government becomes radically more responsive to all the people.
What would it take to mobilize 100 percent?
Well, we do have to push back against efforts afoot all across the country right now to make voting harder.
But at the same time, we have to actively create a positive culture of voting that people want to belong to, be part of, and experience together.
We have to make purpose.
We have to make joy.
So yes, let's have that revolution, a revolution of spirit, of ideas, of policy and participation, a revolution against cynicism, a revolution against the self-fulfilling sense of powerlessness.
Let's vote this revolution into existence, and while we're at it, let's have some fun.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)