In my last post, I discussed reasons why rage bait is so depressingly successful. And I see a lot of discourse in favor of libertarianism that seems to lean into the rage bait angle. Sometimes it takes the form of “look at this outrageous and awful thing” done by the government or caused by government regulations. Of course, one could try to frame such an article as explaining a tragic and sad tale, rather than using it to promote anger and outrage. But this is not a good strategy for engagement – stories that provoke sadness actively discourage engagement. Another method of rage bait I sometimes see takes a lower track, along the lines of “here’s why anyone who disagrees with us must be stupid, evil, or both.” Neither of these are routes I particularly enjoy taking.
Still, the news is not entirely bad – and there is at least one promising alternative to rage bait that can be used to make ideas more engaging. According to the study I cited in the previous post, there’s one particular form of engagement that is almost as successful at creating engagement as anger – and it’s one I think libertarians can take advantage of. You can see it on Figure 2 on page 8 – while anger is the most motivational emotion, a close second is awe.
This is something libertarian ideas can very easily accommodate. Leonard Read’s classic essay I, Pencil has had a tremendous amount of staying power precisely because its message, when fully understood, is truly awe-inspiring. The ideas of decentralized and spontaneous order, too, can be awe-inspiring when first absorbed. I was awestruck reading the Ostrom’s work on how people can come to voluntary, decentralized, bottom-up solutions to collective action problems that most social scientists insisted could only be solved by coercive, centralized, top-down approaches.
I think Hayek understood this on some level – in his paper The Use of Knowledge in SocietyHayek refers to the price mechanism as a “marvel” and follows up by saying,
I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.
I myself have attempted to make my own contributions to this kind of discourse, such as the time I used something as seemingly simple as bananas. I pointed out how, if you think about it, the fact that on a twenty-below-zero winter day in Minnesota I can go to any grocery store in the area and buy seven pounds of fresh tropical fruit for three dollars is utterly amazing.
I think awe beats anger as an overall approach. For one, it’s just more psychologically healthy. Wallowing in anger, and encouraging others to do so, is a miserable way to spend your limited life. (As the comedian Patton Oswalt once said to a heckler in his audience, “You’re going to miss everything cool, and die angry.”) But more importantly, awe has far more staying power in the long term. Anger burns bright but burns out quickly – and that’s why it so often seems like the zeitgeist is so quickly hopping from one outrage of the moment to a new one the moment after. Anger can’t sustain itself. But awe can capture someone’s imagination for a lifetime.
