"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" -Richard Feynman
As a neuroscientist and psychologist, I cannot diagnose President Biden, but I can diagnose why we are arguing with each other in such unproductive ways. The debate over whether Biden should step aside and let someone else be the standard bearer in November’s election reveals just how easily our disagreements devolve into negative attributions about the motivations of others. Many of us suspect those who disagree with us over Biden’s fitness for office are arguing in bad faith – saying things they know to be false in order to achieve a particular end.
All of us who are arguing were largely indistinguishable members of a single group just two weeks ago. We all want to ensure Trump does not win the next election and will be rallying people in October to vote for the Democratic nominee, whether it is Biden or someone else. Yet, Biden supporters have accused those who want Biden to step down of actually wanting Trump to win and not appreciating the strength of Biden’s first term. Meanwhile, Biden supporters are being accused of being delusional or worse - knowing the facts but being unwilling to say them publicly or to Biden’s face. To paraphrase J.M. Barie, the author of Peter Pan, never assume others’ motives are worse than your own. We are the same team trying to solve the same problem – avoiding a Trump second term that would be disastrous for the nation.
The reason we aren’t all reaching the same conclusion is because we are all engaged in decision-making under uncertainty. None of us has all the relevant facts. But the reason we are at each other’s throats is that we fail to appreciate that the images of the future that we each generate from the existing facts are constructions of our own minds, rather than additional facts. We mistake the images of potential futures we create for true facts about the world. This reality illusion where we confuse our evaluation of things in the world for being facts in the world themselves makes it almost impossible for us to see others who disagree with us as arguing in good faith. We are mentally filling in the blanks of a half-drawn picture but then taking our filling in as something that was already there on the page. If my filling in of the blanks is experienced by me as factually correct, then your filling in of the blanks must represent something wrong with you when you see things differently than I do.
In the current case, we have a few relevant facts. Fact #1: Biden is the oldest President in history. Fact #2: The probability of mental decline increases with age. Fact #3: Biden had the worse debate performance of any candidate for President in history (with Trump’s performance probably being the second worst). Fact #4: No party has had a candidate step down this late and gone on to win. Anyone telling you definitively what is going on with Biden based exclusively on these facts does not actually know. They are extrapolating – at best engaged in an educated guess.
Imagine possible future #1. The debate turns out to be a single episode and Biden is not declining. Three years from now, Biden seems healthy and cognitively unimpaired. But he stepped aside for the good of the country and then things were thrown into chaos because Democrats could not find a strong consensus over who should replace Biden on the ticket. Eventually a candidate wins at the convention, but some voters’ feelings are hurt over their preferred candidate being passed over. The new candidate has never been tested at this level and in October opposition research comes out that deeply damages this candidate who goes on to lose all the battleground states by 6% and Trump is re-elected in a modern landslide.
Now imagine possible future #2. Anyone who has watched a loved one slowly and then quickly succumb to dementia knows that someone with cognitive decline can have really bad days and really good days. Its only clear in retrospect that decline was happening. A bad debate or a good interview a week later does not settle the matter because both are consistent with problematic decline or something momentary like an illness. Imagine Biden rallies the troops and everyone who ever supported Biden falls into line knowing he is clearly a far better choice than Trump. The race proceeds and then in October, Biden is doing a press conference and has another episode where he looks lost and confused, mumbling incoherent answers with a wooden presence. Independents who were already worried Biden is unfit are now sure of it and decide to sit out the election or vote for someone else. Biden goes on to lose all the battleground states by 6% and Trump is re-elected in a modern landslide.
Everyone who is arguing right now is probably fixated more on one of these images of the future than the other. They have a stronger fear of one of these imagined futures and are taking a public stand accordingly. But these imagined futures are not facts and those who focus on the alternative are not delusional or craven. None of us have the foresight to know which of these futures is really more likely; we will only know in hindsight, sort of. But we would do better as a group if we acknowledged that we are each responding to our own imaginations and not just to the facts that spark our imaginations. If we did that we might not be creating the kind of divisiveness we are currently seeing.
President Biden and his team could also help if they took the actions necessary to give us more facts and reduce our uncertainty. That should be his number one priority right now. Instead of threatening his colleagues into silence, he should ask to be assessed by an independent team of neurologists and neuropsychologists who are allowed to share their results with the public and who are not pressured to reach a certain conclusion. Ideally, this team would consist both of people who start with the intuition that there is decline and those who have the intuition that there is not. It would then be an adversarial collaboration that is likely to produce more trustworthy results. In addition, Biden should be doing press conferences at least once a week, the more combative the better. The fact that Biden has so far refused to do either of these things is what ultimately tips me towards thinking he needs to step aside for the good of the country. If he had genuine confidence in his own mental capacity and a clear awareness that most of the country does not currently believe he is fit to be President for another four years, he should be happy to do these things to put the rest of us at ease.