I find more people angry online than in person and I don’t know why.
Because it’s election season in the Philippines, the occasional angry mob has become a 24-hour online presence and it has been challenging to drown out all the noise and think clearly about the values and principles our parents and well-meaning teachers taught us when we were kids: to have right relations with other people.
Some people would rather dehumanize one another online, than see each other as someone’s brother, sister, mother, father, daughter, son, or friend.
No. Online faces and avatars don’t trigger the same parts in our brain that make us feel empathy when we see others face to face. Online people are always abstract in our minds, therefore wishing harm on them feels the same as wishing harm on a photograph.
Writing online also physically removes us from the consequences our words might bring us (like this blog post). Our digital screens have weakened our normal social inhibitions—we don’t scream at people all day long in the public square for all the things other people did wrong because that would be (1) physically exhausting and (2) you would be thought of as crazy or someone with anger management issues for being angry all the time.
A single person can identify problems in a system that took thousands of people years to build. They might even be correct about every flaw they identify. This criticism, while occasionally valuable, is not equivalent to the work of building. The cynic’s contribution, while real, is orders of magnitude smaller than the builder’s.
This asymmetry creates perverse incentives in our discourse. Why spend years building something that could fail when you could spend an afternoon critiquing others’ attempts and look just as smart? The cynical stance is intellectually rewarding but culturally corrosive.
We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders. by Joan Westenberg
On some days, I wonder how I could pour my hours into so many things all at once: putting food on the table and keeping the lights on, embracing the role of wife and friend, conducting my research, reading, and writing because that’s what I do, connecting with family and friends, extending hours for volunteer work, creative work, and errands, keeping in step with politics, and fighting off evil (which side?).
Who has the time to do all these things all at the same time without feeling burnt out?
And thinking about all the evil in the world, what even scares me is that everyone had been once a child. How could a child become so corrupt and evil when they become adults? But then, now I am an adult. So, I can’t help thinking that somewhere along the way, others must have given up to live right growing up and gave in to what’s pleasurable (or what gives them power) even at the cost of one’s dignity and reputation.
And so evil stirs up people into chaos.
And that chaos doesn’t stay in physical spaces. It gets amplified online. Making people less human and more like animals, acting out on anger like it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Because the algorithms reward engagement, and most online engagement is fueled with rage, group polarization online seems inescapable. Everyone is just angry, no matter which side. And if you don’t want to be on either one, then both sides would throw stones at you and crucify you for not choosing a side. “Everyone has to take sides,” they say.
jessa 