by anthony funnel For ABC's Future Tense Podcast
If the world seems chaotic at the moment, that's because it really is.
Fear and anger permeate our politics, social discourse, and expectations for the future.
Blame can be directed at the usual suspects: dictators, populists, malcontents, and online trolls.
But that's not all.
Social researchers warn that fear and anger are being monetized as a result of deliberate manipulation by commercial and political interests.
But experts warn that the antidote to current fatigue is not simply suppressing extreme emotions. In fact, both fear and anger can foster a desire for justice and revolution and aid in positive social change.
Rather, what is needed is a greater public understanding of the role these emotions play in our lives, and a greater awareness that when emotions are manipulated, even with the best intentions, the consequences can be disastrous. Get it clear, they say.
When good fear turns bad
Historian and author Robert Peckham describes fear as the flip side of hope. Hope and fear are “woven together,” he says.
“Fear sharpens the mind. That's why fear is used in campaigns, whether it's public health or changing people's attitudes to things like climate change,” he told ABC RN. future tense.
Peckham argues that when a society fears losing its values and way of life to an external threat, that fear can harden resolve, as happened in the fight against fascism in the mid-20th century. .
But he points to the long-term paranoia of the Cold War era as an example of well-intentioned fear deployments gone horribly wrong.
“Difficulties arise when ambitious elements in politics are ruled by fear,” he says.
“After the horrors the world experienced after World War II, democracies became defensive. In other words, fear is an important tool to ensure that this kind of perversion never happens again. That's what I thought.
“But in the process of doing so, fear actually became too important as a construct. And rather than being a kind of defense mechanism, it began to overshadow the very values that fear was meant to protect.”
This is because democracies engaged in a number of questionable moral campaigns in the decades after World War II, including the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and propping up brutal right-wing dictatorships around the world. It helps explain why you did what you did.
overusing fear strategies
Peckham says societies and communities are becoming “civilized” with fear. But overusing fear's motivating power can lead to apathy and mistrust, he says.
“I think the coronavirus pandemic has probably shown us that too much fear breeds apathy. People shrug their shoulders and say, 'Why bother?'” he says.
Noel Castree believes part of the problem is one of language.
Castrie studies the political economy of environmental change. For example, fear-based discourse around climate change is on the rise, he says, and the use of fear-laden expressions and language often backfires on those deploying them.
“When you fall in love with someone, [UN Secretary-General] Antonio Guterres uses the term “global boil”, but the problem is that many people are not experiencing the climate crisis in their daily lives and are not experiencing excessive heat. There are no wildfires in the immediate vicinity. They just switch off,” he says.
Another problem is that many of the doomsayers used by well-meaning climate change activists are “futuristic”, which increases the difficulty most people have in engaging with them. .
“They're saying if we don't do something about this problem now, it's going to be much worse in 10, 20 or 50 years,” he says.
“And, of course, the challenge for people today is trying to empathize and use their imagination to think about their own future situations…It's very difficult.”
fear and mislead
Although we tend to equate fear-based leadership with totalitarianism and populism, there are many examples in democracies where politics is colored by the use of fear as a blunt instrument of coercion.
Consider the recent robo-debt scandal and discourse surrounding “illegal” immigration.
Leadership expert and author Margot Faraci says fear is also on the rise in the management of businesses and organizations.
Faraci recently surveyed 2,500 emerging leaders in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.
She found that more than a third of them admitted to leading their organizations with fear.
“Leaders either micromanage or avoid getting into trouble,” she says.
She says this approach can impact the health and well-being of employees and ultimately hurt an organization's bottom line.
According to her estimates, fear-based leadership could cost the Australian economy billions of dollars in productivity.
“When fear pervades the system, and it pervades all of our systems, it means we lose dynamism, we lose innovation, we have high turnover of talent, it means high costs,” she says. .
Administrators may also be negatively affected.
“About half of people who identify as being controlled by fear actually suffer from decision fatigue, because they're just so afraid of doing the wrong thing that they overdo it,” she says. To tell.
“About 40 percent [of these leaders] Witness the decline in team morale [and] About half are dissatisfied with their jobs. So this doesn't go well with the fearful leader, much less his direct reports. ”
The rise of “ernomics”
It's difficult to fully understand how fear shapes our world without addressing the relationship between fear and anger.
Fear, as a tool of coercion, can only take people to their limits, but Peckham says that fear creates grounds for anger and causes us to “otherize” those we dislike or disagree with. .
“Anger, fear, and hatred are certainly very important components of what happens when fear begins to spread throughout society.”
And anger is important to those who profit from fear because anger creates action.
“Anger happens to be one of those emotions that makes us act quickly and sometimes prevents us from acting as we should. [possibly] Otherwise, it becomes more systematic, deliberate, and slows down the decision-making process,” says Jennifer Lerner, a psychologist at Harvard University.
And she says people are more vulnerable when they're angry, which makes them attractive to individuals and groups looking to manipulate opinions.
“When we're angry, we don't pay attention to the details of complex messages,” says Lerner.
“We tend to find simple messages more persuasive.
“We found that the more one person expressed anger, the more others expressed anger, and it became a kind of spiral of increasing anger.”
This is much like the situation many people lament online when social media platforms seem to descend into abuse and abuse.
According to Erika Fersht, founder and principal consultant at US-based Scintillate Brand Consulting, much of the anger one feels when browsing a device is not inherent, but is intentionally created for profit. It is important to recognize that the
Provoking outrage is becoming the norm for many online jobs, she says.
“There are several ways the media monetizes our emotions, but this is the quickest and most effective,” Fersht says.
“For the vast majority of companies, this is a near-certain marketing tactic.”
This is why she calls it “outrage marketing” or “cultivated controversy.”
This works because in an algorithm-driven culture, the popularity of a particular piece of content is not determined by the number of people who see it, but by the level of engagement it generates.
“The human brain reacts and engages much more quickly when you're angry than when you're looking at something calm and kind,” she says.
“So if I make you angry, you're going to let that emotion out and what I put in front of you, which is my communication, will be better.”
But Fersht believes many people are becoming aware of this manipulation and are tired of being angry and interacting with angry content.
“I see a lot of people talking about anger fatigue. [saying] Everything is so bad that they can't watch the news anymore and don't use social media. So some people actively opt out,” she says.
So perhaps we are reaching a tipping point where many of us realize that we are living in a vicious cycle where manufactured fear fuels anger and anger blinds us to the realization that fear is misplaced. It may be.
But Fersht argues that if we ever reach that point, it won't be because of a benign change of heart on the part of those who monetize our emotions.
“unfortunately, [online businesses] It’s driven by profit and growth,” she says.
“That’s exactly the nature of the business system we envision.”
-ABC