Bloggers and Politicians and Teen Pop Stars have something in common.
The Euphoria Of Connecting
A recent article in the Scientific American about the therapeutic value of blogging gives me a reason to discuss my theory of the basis of popular opinion and political and social celebrity.
Our remote ancestors were subject to many survival factors that shaped the evolution of our brains. One of the most successful survival traits is called "patterning" the hard wired impulse to find something familiar in whatever we experience so that we can successfully deal with it. This creates a "pleasure" feed back in our brains when we can repeat actions or recognize familiar objects or ideas.
When someone blogs, they are communicating their own thoughts and ideas and "person" to others, the very act of communication is therapeutic because the blogger is putting into words what their own thoughts are, thereby creating a feedback of "pleasure" from their self patterning.
The additional feedback of positive responses from others enforces their pleasure, and any negative feedback is ignored or dismissed because it does NOTHING to stimulate the pleasure response from the "patterning".The more positive feedback, the more addictive the blogging becomes.
Now we get to the area of celebrity and political power. This is the ultimate arena for the creation of pleasureable feedback from others. The more positive feedback the greater the need for still more, and the greater the reluctance to have any negative feedback, not because the "logical" mind doesn't want to listen to contrary opinions, but because
the primal mind only gets pleasure from positive reinforcement.
And so we get to the extremes, people who are the super celebrities. Those whose youth and inexperience or insular upbringing and limited experience with exposure to "contrarian" ideas have allowed them to become addicted to the positive reinforcement of their primal mind by synchophants and followers or juvenile fandom.
These are the teen "stars" who have never learned to be without the "high" of constant adulation, and the politicians like Bush or Nixon who have been in a cocoon of yes men, to whom everyone else is an enemy because they do not contribute to the "pleasure" of positive feedback.
The enormous therapeutic power of connecting with others can be enlightening, healing, and inspiring.It can create a better World and a brighter future for us all.
It can also become self destructive, rabidly dangerous, and lead to unwarranted attacks against anyone who doesn't support the maintenance of the superficial euphoria of constantly agreeable positive feedback.
Those who are really sincere in having their OWN "idol" succeed should take a deep breath and consider that their attacks on the "other" candidate are just as misguided as Bush's or Nixon's "enemy list" and arise from the same ancestral primal mindset.
In these days of political choices, the rational mind should learn to ignore the primal mind and sort through the rhetoric ,and pick and choose based on a reasonable preponderance of factual evidence . Even if that choice sometimes makes one uncomfortable because some of our "choices" don't always agree with us, and our primal mind can't be kept on a constant happy "high".
So, if you are "turned off" by Obama, or "hate" Clinton, remember, it is not your logical mind thinking, it is the vestige of your cave ancestors primal survival skills which relied on "patterning" and didn't need logic to survive.