There was a remarkable line in one of the holiday greetings I got last week – so thoughtful, in fact, that I’m thinking of getting it needlepointed onto a seat cushion, so that I’ll have it around all year. It was a comment attributed to John Lubbock, a Victorian-era English scientist and business leader, who helped establish the science of anthropology. Here’s the quote: “What we see,” he wrote, “depends mainly upon what we look for.”
I’d say that sums up how our expectations and prejudices affect our perceptions. And Lubbock was writing about a scientific pursuit, which involves systematic research; so it’s surely all the more true of the way we interpret everyday life, which we rarely approach with intentional objectivity. What we expect to see in no small part determines how we perceive what we encounter.
Imagine, then, if our expectation was for hope and goodwill. What would be different in 2026 if, all year long, we expected more of our leaders and ourselves, and looked toward positive outcomes?
I don’t mean that we ought to paper over offenses or pretend that all is well in a society where that’s clearly not true. If you’ve heard my commentaries here before, you know that I’m outraged by the intentional cruelty and careless incompetence of the Trump administration, and by the flirtation with fascism that has overtaken the old Republican Party. You don’t have to look far for evidence that America is in deep trouble. In fact, you have to avert your eyes from reality to not notice it. You have to be looking for Trump to be as great as he imagines himself to be to not see how corrupt and dangerous he is.
But what about the rest of us? What if we were to look for signs of hope and for paths toward getting there? How would we behave differently in the new year?
There’s some pretty good science on this topic, actually. Researchers tested it on high-performance cyclists heading into a time trial – and they found that the cyclists performed better when they believed they had been given a strong dose of caffeine, even though what they’d gotten was a placebo, with no caffeine at all. And weightlifters likewise experienced up to ten times more strength gains than usual when they were told they had gotten an anabolic steroid, even though that wasn’t true.
There’s a physiological reason for this performance-enhancing power of a mindset: The brain responds to hopeful expectations by triggering the release of neurotransmitters, like dopamine, that are associated with both motivation and pain reduction.
Now, if what we imagine to be true can unconsciously affect our physical performance, surely it could even more readily influence our intentional behavior. That is, what we tell ourselves to be true can – to a degree, anyway – shape what will be. So we have to be careful about that.
Take, for instance, what happened right after the assassination in September of the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. We heard some people saying that this could be the trigger to provoke a civil war. Of course, our president didn’t help: He said, “The radicals on the left are the problem,” in one of his usual diatribes of hatred.
Here’s the thing: Research from Dartmouth University has found that only 2 percent of Americans think that political murder is acceptable, but that nearly one-third believe that their political opponents embrace it. So if you think the other side is full of would-be murderers, you’re going to react differently to something like the Kirk killing than if you think they, like you, are opposed to the idea. There is no mass movement of political violence, but the amplification of fear by some of our leaders makes a lot of people believe it’s there. And that increases our risk.
So the burden falls on each of us to confront our own fears and temper our tendency to awfulize our opponents. We can do that by holding to account those who exaggerate the threat that their opponents represent and by rewarding those who try to help us sustain our faith in America. We need to imagine a future that involves a peaceful resolution of our differences and a rebirth of American democracy – and we must cling fiercely to that vision.
No, imagining things won’t get us there; we have to take concrete steps toward fixing what’s wrong. Part of that, surely, must include support for the thoughtful and honest people who aspire to be our representatives and leaders.
If we want to be a nation of hope and promise, we have to look for it, expect it, and demand it. That’s what I plan to be doing from my needlepointed seat cushion in the new year: looking for hope.
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