Transcriber: Patricia Mercado Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So, let's talk about fear and anger.
I'm going to give you a scientific,
a practical, and a fairly radical set of notions about what we can do
to push back on attempts to manipulate our emotions and our minds.
So, these are very difficult times for many of us.
Debt, politics, racism, terror
have left us fearful of things outside ourselves.
And few of us realize how vulnerable fear makes us.
We like to think our emotions and our choices are our own.
But what do we really know about fear?
Jennifer Lerner is a scientist at Harvard who studies fear.
And remember this because it's important: she also studies the effects of anger.
But in her studies of fear she found what we would expect:
that fear makes us cautious; it makes us avoid risks.
This makes sense because after 9/11,
it was fear that froze the nation's stock market;
fear that made thousands of us cancel vacations
and start saving rather than spending.
Fear kept us glued to television and radio.
And this was true while they fed us more and more -
knowing we were anxious.
Waiting for that one bit of information that would make us feel safe again.
I'm afraid the media knows a truth about us, and that is this:
that making us afraid makes us more dedicated viewers.
Now, it gets more interesting.
Lerner, in her research on fear, also studied anger.
And fear and anger are closely related.
Very closely.
She describes anger as fear plus a target,
or fear plus a cause or a person to blame for it.
Now think about that.
In her research with thousands of subjects,
she found something surprising about anger compared to fear.
Anger actually makes us take unreasonable risks.
It can make us invest badly, shop irresponsibly,
make bad diet and health decisions, like choose junk food.
It can make us fail at basic math and risk calculations
that most of us make successfully every single day.
It stands to reason
in a time when the political decisions that we're making
will so clearly shape our future,
that we'd be deeply suspicious
of anyone who tries to use blame
to turn our very real fears into anger.
Because this can make us make decisions that are against our own best interest.
So,
what you need to notice, and what we all notice
is how the media focuses so often on blame and scapegoating.
How also it focuses on human brokenness -
and not on things we can fix, but on things we can't.
Notice how media's fixation,
and especially advertising industry's fixation,
on unrealistic ideals of beauty and wealth
And our own insecurities and our own fears
are used to feed insecurities further,
and make us buy products we're told are going to make us more beautiful
and more successful.
So, the question at this point is
we need to pay attention to how this feeding of our insecurities
tends to feed our fears and turn them into another emotion.
And that other emotion is despair.
Despair.
I'm afraid if you contemplate it, loneliness feeds despair.
But what happens if we try to mask or dull our fears,
our sense of despair or anger,
rather than consciously trying to reverse it?
This we know can lead to addiction.
It can lead to self-harm,
even suicide.
And I don't know about all of you, but I have lost far too many friends.
I've been to far too many funerals. Watched people struggle with addiction.
I'm afraid we have a culture of anger and despair
because we allow a culture of anger and despair to exist.
We are not powerless, though.
We can actually seek out and share news that doesn't incite anger.
We can refuse to attack when we feel attacked.
We can actually object when we see attempts to anger and divide.
We can ask questions and offer solutions.
Because that cycle of attack and revenge,
it can be addictive itself,
and that can make us empty, not happy.
And study after study of happiness
shows that happiness is fed, actually, by forgiveness.
And by compassion.
[People who post mean memes deserve to die in pain]
Then there's the world of social media.
It's a difficult one. A really difficult one.
But even that meme that insults us or those we love can be edited;
it can be revised and sent back to the world to make it better.
Because we can and we should ask the world to be better.
So we're going to edit a meme now.
Okay, on Mac or PC,
you can click on the photo on your news stream,
and that will pop open a window like this.
If you scroll up,
you get an option for downloading it -
like that -
and on a PC you have to chose that option, typically.
You can choose to open it in Windows Photo Viewer
or Paint if you can there.
You may have to wait until you get over into this screen and choose "View" up top,
right up there,
and choose "View in Paint," there, or "Open in Paint."
Open, so choose open and then click "Paint,"
and it's going to give you an array of tools up there.
On Mac, you can actually just drag that picture onto your desktop.
And once you do, you can click twice and open it.
There we go.
And you'll see a little "Editor" option up there
on most photo programs that exist on most Macs.
And what you're going to choose then is a box,
and that box helps you block out the text that is paining you.
OK? So we block out the text and we can choose an "ABC" up there.
You'll see a little text box that you can create.
Just click somewhere and the text pops up.
We're going to be able to move that, so we type our text in.
So this is our practical solution.
And I don't know about you,
but working in politics and as a state senator,
I'm always trying to mediate conversations that get heated and sometimes retaliatory.
And so the essence is to try to turn these things
into something that isn't retaliation or revenge.
[Should post positive things]
If you use the little plus sign on a PC,
that's how you have to move your text around on those.
And the little box, you have to choose "Fill" from.
So you would just close this up -
we can do additional text too, you'll see.
And we can change the color and the size of it.
And this is on a Mac, this time.
We highlight that by clicking at the beginning, dragging to the end,
let up the click, and then we can choose the size.
Make it better, bigger. [Let us be better.]
Okay, and if we click to the side and then click on the text,
we can move it.
There we go.
That's our new and improved meme.
I hope you all put that to use.
(Applause)
Sometimes, you know, social media makes us feel really powerless.
But that is the world of social media.
And then there is the world out here.
The world made up of the words we say and the actions we take.
And sometimes in that world, problems are too big to solve with words.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, we found heroes.
People who did beautiful things that day.
A waitress, a security guard, people who shielded others from bullets.
Bruno, Didi, Sameer.
But it took far too long
for us to see that beauty and that light in that well of violence
because the news kept us glued to what to fear and who to hate.
Let us be better.
But even if we're determined to be brave
and to change the world for the better,
sometimes problems are deep-seated and complex.
And only a symbolic act may have a chance of giving people hope.
And this isn't trivial
because symbolic acts, if they're recorded and shared,
they can defeat despair for others.
And they can inspire compassion and change.
I'm thinking of the staffers, the congressional staffers in D.C.
who walked out of the Capitol in 2015 with their hands up,
in solidarity with people around the country
who had faced lifetimes of racial profiling and police brutality.
I'm thinking of the 44 of us who walked into our state capitol in 2014
and stood silently, peacefully, and respectfully
until we were arrested.
Because in that state senate,
we had spent ten years waiting even for a public hearing
on a bill to include gay and transgender people
in our state's non-discrimination laws.
Those are laws that still have not changed.
I'm thinking of Amy Pence Brown,
a self-described "fat activist," who one day, in our marketplace,
stood alone and blindfolded,
holding a sign,
inviting people to write on her body
while she wore only a black bikini.
Inviting them to write a heart if they had ever also struggled with self esteem.
These acts of peaceful resistance and images of these acts
have given millions of people hope.
These acts have inspired the powerless
to feel slightly less powerless,
less isolated, less alone.
Throughout history, acts like these have inspired peaceful revolutions.
In the end, the only way to combat fear and anger
in a world constantly trying
to push our emotions and turn them against us,
is our determination to reject the path of anger,
but instead to choose compassion and forgiveness
and every second to let us be better.
Because we have no choice but to live in this world together.
And if we reject anger, we will be less alone.
Thank you.
(Applause)