Month:August 2018

Emocracy: Conclusions

This post concludes my investigation of emocracy[1]. I started by describing how emotions rule our world in an unprecedented way; looked at how psychology and social media contributed to this rise of the reign of emotions, in particular with regard to hate; explored the benefits and the losses of emocracy, as well as the tipping point we have reached today; and thought through seeing our emotional landscape as a commons to jointly care for as well as considering a right to the freedom of emotions. Two posts ago, I wrote about how regarding emotions as a commons might work for reasonably delimited communities who can agree on the principles and practices to care for their shared emotional landscape. And in the last post, I pointed out that assuming a right to the freedom of emotions implies a right to express emotions – which in turn brings plenty of challenges. Both views result in a collective outer display of emotions: Either in terms of a common emotional space collectively looked after by the community; or in terms of a public cacophony of individual emotional expressions created by and accessible to all.

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Emocracy: Freedom of Emotions?

In many ways, our shared emotional landscape is a commons that needs to be cared for by our joint effort[1]. However, this perspective restricts the scope of emocracy to clearly delimited communities who then still face the challenge to define – and subsequently uphold – the principles and practices to govern the emotions populating their shared spaces. Following a more recent historical trend, a broader  – and potentially global – approach would be to include emotions in the basic set of human rights: the French Revolution’s and American Independency’s way of describing universal characteristics valid for everybody on this planet. What if there was an article saying: “Everyone has the right to freedom of emotions and their expression”, similar to the existing article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression”[2]?

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Emocracy: Commons of Emotions

Living in an age of emocracy, we are tasked with finding ways to manage the transition of our emotional subjectivities into a commonly agreed upon intersubjective reality of human beings’ feelings[1]. Fortunately, the history of humanity has many examples of how people created common structures, stories, or stratagems out of individual stances, insights, or interests. Unfortunately, practically all of these examples have their successful and unsuccessful manifestations, and none (so far) has survived unaltered across times and places. Over the next three posts, I will examine three possible starting points for creating a shared emotional perspective, transforming our feelings from subjective attitudes into a shared intersubjective view. The three concepts I will investigate are: The idea of the commons; (human) rights; and transcendence.

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Emocracy: The Tipping Point

Here’s were we got in our exploration of emocracy so far[1]: We live an an age of emocracy where emotions rule our private, professional, and public lives more than ever before. This shift hast been facilitated by the workings of psychology, including the creation of a dream of boundless happiness in this life and the (re-) definition of emotions as “what makes us human”. The rise of social media has made us dependent on “likes”. At the same time, social media has reduced our willingness and ability to endure what we dislike – while keeping us firmly fixated on the need to express our dislikes. Emocracy enriches our lives by raising the bar on how to take into account people’s feelings in all our private, professional, and public interactions. And emocracy limits our resilience when we have to face unpleasant circumstances or when we have to do things that just “need to be done”.

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Emocracy: The Losses

The reign of emotions brings losses, too[1]. This post deals with a first – rather obvious – set of losses: As emotions rule our private, professional, and public lives, across all these domains we lose the willingness and ability to live with (and despite of) things we don’t like[2]. The chains of “like” bind us into searching and clinging to what we makes us feel good; and the haters’ paradox makes us pull away from what we dislike (while at the same time, urging us to express our dislikes loud and clear). With this, there’s little room for an environment which contains unpleasant episodes, unwanted encounters, or outright unbearable experiences.

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Emocracy: The Benefits

Let’s look at the benefits of emocracy[1]. As emotions rule our world, what do we gain[2]? At first glance, quite a lot: Who wouldn’t appreciate a society in which human beings are aware of their emotions, can freely express how they feel, and receive respect from others for their feelings? In this vein, “empathy” – the ability to understand and share the feelings of others – has become a universal spell for our times, from raising kids to caring for the sick, from marriage to management, and from “The Empathic Civilization”[3] to “Empathy and Democracy”[4] and “Digital Empathy”[5]. So the rule of emotions, it seems, carries an inbuilt prerequisite for these emotions to be shared, heard and listened to. Emocracy’s benefits come with a catch[6].

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