At certain points in history, feelings are what really count. Facts and logic play second fiddle. The Romantic movement in literature is one example. Another is currently unfolding in social media.
The Romantic movement in literature occurred alongside political unrest such as that which provoked the French Revolution. Intense emotion might therefore be a means of expressing political conflict.
What causes the contemporary triumph of feelings? Did psychology play a role?
Clinical psychology invited clients to look inward as a way of resolving Freudian conflicts. This offered a permission slip for some of the contemporary subjective excesses.
What Long-Term Therapy Does to Clients
There are many different kinds of therapy. Some can work quickly, such as cognitive behavioral approaches to phobias, and time-limited treatment for post-traumatic stress. Yet many people attend weekly appointments with therapists for years. Pioneered by early practitioners like Sigmund Freud, this open-ended approach has not worn well over time. Many therapists still believe that our problems lie buried deep beneath the surface and must be worked out through extended self-scrutiny.
However, introspection can aggravate anxiety and conflict rather than relieving them. Two kinds of evidence point in this direction: First, people who are happy, and manage anxiety well, are generally active and outgoing. Second, research on conflict resolution suggests that thinking about situations that provoke our ire makes us angrier instead of bringing Freudian catharsis.
In one study, students who received counseling throughout their college years fared significantly worse than those who did not. Students were asked to complete personality tests in their first and fourth years. A comparison of the two sets of scores found that students who received therapy became more anxious, more neurotic, and more depressed. They also became more introverted, the opposite of what one would expect if therapy helped clients to manage anxiety and engage with other people.
Like psychotherapy, the digital age also encourages subjectivity. The Internet offers us endless information but that information is often unreliable, and sometimes manipulated by bad actors, particularly on social media. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a decline in respect for previously trusted institutions that had functioned as guardians of truth and helped to maintain a sense of shared reality.
Declining Respect for Institutions and Privileged Knowledge Systems
Such institutions include religion, government, news media, medicine, universities, and the legal system. Half of the US population trusted nine institutions studied by Gallup in 1979. This had recently fallen to just 26 percent. Similar declines were found by European Community research.
It is not clear why this collapse in trust took place. Social scientists speculate that it is related to various failures of these institutions such as the financial collapse of 2008—for which governments are blamed—as well as sexual scandals in churches, the Covid-19 crisis and the subsequent collapse of education in some countries, the opiate crisis, and so on.
If there is no reliable arbiter of the truth, then each person can serve as their own authority in an age of limitless digital information.
Internet Omniscience and Rabbit Holes
In this environment, we are vulnerable to misinformation and deliberate disinformation by propagandists, foreign agents, influencers, bots, and all the other distorting mirrors of the Internet.
In addition to such bad actors, we are exposed to engagement algorithms that serve up content based on user engagement. This content is biased towards material that stimulates outrage and anger (1). Given that more engagement equates to more advertising dollars for social media companies, these platforms monetize hate with appalling consequences that range from family arguments to genocide.
Social Media and the Return of Medieval Morality and Entertainment
Political polarization is aggravated by social media (1). Violent pornography is promoted as well. Indeed, children’s knowledge of human sexuality is often gleaned from videos circulated on YouTube and other platforms (2).
Modern entertainment is so bloodthirsty that it leaves Jacobean revenge tragedy in the shade and is more akin to the Roman Coliseum. Our fondness for grisly fiction recalls the medieval era when grisly executions were a favorite form of entertainment.
In the digital age, there is a medieval sense of morality as well. A single unguarded comment brands a person as the modern equivalent of a witch. Everyone wants to burn them, rhetorically speaking. There have also been instances of actual riots against individual homes in addition to cyber-SWATting attacks, sexting, and “doxing.”
This “medieval” morality is brutal, and completely lacking in empathy or negotiation. It leads to permanent social rifts and “canceling” that splits up families.
Will the fever break, or are we stuck in a dark age of subjectivity? Only time will tell.
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