The Republic of Anger.
If you have a little time on your hand, sit in front of your television, switch to any news channel showing a political debate, turn down the volume so that you can delink from the content of the debate. Just look at the anchor and try to feel the emotion. More often than not, it would be anger.
Without taking any sides or taking a moral stand, we must understand how anger priming is shaping our politics. ‘Angry debates’ on TV is not a one-sided affair as angry spokespersons on both sides of the political divide try to maximise their appeal among their core support base. Spokespersons are treated as warriors by their support groups and the brief is to ‘fight,’ not to make sane points and convert voters. Knowingly or unwittingly, we have been pushed in a state of ‘pernicious polarization.
A 2020 paper by Murat Somer, Jennifer L. McCoy & Russell E. Lukeb define pernicious polarization as- “the division of society into mutually distrustful Us versus Them camps in which political identity becomes a social identity – fosters autocratization by incentivizing citizens and political actors alike to endorse non-democratic action.”
So what happens when a society enters the state of pernicious polarization? All discussions turn into angry debates, people’s issues become secondary, and issues put forward by a visibly partisan media now dominate the public discourse. Society reaches a point where the there is little or no room for changing your mind. No matter which side of the divide you stand, your views are now shaped and defined by the party line.
The biggest issue here, however, is how the entire society is pushed into a state of anger, how it works and what could be done to defuse it?
Politics of anger draws its genesis from the Social Identity Theory in which “addresses the ways that social identities affect people's attitudes and behaviors regarding their ingroup and the outgroup. Social identities are most influential when individuals consider membership in a particular group to be central to their self-concept and they feel strong emotional ties to the group. Affiliation with a group confers self-esteem, which helps to sustain the social identity.”
As people get deeply connected with their groups, their dependence on the group identity increases to have a sense of self. The next step they start believing that their group is superior to ‘other groups’ and this leads us to a social phenomenon called collective or group narcissism.
A paper titled Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences: The Bad and the Ugly by University of London psychologists Agnieszka Golec de Zavala and Dorottya Lantos stated that this leads to a "belief that one’s own group (the in-group) is exceptional but not sufficiently recognized by others. It is the form of “in-group love” robustly associated with “out-group hate.”
From a harmless game of trying to reinforce a person’s identity, the society suddenly gets divided into in-groups and out-groups, or simply put we are now divided into Us and Them. This division is primarily driven by hate or anger against the out-group.
This where we need to understand anger as an emotion. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, innovative businessmen have opened what they call a Rage Room. They allow people to vent out their rage on old TVs, printers and other objects using hammers, destroying them for less than $5 per session. No matter who you are angry about, the emotion continues until you vent out and destroy the object of your anger.
While Rage Rooms may be a great business idea, it is not difficult to imagine that people on either side of the political divide experience a strong sense of rage against the ‘other.’ We have reached a point where most partisans believe that there is no room for ‘co-existence.’ We are driven to a point where some sections would want to obliterate the other.
The winning side may always want the status quo to continue (all parties get hit by this in different states) and hence the onus is always on the losing side to break this state of pernicious polarization. Unless they break the logjam, they will not be able to make any inroads and turn on the winning side.
The big question is how to do this? While there is a lot of literature available for personal anger management, defusing anger caused by group narcissism is a fairly difficult thing to do. The last thing that you would want to do here is to attack anger with anger. It only adds to the degree of polarization and cements the ingroup.
Every time you try to ‘turn’ the in-group with facts, those benefiting from this polarization will defend themselves with ‘attack on the group identity’ theme. Any number of frontal attacks on the in-group will only end up benefiting those who are playing on this group identity.
History is full of examples when a smaller force overpowered a stronger opponent but nothing matches the strategic brilliance employed by the Zulu warriors in the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. Using a strategy called Horns of the Buffalo created by Shaka Zulu, the Zulus were able to completely outwit British forces. The strategy involved a mix of a low intensity frontal attack with encirclement from the flanks like the horns of a buffalo.
The biggest lessons from the Battle of Isandlwana is that frontal attack works to the advantage of the side which has military superiority. The only way for weaker forces to attack is to attack the flanks while keeping the frontlines distracted and engaged in a low-risk and mild attack.
In a deeply polarized polity, an attack on the identify of the in-group would prove to be counter-productive. Identity is never uni-dimensional as each individual has many layers of identities. Humanity and national identity are the biggest identities umbrellas. We have to fight our own versions of Battle of Isandlwana.
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