As the USA and a nervously waiting world waits to see what impact the 47th President of the United States is going to have on domestic and global affairs, there’s no denying that this result has been a particularly seismic moment.

From the instant the result became inevitable the world has become awash with pundits – and particularly those who supported Kamala Harris – trying to make sense of what seemed to have been impossible – some 73 million citizens voting for a regime change that is highly likely to be unpredictable, dangerous and possibly very self-implosive. Turkeys it seems do sometimes vote for Christmas. One gentleman from Kentucky summed it up perfectly – “there’s really nothing I like about Donald Trump, he’s offensive and disgusting, it’s just that he was better than the socialist alternative.”

Here in the UK politicians often complain that it has become all but impossible to anticipate the mood and intentions of the general public. Time was you could pretty much bet a tenner on how any class, group, faction or collection of advocates were going to vote on anything, but the arrival of the internet not only democratised the public narrative, it shattered it into a million sub-streams that has already created a world where there are almost as many opinions as there are citizens living in it. For a country the size of America, and especially given that it is really a large number of diverse and distinct countries pushed together by history, trying to predict – never mind cater for – 300 million differing opinions is always going to be a hopeless task.

What has distinguished this particular election is that politics, social care and fiscal strategies radidly became diminished and discarded, fermenting public opinion down to two fundamentally opposing positions – liberal vs orthodox, capitalism vs socialism, inclusivity vs exclusivity and no doubt many other primitive polarities of the human subconscious. One might have thought that such profound divisions could have been anticipated along familiar monochrome lines – black vs white, rich vs poor, citizen vs immigrant, conformity vs anarchy – but no, the Trump/Harris contest reduced ‘argument and substance’ to ‘invective and prejudice’ to a degree that returned an entire country to the darkness of the prehistoric mind.

For most commentators there was no apparent logic to how so many groups of citizens actually voted – why would immigrants vote for a larger pay packet but likely deportation; why would black men not vote for a black woman; why would so many women vote for a misogynist like Donald Trump, why would confederates vote for an LGBT-supporting liberal? In the world of conventional polling and analytics nothing made much sense in this election, unless of course you look at the trends through the glass of the most primitive and subconscious aspects of human instinct. This election had little about domestic or even global policies, it was nothing short of a contest between two world orders, between two visions of the future of the human person, and most importantly between the two outlooks of the primitive human in its cave when confronted with other humans  – do we go out and embrace, or do we batten down and defend?

Across the course of living history it tends to be the case that co-operation is generally far more effective than competition, but it’s not a concept that all humans either recognise or espouse. Most likely the best strategy for human survival is a carefully-constructed balance of both co-operation and self-preservation, but we are living in a moment in our evolution where these things have been driven to extremes, and with dreadful consequences. On the one hand the kind of perverse liberal relativism that the late Pope Benedict was so concerned about has come to place the individual’s wants and demands at the epicentre of society and the human experience. In the face of this sweeping onslaught on established habits, morals and social attitudes the traditionalist has been driven to the back of the evolutionary cave, having been convinced that the entire global order is on the brink of collapse.

Seen in this light, the voting habits of America this week become far clearer – in short it hasn’t been about whose policies do you support or oppose, but what kind of country do you want to live in? Sadly, this primitive and explosive question was exploited quite ruthlessly by both of the main candidates – there were actually others running for election but this was such an existential conflict that the voting was always going to come down to something as big as the stars and stripes, or a rainbow banner.

Hereby, of course, is a salutary lesson for other countries too – the relentless devaluation of political integrity and public interaction with democratic processes has been reducing many countries to a highly dangerous kind of ideological politics that is dividing populations dangerously.

Those in positions of power on both sides of the debate like to interpret such convulsions as bigots versus the enlightened, or conversely as the dignified versus the perverted. But wherever one stands, the argument always seems to be progression versus regression, justified by the prevailing illusion that we have finally crawled out of our caves and into enlightenment – when in fact the opposite scenario is equally valid.

For us Catholics – and for those Catholics in America who did bother to vote on Wednesday – our place outside of the main flow of public life (Jn 17:16) gives us a uniquely powerful and insightful understanding of both the human condition, and its ultimate prospects for survival. This is the central paradox of our faith – we know that this world that God created has the absolute potential to be a living paradise and we strive with every human strength to create that, but we also know that ultimately we are only passing through on our way to a far greater place. As Christians we do not let the vision of our eternal destiny overshadow our worldly preoccupations, and this is a position that enables us to deal with some of the complex contradictions that we have to confront when issues such as a General Election arise.

When the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales produced the groundbreaking document Choosing the Common Good in 2010 in the run up to that year’s UK General Election, there were many who thought that the document outlined very succinctly the Catholic arguments involved in voting decisions, but offered precious little in terms of indicating exactly who to vote for – the overarching message was ‘here’s the facts, now you go off and decide what to do’. We now know this as discernment, and it’s the central – and equally most profound – iteration of the Catholic paradox, the balancing of greater and lesser evils that all but consumed the saintly St Augustine, who wrote much of the practical foundations of our faith.

From the Catholic or Christian perspective it’s critically important that we make voting decisions based on the principles that we cherish the most, but this won’t be the same for everyone. How we balance those good principles against the evil intentions that we need to resist is not a dilemma, it’s the profoundest gift of faith itself. The fact that we have ‘discerned’, that we have even been able to weigh good and evil, is the gift that comes with our faith. It is this that has enabled devoutly religious Americans to reject Kamala Harris’ aggressive support for abortion and place their vote instead for a man whose morality and intentions are profoundly open to question. It is also the gift that has led other US Catholic citizens to reject Donald Trump’s narcissism and divisive nationalism in favour of an equally contradictory candidate who has rejected the preservation of life at its most vulnerable, but who may yet save many thousands of citizens from oppression and deportation.

For St Augustine, life on this earthly planet can be a vicious and contradictory process, and one that can even involve us partaking in acts of evil. Of course this is a consequence of Original Sin, but this also enables us to accept that our journey through the physical is not about the preservation of purity, but of how well we deal with the contradictions that a turbulent world confronts us with.

With the US elections now concluded, the world is going to enter a new phase of development, and one that will be heavy with uncertainties, paradoxes and uncomfortable challenges. This will affect those of us of faith particularly, as elements of our most cherished beliefs – and the most profound commandments that Christ has left us – are to be found in equal measure in both liberal and orthodox politics.

Given that the world is slumping ever deeper into isolationist positions, and our neighbour is being pushed relentlessly towards the supremacy of self-preservation and self-importance, it is becoming of profound importance that metaphysical perspectives are sustained within political narratives. As legislators continue to experiment ever more profoundly with the limits of good and evil, it will increasingly be down to us and not them to represent the voices of the vulnerable, the marginalised and the desperate, quite regardless of the idological flag we have gathered under.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian