A few weeks ago we wrote about ignorance. At II we feel it is important to address popular arguments and strip them of their fallacies in order to educate and help tone down the rhetoric. It seems that anymore American political discourse has devolved into insult laden, ignorant filled shouting matches that are as helpful to solving the issues as they are enjoyable to listen to. People remark, "It's nastier than ever," and "I don't even listen anymore." Corporate human resource department managers struggle to write policies banning political discussions at work. Social etiquette now dictates that political alignment is private information and disclosing one's views is the equivalent of telling a racist joke in public: a political anathema. Those brave enough to openly share their opinions risk long lasting social stigma and judgment. The fact that sharing one's views shows the very real effects and damage that fallacies elicit. The consequence of ignorance is tangible and is called injustice. As we wrote in Don't Drive Angry, "there is a mechanism in the human psyche that immediately recognizes and disdains injustice."
Injustice triggers that fight or flight response in our brains. The Supreme Court today ruled that the family of slain soldiers who were protested against and maliciously maligned could not sue the church organizing and leading the protests. When one reads the placards or hears the chants of that church calling the soldiers gay and declaring pleasure in their deaths it is difficult, nigh impossible to not feel a sense of injustice. When one hears of the Libyan leader hiring mercenaries to slaughter his own countrymen it is hard to not feel the injustice. When one sees a man let a door close on a woman, when one sees a child ignoring their parent's instructions, when one gets cut off in traffic, or when gets a Coke when they clearly ordered a Diet Coke it is a struggle to fight off the sense of injustice. Which begs the question: Are people becoming too sensitive?
We touched on this a few weeks ago, "The human mind was not built for nor can handle the massive amount of information we receive." People are so interconnected now within their own lives, their community, work, and the prevalence of news from around the world it is sometimes overwhelming and potentially maddening. The first ten minutes of a local newscast presents us with a staggering amount of bad news which feeds one's sense of injustice. "An apartment building burned down." "A local official is corrupt." "A family was murdered." The human brain is amazingly adaptable but it is hard to imagine that it has developed the physical coping mechanisms needed to keep pace with the exponentially rapid evolution of information flow in today's society. Not being experts on the subject we at II cannot conclude that the mind potentially struggles from injustice overload but it can help us understand the motivations of people who are either ultra-sensitive or non-empathetic.
And understanding is the key to fighting the ignorance which leads to the feeling of injustice.
Are people becoming too sensitive to injustice? Working under the assumption that injustice is a natural response in the human psyche we can examine other natural responses. Does increased frequency to pain make one more or less sensitive? Certainly people can become calloused to pain and rewire their brains to ignore, divert, or misinterpret those signals. Conversely those who have known joy find it easier to make their experiences in life more joyous than those perpetually miserable. It seems that we can hardwire our brains to produce favorable responses more efficiently as we age. So thereby the ease at which one can produce an emotion speaks to one's motivation. A simple and perhaps obvious statement, but in the context of injustice one can begin to understand and answer the question on the table. As we stated earlier the feeling of injustice triggers that fight or flight response in our heads. Fear and anger are a result of that feeling of injustice.
Here we would like to make a contextual distinction between feelings and emotions here for the purposes of this essay: feelings are natural and brief responses in the human body that lead to emotions which help us frame and determine a situation in order to make decisions. Fear and anger are emotions with a similar cause much like hunger, lust, or loneliness are emotions caused by feelings in the body.
Understanding that feelings are involuntary and it is the emotions that develop from those feelings that can be managed is the key to wisdom. It becomes simple cause and effect. If we hardwire our brains to always react a certain way given a certain input we dehumanize the spirit and puts on exhibit the ignorance that motivated that decision process. Everyone hates that certain friend whose first reaction to every proposal is "no." We call singularly emotional people robots. We euthanize animals whose response to injustice is to always fight. Being able to manage one's emotions is not only distinctive to humans, but mastery is sagacious.
So, are people becoming too sensitive to their feelings of injustice? Certainly we are overloaded with information and these feelings are instigated more often now that in human past, however while the frequency by which those feelings are instigated has increased it is the mechanisms by which we develop our emotions that have evolved and all too often over simplified. If we are to properly address the ignorance in our lives we must learn to properly balance our fear and anger. Our humanity is exemplified in our ability to do so.
Rarely is the sense of injustice more powerful than when one is confronted with a child molester. And a shift has occurred in society's reaction to these people from fear to anger. We have developed lists for post-detained sexual offenders. We ban them from our society. We rejoice when they are rounded up and forced to live in inhumane conditions. We take solace in our imbalanced schadenfreude. By dehumanizing them we justify ourselves. Throughout human history people have endeavored to elevate themselves by casting out or relegating the undesirables. The problem occurs when, in the process of working out our emotions, we create a new injustice. It is enough in today's society that just an accusation is enough to ruin a life. It is remarkably dehumanizing for both the victim and those passing judgement. We should recognize that the method used to form these emotions are likely based on ignorance. People make poor decisions everyday. Fortunately the vast majority come with little ramifications. But we all possess the ability to make that one mistake with profound and overwhelming consequences; and to forget that is disturbingly foolish.
Remember that our fear and anger are the result of our natural response to injustice and that which makes us wise is our ability to manage those emotions. We are so quick to seek retribution from those who have offended us. It has led America to become a litigious society. The politically correct reside in the fear that their emotions will reveal their ignorance. And the internet has enabled the angry to virulently lash out at those who have offended them either directly or indirectly. These emotions often signal the ignorance that led to the injustice in the first place. And the quicker one is able to deduce that the more efficient one becomes in their ability to prevent further injustice.
No comments:
Post a Comment