Comment by lazide
7 hours ago
If you think for a bit on what you just wrote, I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with what they wrote.
You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.
7 hours ago
If you think for a bit on what you just wrote, I’m pretty sure you’re agreeing with what they wrote.
You’re literally saying why people want to be angry.
I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.
My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.
But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.
>in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed
Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.
It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.
Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.
The issue right now is that the only things you can do to protect yourself from certain kinds of predators is literally what will get you blown up on social media when taken out of context.
If people are bored, they’ll definitely seek out things that make them less bored. It’s hard to be less bored than when you’re angry.
There's a difference between wanting to be angry and feeling that anger is the correct response to an outside stimulus.
I don't wake up thinking "today I want to be angry", but if I go outside and see somebody kicking a cat, I feel that anger is the correct response.
The problem is that social media is a cat-kicking machine that drags people into a vicious circle of anger-inducing stimuli. If people think that every day people are kicking cats on the Internet, they feel that they need to do something to stop the cat-kicking; given their agency, that "something" is usually angry responses and attacks, which feeds the machine.
Again, they do not do that because they want to be angry; most people would rather be happy than angry. They do it because they feel that cats are being kicked, and anger is the required moral response.
And if you seek out (and push ‘give me more’ buttons on) cat kicking videos?
At some point, I think it’s important to recognize the difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. Social media seems adept at exposing revealed preferences.
If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry? Regardless of what words they use.
And for example, I never heard anyone who was a big Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or Alex Jones fan who said they wanted to be angry or paranoid (to be fair, this was pre-Trump and awhile ago), yet every single one of them I saw got angry and paranoid after watching them, if you paid any attention at all.
>If people seek out the thing that makes them angry, how can we not say that they want to be angry?
Because their purpose in seeking it out is not to get angry, it's to stop something from happening that they perceive as harmful.
I doubt most people watch Alex Jones because they love being angry. They watch him because they believe a global cabal of evildoers is attacking them. Anger is the logical consequence, not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is that the perceived problem is solved, i.e. that people stop kicking cats.
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