{"id":2235,"date":"2011-06-11T16:09:31","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T22:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=2235"},"modified":"2013-09-06T22:47:36","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T04:47:36","slug":"emotional-contagion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=2235","title":{"rendered":"Emotional Contagion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The dynamics I described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change<\/a>\u00a0applies as much to emotions as to cognitions, as we all know: Kindness and unkindness, love and hate, generosity and selfishness, forgiveness and anger, are all highly contagious, spreading robustly in conflicting, resonating, self-amplifying\u00a0currents of benevolence and belligerence. The world is full of flame wars and love fests, shouts of “get a room!” and “cage match!” On scales both large and small we cultivate\u00a0either mutual goodwill\u00a0or mutual antagonism with every word and gesture.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the dynamical, ever-changing social institutional and technological landscape described in the essays in the first box at Catalogue of Selected Posts<\/a>\u00a0is as much a function of this emotional contagion as it is of the cognitive contagion on which I routinely focus. The two are intertwined, at times mutually reinforcing and at times mutually disrupting, bad attitudes undermining good ideas, and kind emotions\u00a0concealing callous cognitions. I had discussed this several times, in a different context, in several of the essays in the second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts<\/a>, such as\u00a0The Foundational Progressive Agenda, <\/a>The Politics of Anger<\/a>, The Politics of Kindness<\/a>, The Power of \u201cWalking the Walk\u201d<\/a>, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without<\/a>, and The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, I began to identify the interplay of the substance of our political positions and the form by which they are advocated, in The Basic Political Ideological Grid<\/a>. But, as I began to indicate in that essay, their integration is more along the pattern described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change<\/a>, two reverberating currents intertwined in complex ways.<\/p>\n

I have sometimes written (drawing on the work of economist Robert Frank, among others) that our emotions are our primordial social institutional material, the commitment mechanism that bound us together before we created governments and markets and enforceable contracts; the protoplasm of “norms” diffusely enforced through mutual social approval and disapproval. But even as we have rationalized our society through the ever-increasing domain of hierarchies, markets, (fully developed) norms, and ideologies, this emotional protoplasm is still flowing through that mass of latter developments, of cognitive social institutional material.<\/p>\n

Political discourse is commonly more emotional than rational, and, as a consequence, more ideological than methodological (see Ideology v. Methodology<\/a>). That’s because ideology is the handmaiden of emotion, while methodology is the handmaiden of reason. Since reason has always played, and continues to play, only a marginal instantaneous role in human cognitions and human history (though, somewhat paradoxically, a major long-term role), the dynamics described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change<\/a>\u00a0are of a more emotional than rational nature, at least in real time.<\/p>\n

And the emotional content counts, as much or more than the rational content. There are those on the left who argue that we need to be angrier, to be more like The Tea Party, which used anger so successfully. But I argue that that is\u00a0a recipe for\u00a0becoming<\/em> The Tea Party, not\u00a0for countering it, because it is the anger, more than anything else,\u00a0that makes The Tea Party the scourge that it is. Of course, those who argue\u00a0in favor of\u00a0angrier politics\u00a0are not opposed to the emotional content of The Tea Party, but only the substantive content. They are already\u00a0adherents of\u00a0The Politics of Anger<\/a>, and are spreading\u00a0the same emotional\u00a0gospel with a set of alternative substantive hymns.<\/p>\n

The robustness of The Tea Party, therefore, is not only to be measured by how many substantive adherents it has attracted, but also by how many people it has inspired to\u00a0anchor their own politics in anger, because the virus of anger is as much a part of its message as the virus of extreme individualism, the latter carried by the former, or perhaps the former by the latter; it’s always hard to tell.<\/p>\n

I could rewrite The Fractal Geometry of Social Change<\/a>\u00a0referring to emotional hues and shades rather than cognitive hues and shades, keeping all the rest intact, and it would serve the purpose well. But the final draft would have to combine the two, the emotional and the cognitive, for, to play on Richard Dawkins’ previous play on words, we are not just a story of genes<\/em> and memes<\/em>, but also of emes<\/em>, all braided and blended\u00a0in complex and mutually reverberating ways.<\/p>\n

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards The dynamics I described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change\u00a0applies as much to emotions as to cognitions, as we all know: Kindness and unkindness, love and hate, generosity and selfishness, forgiveness and anger, are all highly contagious, spreading robustly in conflicting, resonating, self-amplifying\u00a0currents of benevolence and belligerence. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[30,42,22,36],"tags":[128,1165,1445,1444,1439,744,1438,149,57,880,135,1440,1442,927,1441,60,1025,48,1443],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2235"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404182,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions\/404182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}