What has changed is our ability to feed and indulge our tribalism, particularly with news and politics. This new-found ability is the result of the transformation of the news and information landscape. It began with cable news. The internet has taken it to a new level.
As Roberts points out, it is not just that modern media have the ability to stimulate feelings of outrage. They have a strong incentive to do so.
Roberts elaborates on these points in this podcast.
It’s not just about outrage. It’s about the modal perspective on life and attitude towards its condition, which is an underappreciated element of social capital. There is continuous encouragement to unhealthy and delusional emotional misalignment. It’s about a spirit of complaint and grievance (anger looking up, dissatisfaction for not having more) vs a spirit of appreciation and gratitude (pity looking down, thankful for not having less).
The fundamental asymmetry is that it is much easier to agitate someone than to make someone content with their situation. It is easy to observe that human nature is to very quickly take things for granted, recalibrate to thinking one material condition is merely normal (instead of historically extraordinary), to keep racing on the hedonic treadmill, and to always feel resentment and envy towards those who enjoy the benefits higher status. Perhaps that is analogous to the risk asymmetry that leads to the ease of being drawn in to join a lynch mob vs the courage required to take a stand against one.
Think how much time and effort traditional religions put into encouraging people to regularly reflect on their situation in a positive mental mode, to express gratitude, and to see everything they have as gifts or unearned grace and undeserved mercy. No culture and opinion forming institution today has any incentive to continue this salutary tradition.
That’s not to say there isn’t a Social Failure Mode of that kind of thinking too if it goes to extremes (as all ideals tend to do if they escape control and balance). If one starts to see all accomplishment or wealth as being derived from mere luck, privilege, or the vicissitudes of fortune, then (as McCloskey and Goldberg would probably say) support for private property, free markets, bourgeois virtues, and capitalistic wealth accumulation falls while calls for regulation, expropriation, and redistribution rise.
However, if the perspective of gratitude is encouraged and kept within proper bounds, and the ritual of daily counting of one’s blessings is followed by most everyone, then one lives an entirely different kind of existence both personally and in a different kind of society.
Our progressive society, on the other hand, because of its political usefulness, does everything possible to agitate complaints and passions of grievance from perceptions of being unjustly oppressed victims. And those who are doing well are encouraged not to positive disposition, to be both grateful and proud of the fruits of their labors, inspiring pity and charity as socially rewarded virtues, but to a negative disposition, embarrassed and guilty at their “privilege”, piqued when wealth and positions are involuntarily and unceremoniously grabbed from them as the price of an uneasy and ephemeral social peace.
Complaining about something that needs urgent change (i.e., “raising awareness” in our Orwellian cant) has high status, but there would be plenty of complaining even if it wasn’t encouraged and commercially incentivized. It needs to fall dramatically in status, which most militaries naturally do, and was an aspect of more masculine or Stoic cultures, where not putting up a fuss even about real pain was considered a noble and admirable quality.
My speculative hunch is that all things is psychologically damaging and destabilizing to a large number of people, and that it is unsettling and deranging to keep people in this kind of emotional state for long, let alone perpetually. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is a connection between all this and prevailing mental illness rates, but that is just my guess.
Progressives do encourage a certain kind of pity or compassion, of course – but their pity or compassion is very selectively focused on recipients who serve to rationalize the progressives’ rage against their chosen enemies (middle-class or working-class non-“woke” white people; traditionally religious Christians & Jews; the shrinking nonconforming remnant in the academic, professional and business classes; insufficiently self-hating Israelis) or are perceived as allies against these outlaw classes. Thus, African American young men who are shot by the police (with or without justification) are posthumously celebrated as latter-day Emmett Tills, but little is said about African Americans shot by other (non-police) African American. Thus, the endless wailing over the plight of the Palestinians, but indifference to the fate of Arab Christians and Yazidis at the hands of ISIS – or, for that matter, to the Palestinians massacred by Assad in the Syrian civil war.
To be fair, the Trump true-believers seem to be motivated by rage, as well – rage that sadly blinds them to Trump’s indifference to doing much of anything to serve their interests (in spite of his insincere rhetoric). And that blinds them to their own contributions to their unhappiness. But their anger at a ruling class and establishment that is hostile to their interests and their very existence – and has been for a generation – is understandable.
Out of curiosity, has any media in the internet era actually tried going in the other direction?
Consider this list of qualities:
* No anonymous sources – all sources are explicitly named
* No reporting on things because other media is reporting on it – no stories like “Allegations have arisen that xxx”
* Report on the past, not the future – tell us what has actually happened, not what may or may not happen (have you noticed that 90% of these stories end up being wrong?)
* Stick with the classic who, what, when, where, how but don’t bother with “why” – “why” is invariably the part where you taint it with tribalism.
I think a news media that operated like this would be far more useful to readers. A usefulness that might actually be worth paying for. It would also probably be far less fun for the reporters and probably more expensive as well.
Note that business news generally operates like this, and I believe that those publications are fairing better than consumer news.
I guess I’m a little leery of accepting Roberts’ conclusion before the alternative has actually been tried and failed.
I guess a lot of it is how much you media you want in your life. Left facebook and twitter a long time ago with absolutely zero regrets. Never subscribed to cable TV so have no idea about what that all the cable TV, or broadcast TV for that matter, noise is about. Run into CNN from time to time in waiting rooms, but honestly, the largest audience for CNN, at least 10 times larger than their actual broadcast audience, is the Rush Limbaugh radio show when he plays their clips, so not missing anything ignoring those. If I am bored, I can always jump around foreign news outlets on my phone. But really, I feel fine about it, and I imagine a lot of people would be better off, tuning out most of the media world as well. The return is simply not there and however much Russ Roberts thinks we can create a better media environment, one has to ask if its worth the effort? Focusing on a dozen or so good blogs, random surfing, and using the BBC for news, provides me, for one, with a satisfactory balance and a tiny fraction of the trauma of exposure to the haters. The other thing that helps, is engaging with what you read, not just passively ingesting it: there is a reasonably good return from questioning everything.
As the years go by we have been helping my spouses parents more and more. You would not believe the tsunami of lies and fraud they are exposed to on a daily basis. They spend a lot of time watching TV, emailing friends, chatting with family, playing cards on the computer.
The scams, the phishing, the fake stories, the pleading for donations, the email chains…it is exhausting trying to tamp these things down. To get the spyware and adware and malware and phoney landing pages off their phones and computer. I read at one point the average fox news viewer is north of 70 years old now. CNN and MSNBC are not far behind. This demographic is ripe for fraud.
It seems it all boils down, one way or another, to separating people from their money. And dialing the fear up to 11 keeps the eyeballs coming back and the donations flowing. A measured analysis wont have that effect.
You would think fraud is something the government could do something about. But I guess not.
I agree with you there.
Google “pain relief center scam” for details. The part that infuriates me is scammers calling saying they are “Working with medicare.”
I used to make sure they would say they “Worked for medicare” so I could reply “stop lying to me, you don’t work for Medicare” but life is short. Now I hang up.
Between
1. the scam calls from “pain center working with Medicare” and would you believe it,
2. a fraudulent call saying our utilities would get shut off if we didn’t pay by phone–conveniently coming on a 3 day weekend…and with a phone number which was just one digit different from a valid corporate number…
there is a lot to be paranoid about. Woe to the patient, helpful, gullible, trusting person with a landline who answers it.
There are many things happening that deserve outrage.