The Rising Tide of Global Sadness https://t.co/7gLr5rX8gR
— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) October 28, 2022
From the article:
The researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply.
Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 different news outlets popular in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, but headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.
The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.
The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions — related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain — hit a record high last year.
The last two paragraphs:
If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? Well, rising levels of populism for one. And second, greater civil unrest across the board. Clifton noted that according to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent — riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations — increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.
We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.
Christopher Lasch:
ReplyDelete"if I have to be labelled I would prefer to be called a populist. That is an ambiguous term to be sure and can give rise to all sorts of misunderstandings. I readily admit populism can be reactionary. Nor has it been successful at countering bad economic programs with good ones of its own. I use the term primarily to recapture a moral vision that has been largely lost in modern society. It is, first of all, a useful way of criticizing the pretensions of progress and also a way of setting in relief certain values I cherish: a sense of limits, a respect for the accomplishments and aspirations of ordinary people, a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities, genuine hope without utopianism which trusts life without denying its tragic character. Populism, however ideally we might want to reconstruct it, does not offer a ready made solution to our multiple ills. I think, however, it asks the right questions. And it comes closest to answering the question about civic virtue. Above all, it is connected to a moral tradition. For this reason alone we cannot let it go out of fashion."
It sucks that everyone has to be so "miserable" for all of this to become possible, but if that's what it takes...