Violence is not our inevitable future
The next step after Charlie Kirk's assassination may depend upon our expectations
Like a cyclist who expects better performance, can our nation fulfill expectations? (Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash)
Expectations can bend reality, at least to a point. Scientists found that high-performance cyclists heading into a time trial performed better when they believed they had been given a strong dose of caffeine, even though what they’d gotten was a placebo. Weightlifters likewise experienced up to ten times more strength gains than usual when they were told they had gotten an anabolic steroid, though that wasn’t true.1
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.2
So if what we imagine to be true can unconsciously affect our physical performance, surely it could even more readily influence our intentional behavior — right? That is, can’t what we tell ourselves to be true literally shape what will be?
Certainly. And that’s why the repeated assertions in recent days that our nation is on the verge of crisis are so troubling — because the more broadly an expectation spreads, the more likely it is to become inevitable. And that is why we must resist that supposed inevitability.
The assassination of the rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk in Utah this week was terrible in its immediate reality. It took a young dad from his family and shocked the sensibility of his predominantly young audience. More broadly, it tore into the assumption that America always solves its political differences by peaceful means, rather than by violence. It was undeniably and obviously a tragedy.
But we risk far more damage to our country if we elevate this incident beyond what it was, and declare that this moment has uniquely put us at risk of civil war, or that it is surely a harbinger of much more violence to come.
It’s not that there aren’t terrible divisions rending America. But this murder will provoke more attacks only if we allow that to be so. That outcome is not inescapable.
And while prominent figures with easy access to media platforms can raise the likelihood of turmoil by continually telling us that we are heading there, ordinary citizens can turn aside their prophesies by keeping their wits about them and refusing to succumb to such emotional terrorism. If we hold other expectations in place — notably, if we retain a valid sense that America has withstood other terrible crimes at similarly fraught moments — then that can become our reality, instead. We hold that power ourselves, and we must cling to it.
When our grown daughter returns to our Upstate home on holidays, there’s always a night when we settle in to watch one of the several movies that have somehow become family classics for us. We might choose one of Cary Grant’s great roles, like in His Girl Friday or The Awful Truth, or let Jimmy Stewart remind us in Harvey of how open-heartedness can change our sensibility. We’re fans of a 1990s classic, In & Out, in which Kevin Kline, Tom Selleck and Joan Cusack memorably tackle the issue of sexual identity. I’m always especially happy when we turn to The Music Man, the 1962 film adaptation of Meredith Willson’s great Broadway musical. (Friends know that I would of course like that one: I played trombone in my high school marching band, then proudly strutted in all-white as its drum major.)
There’s a scene near the end of The Music Man where the flim-flam man Harold Hill, fluidly played by the inimitable Robert Preston, saves himself from tar-and-feathering by exhorting a ragtag group of untrained boys to play “Minuet in G by Beethoven” (actually, the piece is by Luigi Boccherini). Hill has insisted that they can learn without music lessons, using what he calls “the think method,” which is of course impossible. But the kids step up with confidence in their leader and respond with a nearly recognizable version of the tune.
The townspeople of River City are then so proud of their children that they hear only a triumphant performance. And suddenly their imagination turns to movie reality as the ensemble becomes a vast brass band, emerging from the humble City Hall and powering down Main Street to “Seventy-Six Trombones” as Preston bounds forward at the band’s head — likewise changed, as Professor Hill’s crass opportunism yields to the unlikely love of Marian, the librarian, and the simple faith of her little brother, Winthrop.
It is a moment that has always struck me as conveying a powerful message, surely Willson’s intent: that hope and belief can transform even the most unlikely situation. No wonder the stage version won the 1958 Tony Award for Best Musical (beating out West Side Story) and the movie got six 1963 Academy Award nominations (Lawrence of Arabia topped it for Best Picture, with To Kill and Mockingbird and Mutiny on the Bounty also in the mix). We love to believe that good can triumph.
Of course, real life doesn’t so readily transform wishes into reality, as the tug and pull of politics so often reminds us. Our best intentions on important public issues frequently founder under the weight of ambition, ego and ideology; political clout usually accrues to those with money and connections, even when they are outnumbered. Don’t you suspect that at the end of the parade route in River City, the good people of the town would surely find their simple lives overtaken by the changes wrought by railroaders and robber barons?
There are people of goodwill all along the ideological spectrum, of course, but there are also cynics and narcissists, some of them so limited in their self-awareness or so damaged by their hereditary pathology that you might almost forgive them for being unable to stop themselves from behavior that harms our shared best interests. Better that interpretation, anyway, than to yield to the temptation to consider them evil actors who want to damage our democracy for their own advantage.
