It's amazing sometimes how little we can be conscious of our actions and the way they affect the world. People often go on and watch violence on TV, or use negative and heavy language in their daily lives, believing this has no effect whatsoever on their general life stye. This couldn't be further from the truth.
I think many of you - at least those of you who have read some new age philosophy, or have listened to some Buddhist talk, or perhaps have some knowledge of psychology - have heard of the famous 'law of attraction' and its overwhelming consequences. What many people don't know is that this so called universal law, which is really just a psychological hack which I'll explain later, is affecting our life and the way our world is shaped every single second of our life.
Indeed it is not merely the words we speak and the actions we take, but the thoughts themselves that we think that deeply affect our lives. How is that possible? They are just thoughts after all, aren't they? Well, not exactly. Thoughts are real, tangible things. They are electrical signals in our brain that have a chemical effect on the brain as well as our body. They cause real and tangible emotional states - depending on the type of thought (negative, positive, etc), they cause more thoughts, and then they cause us to act in conscious, and mostly unconscious ways in our lives (1,2,3). This is the reason why life-coaches keep stressing us about the power of thinking patterns in creating our lives: they are not simply talking magical woo woo, this is a psychological truth. A thought such as "I'm not capable" goes way beyond simply making the person who thinks it place that thought in their mind, it causes a series of emotional states and subconscious actions which will lead the person to confirm that thought and indeed prove that they are not capable. Same goes with any kind of thinking that has to do with ourselves or the world, "I'm not good enough", "she's evil", "black people are dangerous", and so on, all have tangible consequences in the way we act and we affect the world.
For this reason, the law of attraction, in particular with regards to thoughts, says that we attract and empower whatever we place our focus on. If we focus on negative things, we attract and give power to such things in our lives, and vice-versa. This has been supported in psychological studies (4,5,6) .
So what happens when a whole nation of people focuses on one thing collectively, namely the idea of a person, and in particular a person possibly becoming president? How do you think that affects our reality? Where are we placing our power and what kind of power are we placing?
I hope the answer is obvious by now. But to make sure you understand the tangibility of this process, and don't discard it as some kind of magic talk, here is an article to open your eyes, showing how even negative attention in the media contributed to Trump's election (7). Yes, even those people who were bashing him and writing negative things about him, contributed to empowering this person. Indeed the 'universe' does not really care wether what we focus on is negative or positive, it doesn't care about our artificially judgements, it just attracts what we focus on. This is the power of negative publicity.
The reason why I felt in a 'I told you so' mode when he got elected and everyone was shocked in horror was that in the months before the presidential elections my Facebook feed, the news, the internet was filled with coverage about this person. I don't care weather a person is trying to become president, or to take over the companies of the world, someone getting so much attention in my view had already won, by virtue of taking up mental space and the attention of millions of people, ensuring himself an incredibly amount of influence.
This situation gives us a great chance to look at ourselves with great honesty and pose some deep questions. Why do we focus so much on one individual anyways ? Are we placing so much attention on things outside our direct scope of influence as a way to avoid our responsibility for things that are directly in our sphere of influence? Is it actually fair to place so much power on one individual? Really think about it, how fair is it to expect one person to solve the problems (or create problems) for millions of people? Perhaps this focus of power is something we need to start questioning.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debbie-hampton/how-your-thoughts-change-your-brain-cells-and-genes_b_9516176.html
[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4116-brain-study-links-negative-emotions-and-lowered-immunity/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948078/
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-clear/positive-thinking_b_3512202.html
[5] http://www.attn.com/stories/2587/what-negative-thinking-does-your-brain
[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emily-madill/the-power-in-focusing-on-_b_8909230.html
[7] http://uk.businessinsider.com/mark-cuban-why-trump-won-2016-11?utm_content=buffer41036&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-ti&r=US&IR=T