How can two people, who otherwise can agree on so many things, have opposite opinions of the appropriateness of a Donald Trump presidential candidacy?

I’ve tried to understand it. The best I can do is recognize my own tendencies that would lead me to willingly support a cause.

I think the first ingredient would need to be unhappiness. I would need to be unhappy about one or more conditions of my life. I would need to feel that life had not been fair to me. I would need to see others around me who appeared to have better lives and then rankle over that disparity. Being in that mindset I would welcome the words of someone who promised to make things better for me.

The next ingredient would need to be anger. My festering resentment over the unfairness of life would seek a target for blame. You can’t correct an unwelcome situation without first identifying the cause of the problem. Being in that frame of mind I could be more easily convinced that it was the current government’s policy decisions that were making it harder for me to succeed or that it was a government-favored group that was being given an unfair advantage over me, allowing them to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The promises of someone who vowed to change these policies and who could then stack the deck in my favor would therefore be very attractive.

The final ingredient would need to be fear. The fear could be either nebulous and free-floating or more narrowly defined as a fear of change or a fear of the “other.” Fear is a very powerful motivator. Once excited, that part of the brain that responds to dangerous situations takes near total control of our actions. What we do next is based upon survival, the most primitive of our instincts. There isn’t much room for reflective thought or reasoned discussion. Many otherwise disturbing details about a person’s character can be ignored once we accept them as the one who can rescue us from our fears.

Realizing that we are bombarded by warnings from all sides, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine which of our fears are founded and which are merely being spun up to control our behavior in favor of the designs of those who are fanning the flames of those fears. It’s a very slippery slope. Once you gain momentum in that slide it becomes harder and harder to rely on the part of the brain that favors reason, caution and reflection. What is one’s greatest fear? That could be the defining question of the current political debate.

Philip Lussier lives in Ashfield.