So what are we to do as we hear partisan demagogues blame their political opponents for Charlie Kirk’s assassination? U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, said Democrats were “culpable” for the murder, saying he “will be at war for the next 20 (years)” because “I will not allow these leftist scumbags to take my country.” Of course, he added journalists to the blame. “This didn't have to happen,” he said. “But it happened because of the violent political rhetoric coming out of the left, being amplified by you people in the press.”3 The term “civil war” on the social platform X jumped from about 18,000 a day to at least 210,000 on Thursday, according to The New York Times.4
And the President of the United States — unlike the plea for calm that characterized his three immediate predecessors in times of crisis — declined an opportunity to call for national unity. Asked on Fox News how we might “fix this country… (to) come back together,” he eagerly fanned the flames of anger. “The radicals on the left are the problem — and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy,” he said, even before a suspect had been captured or his motive established. “They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”5
It was a prime example of the sort of diatribes of hatred that we have come to expect of Trump, even as others offer more thoughtful and emotionally mature responses. Sadly, no megaphone in the world is as great as Trump’s, and nobody of influence in his party has yet this year stepped up to denounce their leader’s eager embrace of chaos as a governing strategy.
Yet there are voices, on both the right and the left, calling us to choices other than those that would lead to the path of violence and destruction that so many seem to see as inevitable, and perhaps even welcome. Consider Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, who has used every appearance in front of the national media since Kirk’s murder to appeal for understanding.
Declining to cast blame for what he called a “political assassination,” Cox said Friday that America’s current state demands a change in tack. “We will never be able to solve all the other problems, including the violence problems that people are worried about,” he said, “if we can't have a clash of ideas safely and securely, especially those ideas with which you disagree.”
It has been Cox’s signature issue, which he calls “Disagree Better,” since he took office in 2021. He expressed his hopes in a letter to Trump after the failed assassination attempt on the then-candidate last year. “Now, because of that miracle, you have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country,” he wrote.6
So far, that has not been Trump’s priority. Still, some see options for the country to override the proclivity of the president and his followers — as well as those similarly inclined if less vociferous on the left — to blame their partisan opponents for violence.
On the day after Kirk was killed, Politico Magazine reached out to 10 political violence experts in the U.S. and abroad to ask how to reduce tensions. Though not one was optimistic, each suggested steps for what ought to happen next.
Dartmouth’s Sean Westwood cited his research showing that while only 2 percent of Americans actually think political murder is acceptable, nearly one-third believe that their political opponents embrace it. “This belief that one is facing a vast, murderous faction — rather than a few isolated extremists — creates a phantom enemy that makes the country feel far more dangerous than it actually is,” he wrote. He urged people in leadership roles or with big audiences to focus on reality rather than to amplify outrage.
Barnard’s Eduardo Moncada likewise called on leaders to “correct exaggerated beliefs about the other side’s appetite for violence,” because the problem will only worsen if violence is normalized. “We must hold officials and media figures to account when they use dehumanizing or menacing rhetoric,” he wrote.
Barbara Walter, of UC San Diego, noted that most acts of political violence over the past two decades have been carried out by lone actors — mostly young men radicalized online. “If lawmakers were willing to curb the algorithms that amplify conspiracy theories, disinformation and hate, they could weaken the pipeline feeding violent extremism,” she wrote. “After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that may be the single most immediate lever left to pull.”
But preventing those lone-actor attacks, said Clionadh Raleigh of the U.K.’s University of Sussex, might require limiting access to firearms and reducing untreated mental health problems — the former a seeming political impossibility in the near-term. In that light, “Community-level interventions appropriate to minimizing and detecting isolation, radicalization and countering extremist messaging online are also crucial,” she wrote.
Notably, none of the experts suggested that America is, in fact, on the brink of civil war, or even that violence is widespread. That is, there is no mass movement of political violence. Yet the amplification of its reality by politicians can make it seem more broadly dangerous than it is. “Our political leaders are pouring poison into the public well,” Westwood wrote. “Instead of seeking unity, we are witnessing the cynical minting of a martyr and a call to fight.”
So the burden falls on each of us to confront our own fears and temper our tendency to awfulize our opponents. Those who are demanding vengeance are, in fact, the noisy few, though their voices are loud and their reach is outsized. Since among that number is the world’s most prominent human, we tend to find it hard to avoid the noise, and we are daily debilitated by his seeming destructive intent.
Yet to preserve the stability of the nation and to protect our democracy, we need to keep both political violence and the reaction it engenders in context. 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 cling fiercely to that vision. And we must take the concrete steps toward getting there — that is, we need to pursue the day-by-day actions that have always kept the nation on course.
It is slow work, and the progress seems plodding. There will be so many disappointments. But we need to remind each other that we are not, in fact, a nation awash in political violence. Indeed, we can remain a place of hope — but only if we maintain it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-power-of-expectations-can-allow-you-to-bend-reality/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200501-the-performance-enhancing-trick-to-being-a-better-athlete
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2025/09/11/derrick-van-orden-blames-charlie-kirk-assassination-on-democrats/86092776007/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/technology/charlie-kirk-shooting-civil-war.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/trump-fox-friends-charlie-kirk-shooting
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/12/nx-s1-5539257/charlie-kirk-spencer-cox-utah
BONUS CONTENT
GET MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN
IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.
AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or download the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”
TRAINING
DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS?
If you’d like some training in writing opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.
Our next class is Tuesday, Oct. 14, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern
Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too!
ENDNOTE — AND A WORD ABOUT NEXT WEEK
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.
Note: We will be on vacation for a couple of weeks. I’ve arranged a special treat for you: a couple of essays from another Substack columnist whose work I admire, and which I think you’ll find edifying. So watch next Saturday, and the week after, for that. And we’ll see you next month.
-REX SMITH