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“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it” - Sigmund Freud
We’ve all noticed that angry people are drawn to simplified black-and-white narratives. The question I’d like to explore this week is why this is.
The first piece of the puzzle comes from Vicente Valentim, a political scientist. He has argued that there has always been a baseline of people with radical views. In the pre-internet age, many of these people used to realise that their opinions were considered socially unacceptable by others. Before social media, they mostly bit their tongues. As a result, others tended to under-estimate how many people held these views, particularly in an age of gatekeepers.
Social media changed the game in the 21st century. Research shows that decentralised websites tend to reward extremism. Nobody wants to watch boring videos about the Earth being round! Tell us why it’s flat and all the scientists are lying! At the same time, social media also helps people with unusual views build communities with other like-minded folks.
Daniel Kahneman - a psychologist so brilliant that he won the Nobel Prize for economics without being an economist - offers us an important clue about the difference between emotionally satisfying but wrong views and less engaging but sounder opinions. He said that our brains work in two different ways, which he calls System 1 and System 2.
System 1 is our default system. It is fast and intuitive. It is good at jumping to conclusions that are approximately right some of the time. However, this way of thinking is prone to problematic biases and shortcuts. Meanwhile, System 2, which involves hard concentration on tricky problems (think your maths homework as a kid or doing a Sudoku puzzle as an adult), is difficult for most of us to fire up or sustain most of the time.
At the risk of generalising a little, Kahneman’s work suggests that bad ideas are often fast and intuitive snap judgments. People would often get better results by slowing down, and being more thoughtful about the appropriate methodology to solve the problem at hand, while wondering if our underlying baseline beliefs are true.
Meanwhile, Bryan Caplan, a libertarian economist, argues that the worldviews of many voters are characterised by irrational biases, which appear to make intuitive sense on the surface without yielding good results in practice. For example, people on the right often demonstrate antiforeign bias, while people on the left are prone to antimarket bias, he argues. The first might manifest itself as a hysterical hatred of asylum seekers; and the second as demands for failed policies like rent controls.
There are dangers to the superficial and biased narratives that emerge out of our flawed hunches. José Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher and essayist, identified the spoilt-child fallacy, which involves people taking systems and institutions for granted and then undermining them. The example he gives is of a riot due to food scarcity, with a mob burning down the bakeries as a result. A more modern example might involve people taking the health benefits of vaccines for granted and then lobbying against this essential way of preventing diseases.
Of course, non-extremist views, developed carefully out of System 2 thinking, often stress predictable rule-based institutions for society; as well as hard work over a seriously long time, combined with a little luck, for individuals. Ideas are judged by their results rather than the emotional impact of the narrative that supports them.
Sadly, the battle between System 1 and System 2 is rarely a fair fight. We are emotional creatures rather than natural analysts. The tragedy is that a slower approach can offer a better cognitive link to reality than a fast and intuitive one (to borrow a concept from philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, who writes about the virtues of the mind).
Now that we have set the scene, we can return to the question of why simplified narratives are so appealing to angry people. First of all, anger locks us into System 1 and makes it very hard to use System 2. You can test this yourself. Next time you are feeling seriously annoyed, run an experiment by trying to solve a puzzle! You will find it surprisingly hard. Once you have locked yourself into System 1, narratives will appeal much more to you than analysis.
Secondly, angry people often decide to deploy conspiracy theories as the bodyguards to intuitive ideas that are failing to connect with reality, as we have seen many times before in this blog. An angry mindset is often defensive rather than reflective, thoughtful or self-aware. Humility is notable by its absence.
Thirdly, my thesis is that anger creates a strong sense of winners and losers. Seeing the world this way leads to a scarcity mindset. In the jargon of game theory, a scarcity mindset sees zero-sum games everywhere: I can only win if you lose; and if you are winning, that means that I am losing.
We can see this clearly right now in the United Kingdom (UK), where furious narratives about the alleged dangers of accepting asylum seekers into the country are becoming common on the right. The numbers are very small - the government spends less than half of 1% of the budget on asylum seekers. However, if people are angry, the idea that refugees are getting put up for free in hotels that used to be considered posh can be threatening. Couldn’t that money be spent on native-born people instead?
I also think that there is a fourth reason that black-and-white narratives appeal to angry people. These tales tend to stress actionability. If you are worried that there are too many refugees, maybe, just maybe, painting a flag of St George on a roundabout might suddenly solve the issue! Slowing down and firing up System 2 to see if this is an appropriate response is a difficult step for people in the grip of strong emotions, as we have already seen.
It is important to note that although angry narratives are rarely aligned with the world outside our heads, they often express a deeper truth about the people who promote them. For example, someone who says that refugees are the biggest problem in contemporary society is actually telling us that they feel left behind in a fast-changing society and also that they miss simpler times and a more homogeneous culture.
Meanwhile, someone who loudly proclaims that the government should destroy the housing market by controlling rents is actually telling us that it is much harder to get a step on the ladder than it used to be for previous generations.
This final point will be familiar to the parents of young children, who know that the subject of an epic tantrum is rarely the point. Angry kids often need a snack, a drink, a cuddle, and/or a nap, no matter what they happen to be yelling about, which is often irrelevant. Wise parents often keep “magic biscuits” to hand, which can solve all sorts of seemingly unrelated toddler crises.
Sensible elected officials know that the combination of peace, economic growth, almost full employment, low inflation, safe streets, a welfare state to temper the ups and downs of a market economy, and a functional housing market is the best way to keep most voters on an even keel most of the time.
Of course, nobody has found a way of getting rid of the economic cycle in a market economy. In that context, the ability to steer an economy out of a recession quickly and efficiently while avoiding rampant inflation during a boom is roughly equivalent to parents packing biscuits into a rucksack in case a toddler has a meltdown.
Unfortunately, though, this is far from the full story. The electorate can get reckless during a long economic boom as many voters assume they will be fine even if wild-eyed politicians gain power. Any explanation is likely to include the rise of social media and the decline of gatekeepers (a theme we mentioned at the beginning of this essay). The comments are open. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
On the economic cycle (part one and part two)
Further Reading
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies by Bryan Caplan
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand by Vicente Valentim
Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
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