Lion? - "Fear" - Run!

From David Brooks, conservative columnist, NYT March 12, 2010, “In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.” 

Thank you Mr. Brooks.  As an observer who writes for public consumption, however small that might be, I feel moved to comment.  Mr. Brooks has masterfully explained the problem.  Those of my readers who respond that I am leaning too far in one or the other direction, are living in information cocoons.  Or as I like to think of them, “echo chambers” where they hear their own opinions reflected back to them, amplified.  There is no balance there.  Just more intensity.  Just more frustration.  Just more emotion.

Okay so exactly what is emotion?  The dictionary defines it as “a strong feeling about somebody or something”.  What the dictionary does not say is that emotions predispose us to take certain actions.  For instance, fear is a powerful emotion.  When we feel fear we are predisposed to escape from the object of our fear.  In nature, that’s a good thing.  For instance, it helped us survive when we lived in the jungles so many thousands of year ago;  Lion – fear – run!

The way this happens is that an emotional signal bypasses the modern parts of our brains (neo-cortex and cortex)  and goes directly to the old part (amygdalae).  This is the part that allowed us to take action without thinking about it.  This means that emotion predisposes us to take actions without rational thinking.

It’s no wonder that political parties use emotion-laden positions to influence us to their way of thinking.  Here’s the interesting part; they have think tanks that think up the ideas that will cause us to respond without thinking.  So those of you who say, “I think for myself”.  No one really does.  We’re all attracted to political positions that we like.

It’s no secret that I lean left in my politics.  So I’m a great deal more sensitive to the sound bites of the political right.  And I hear the exact same words repeated over and over again as though the speaker has been hypnotized.       

To be sure, there are ridiculously obvious lies and distortions being spoken by people from both sides of the public debate.  Yet if I were to point that out by citing an individual instance, I will get letters telling me that someone from the other side did the same thing last year or in the last administration.  So what’s the harm?

The harm is that the public discourse is being manipulated by people with agendas that are not in our best interests.  A classic example is the “Tea Party” movement.  I have no problem with the peoples’ right to demonstrate and protest for their interests.  But the “Tea Partiers” are protesting higher taxes when 95% of them paid lower taxes in 2009.  Only 12% of them knew that when interviewed.  So 88% were in the dark about the very topic that they were protesting.  As Bill Maher said on his show the other night, “It’s like their protesting that we sent troops to Indonesia when in fact we sent them to Afghanistan”.

Yes, by all means defend your political opinions but do that with facts.  Check yourself  by reading different news outlets.  They all have a bias.  But you can only see that bias if you can see the other side too. 

Robert DeFilippis