by Elaine Gilmartin
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“If people do not feel safe, it doesn’t matter whether they are objectively safe or not; they will eventually start to take matters into their own hands. Telling people they are safe is of limited value if they feel they are in situations of danger.”
These are the insightful words of William Davies from his 2018 book, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over The World.
This remarkable book elucidates the reasons for the politically fraught times we are now experiencing, a time in American politics where truth is as malleable as the speaker decides, where the more outlandish notions gain the greatest traction, where any efforts at civil discourse are shot down on social media platforms or on the sidelines of kids’ soccer games.
Trump’s assertions of voter fraud, crowd size, injecting bleach as a cure for COVID. Scientists became suspect, reason and logic the purview of the ‘elite.’
As Davies notes, “Experts produce facts; Google and Twitter offer trends.”
So as lies and conspiracy theories flooded the internet, as trolls sought discord and disruption, the idea that it is “better to be the perpetrator than always the victim even if it is harm to oneself” became the MAGA fuel.
In my naivete, I believed presenting persuasive facts based on verifiable evidence related to the interplay of social justice, reproductive rights, and economic parity would sway the Republican voter, would change their minds. My mistake was appealing to their minds.
“Appealing to objectivity and evidence rarely moves people physically or emotionally…social media platforms compete for our attention…words and images are merely tools to engage and mobilise people and it ceases to matter if they are valid or objective reflections on reality.”
As Davies goes on to demonstrate, “the nervous system becomes the main organ of political activity.” Feelings are what move voters and what is most intensely experienced by the central nervous system? Fear.
Trying to sway a Trump-devotee is a futile endeavor as the intoxicant for his followers was “not to be listened to or represented, but to gain a feeling or proximity to power.” When you are afraid, your fear precludes rational thought and instead inspires a desire to dominate, to destroy, much like a cornered animal.
Trump and Tucker Carlson in particular cultivated white male victimhood, stirring in them the visceral fear they are somehow being threatened, and so ignited the aggression on which it needed to grow. “As people become more disempowered and especially as they start to feel humiliated for some reason, the temptation to weaponise peaceful equipment becomes all the greater-disruption is an alternative to control.”
Those weapons included Twitter, Reddit, You Tube, InfoWars, Facebook. What is shared does not matter; what it incites, fear, is the message.
And that message “damages the feelings of security and trust that allow diverse societies to function and it replaces them with nervousness.”
Leading up to the midterms we were all inundated with political ads featuring crimes intended to incite anxiety into the electorate, with the presumption that only the Republican candidate could ‘save’ us. Migrants flooding the borders, woke teachers indoctrinating our kids with gender confusion, or species confusion if you consider kitty litter in classrooms.
Although many of us shared some collective palpable relief post election day there wasn’t a red wave, we are still holding our breath as to who will win control of the House and Senate. What this indicates is that many, many people continue to vote via central nervous system and against their best interests.
Davies states, “The perception of threat is amplified and anxiety grows until the mere feeling of violence produces actual violence …the mere sense of danger produces a rising desire for safety…much of the nervousness that influences democracy today is not simply because feelings have invaded a space previously occupied by reason, but because the likely sources and nature of violence have become harder to specify.”
Fear your way of life being taken away. Fear the diluting of your culture. Fear the LGBT kids. Fear women’s full participation at the highest levels. Fear losing your god.
What recourse do we have as technology and its content spreads exponentially and instantaneously, tweets, posts going viral, with brains not equipped to process meaningfully and discern the stream of material coming at it?
“As we become more attuned to ‘real time’ events and media, we inevitably end up placing more trust in sensation and emotions than in evidence and emotive falsehoods often travel faster than fact. The threat lurking in this is that otherwise peaceful situations can come to feel dangerous until eventually they are.”
As his central thesis of this book, Davies states, “In the murky space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states; individuals and governments living in a constant and heightened alertness, relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.”
Does this mean we must disconnect in order to save our beleaguered brains and central nervous systems? Ideally, probably yes, but that is not practical and there are many wonderful applications that enhance our quality of life and our connections to others. But passively allowing our brains to be bombarded by a constant onslaught of content is damaging to our cognitive skills and emotional regulation and we need to take back control.
Consider how many of us now operate. Our smart phones by our bedside, reaching for it the moment we wake, already scanning news alerts, instagram feeds, trending Tik Tok videos, whatever. We begin the day scattered, heightened, distracted as we scroll through images and posts and videos. And that’s before we even get out of bed.
Throughout our days our minds remains ever vigilant for that next text or post or like we received, central nervous system in overdrive just over the anticipation. We sit at home, we sit in public, we sit with friends, looking at our screens, shutting off the outside world, restricting oxygen flow to our brains in the process. We see much and learn little.
Think of kids weaned on this. The assault on their developing brains. Neural pathways closed off to higher order reasoning and problem solving and creativity and imagination all in pursuit of the Pavlovian dog response to the next ding. Seated at a restaurant with their families, handed a phone to keep them quiet, distracted, the environment around them receding to nothing as they are consumed by rapidly progressing images, tiny portions of their brains hyper-stimulated and devoid of the ability to self-soothe.
Chronically heightened and irritable with little meaningful outlet, we snap at each other. Our spouses, our kids, a Walmart cashier. The live wire that is our central nervous system perceives most stimuli as threatening simply because it is just another demand on our scattered brains. We medicate, self-medicate, anything to quell the anxiety, the depression, the insomnia of the overactive mind.
And so that next fix needs to be more and more, the more anxiety-provoking, the more intense the experience, we more intense the response. Combine that with a mob of people with heightened central nervous systems and all that negative energy feeds on one another, the mob of January 6th an internet creation culminating in visceral fear and rage and actual violence.
Can we solve this on a grand scale? Not optimistic. But you can prevent your brain and central nervous system from being hijacked. The antidote is healthy sensory stimuli. It means waking early and walking outdoors in the quiet, giving your brain ample oxygen and serotonin and liberation from the constraints of the imposition of hyper-stimulating images in quick succession, untethered to any meaningful construct of reality.
It means indulging in the delights of the sensory world undistracted, and allowing unfettered access to the creative parts of the brain where peace and serenity lie.
Walk to a library and read an actual book. Eat a meal with your family and have a conversation. Paint, draw, sculpt, run, dance, bear hug, make eye contact, climb a mountain, live in the actual world, something that the interference of a smart phone precludes.
This does not change the circumstances of the world in which we live, of course. But when you invest in the health of your central nervous system every day and immerse your brain in heathy sensory stimuli that lies only beyond a screen, you inoculate yourself to the toxicity of a virtual world that elicits your passivity, your subservience, a willing abdication of truth. Do not allow yourself to be on edge over something you can’t even identify.
Or else from that virtual chaos where a critically thinking brain goes to die, rises the next accelerant, a Trump, a Musk, a DeSantis. There’s always another just waiting in line. Don’t be its willing victim.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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