Every once and a while a crisis appears on society’s collective conscious. It attracts an overwhelming amount of attention. Every media outlet is commenting on it. Your newsfeed fills with posts commenting on the outrage. People start demanding that “something” is done. That “something” has to change. And then, a few weeks later, poof… it disappears.
The event disappears from attention faster than it arrived. It fades from memory, not like a vacation you took last week, but instead like that thing you forgot to do this morning. You forget that you forgot. It disappears so quickly and completely that unless reminded it is easy to forget that it was even a thing.
Cecil the Lion, Fukushima, ALS, Greece’s Debt, Libya.
All these events explode onto the radar of our culture. Mainstream media hammers these events, from every angle except the sane and objective. Meme’s fly around the internet, inciting fear, anger, and outrage.
There is no logic or objective standard to the events that wrangle the emotions of the collective conscious.
We hear about how evil a Dentist from Minnesota is, but hear little of evil for the “Collateral Damage” (read: killing) done by the Military.
People are outraged over a small boy dead in Syria, but strangely quiet about 120,000 people that have died in Iraq since that war began.
Terror sets in over a meltdown in Fukushima, for two weeks the media is inciting panic over the radiation spreading across the pacific, then poof, it’s gone from attention and no one even gets sick.
There is a distortion of reality around these events, certain things seem much larger than they ought to be. A lion dying becomes a bigger issue than the loss of midsize cities worth of humans. A quote attributed to Stalin gets at some of it.
“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”
Our emotions don’t scale well. We can feel a deep sadness about the death of a child, but not 1000 times more sadness when it is 1000 deaths. We can feel anger and outrage over one shooting, but not 1000 times more outrage over 1000 shootings. Our emotions don’t scale and our emotions don’t reason. We can be lead astray by them.
These events that become cultural meme’s provoke an emotional reaction among a large number of people. The event is only sustained so long as the emotion can continue to be evoked. But, as humans, our emotions fade over time. The same event becomes normalized and does not continue to provoke the same emotions, just like your third cup of coffee doesn’t give you as much energy as your first. The outrage of the collective conscious disappears as the emotions fade because people never intellectually engaged with the issue. Photos and narratives evoke emotion, but not action.
People can feel a deep sadness about the death of a lion, because lions are majestic, and because they watched The Lion King when they were young. But on an intellectual level most people have no idea if it is right or wrong to kill a lion for sport. Because if it was wrong to kill a lion for sport what would that mean for deer? What would that mean for the mice in your basement? The spider in your bedroom? The lettuce in your salad? People feel something about Cecil the lion, just like they felt something about Kony 2012. They feel something about it, but they don’t think anything about it, so they don’t learn anything about it. A few weeks later the event disappears from your newsfeed, then the media. The event is forgotten and replaced by the next thing that can evoke a mass emotional reaction.
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