Since space is divisible infinitely, how can you ever conclude your journey and get where you’re going? Every time you get halfway there, you’re still half the distance away.
This paradox has been around long enough — and enough people have successfully reached their intended destinations — that we know it is possible to actually travel between two points and not spend your brief existence on this earth taking microscopic steps toward the fridge. (If you’d like to read a simple explanation of the way out of the paradox, Slate published one in 2014.) But this idea that you can short-circuit the attainment of a conclusion by interjecting imaginary waypoints is useful metaphorically in the moment.
Isn’t this how so much political rhetoric works, after all? Things are headed to a very clear place, but people either mistakenly or nefariously insist that some other waypoint be reached first. And if you can’t reach that waypoint, how can you ever reach your intended conclusion?
Call it Zeno’s politics.
The best example here is conspiracy theories. The most obvious conclusion to draw from Donald Trump’s repeated insistences that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through fraud is that it was not. After all, there’s no good evidence that it was, and there is lots of evidence and research suggesting it wasn’t. There are a great number of reasons to believe Trump was less popular than Joe Biden (like polling) and very few reasons to think Trump would have, say, won major urban voting centers had fraud not occurred.
But instead of allowing themselves and others to reach that conclusion, Trump and his allies insist on reaching intermediary waypoints. Well, what about the container of ballots pulled out from under a table in Fulton County, Ga., they ask. You reach that point, drawing nearer to your conclusion: There was nothing untoward about that. But instead of progressing from there to the end, another waypoint: Well, what about the fact that the people counting those ballots were involved in Plot A or Scheme B? You dispatch with that brief journey and find yourself not at the conclusion but, instead, at another halfway point.
It’s probably useful to extend the analogy a bit here, with the paths intentionally splintered to create new halfway points. The direct route to the goal — there is no evidence of fraud and plenty of evidence no fraud occurred, therefore it didn’t — is turned into a briar patch. The idea that there’s a clear path to the outcome is itself muddled by having to dismiss various increasingly intricate assertions about other paths being put forward as equally important.
This pattern is facilitated by the internet in the way that Zeno’s paradox would have been aided by the presence of a nuclear scientist. The scientist could always articulate some new microscopic distance to be traversed; the internet can always find some new, more nuanced waypoint to keep us from reaching our conclusion. The intricacy of vote-fraud theories is truly a marvel, a function of more than two years of endlessly energetic Trump supporters generating and field-testing reasons that the election was suspect. And as long as their opponents can be presented as being less than 99.999-repeating percent away from the conclusion, the conspiracy theorists will claim victory.
We see this tactic elsewhere, too. In nearly any political situation, there’s always something that someone’s political opponents could do that can then be presented as a necessary waypoint for reaching the conclusion. For months, for example, Republicans insisted that President Biden wasn’t taking the situation at the border seriously because he hadn’t visited the region. Then he visited the border — or, at least, got halfway to that outcome, since it was then criticized as not being the right kind of border visit. There is always some intermediary point that can be identified as a necessary destination.
Unlike Zeno’s paradox, it’s not clear how we resolve Zeno’s politics. How do we announce that we have reached our conclusion on, say, Capitol riot attendee Ray Epps — that he was not a government agent tasked with stoking the day’s violence — when there are so many halfway points still being pointed out? More importantly, how do we make that announcement when people like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson are pretending that halfway points we’ve already moved past haven’t yet been reached?
One of the simplest responses to Zeno’s original proposal is that it is necessarily wrong because we do eventually reach our destinations. A similarly declarative statement of shared reality seems unlikely to settle the challenge of Zeno’s politics.
