Greetings Economists, Joanna remarks, In the last forty years in this country, I have met some extraordinary Americans. They tended to be leftists. But take my word for it, there is a level of anxiety, of unrelenting fear and mistrust, the likes of which I have not encountered anywhere else on earth.
Doyle Michael Moore said something of the same thing about endemic U.S. fear and anxiety in his "Bowling for Columbine" movie. How does one link that up with understanding how to build a left movement in this country? I have suggested lately that media carries more or less 'emotion' depending upon whether it is text only, or motion pictures. That was the subject of my email on 'Face Blindness' to get some grasp of what emotion content does to communicate with other people. I also pointed out that emotions really matter in the sense we share them. Most people in the U.S. are enmeshed in U.S. media culture. This email list is just one example about how much we rely upon media to form groups with. With emotions faces carry a large amount of how we express our feelings. I think what impedes organizing people in traditional leftwing senses is that everyone so much relies upon media as a source of emotional structure to society. Face to face organizing must compete with media products. Literally influencing how we expect to emotionally connect to each other. Face to face organizing by contrast has to produce the same satisfactions as media movie. Face to face organizing of course has an action component that passive movies don't. In that case I don't need to hypothesize an excessively fearful people. The media may run fear campaigns to support the war, but the real issue is that most people rely upon their media for their emotional ties to this society. A weakness of U.S. mass media is the inability to actively share the content of what people consume in the movies with one and the other. We can share the content of email lists. There is an audience for the list, and there is the ability to write into the group. Movies on the other hand are very difficult to use in a sharing way. Movies, television is usually consumed in a passive sense as an individual. Someone could make a movie and have a more active role in the process. Shoot a home movie, but still the vast majority of what we watch is passively seen. So the emotional training for us is that we often take in emotions from a movie as a passive experience. In relating to the movie as a major source of emotional sustenance as the vast majority of people do, their everyday experience is sitting in a chair observing what enthralls their emotional system. Whereas emotions are really tied closely to activity. We are therefore stunted in emotional experience by receiving much of emotional experience sitting quietly in a chair. The emphasis to fear you give in your remark tells me how much you credit a specific state of feelings as the central core of what makes things hard in the U.S. I think you find fear as the problem because fear is what we would understand in our bodies as the reason why we 'won't' do something. I agree with the thrust of emphasizing emotions as a central issue for organizing the left now. But I don't think a part of the spectrum of emotions is the problem in the U.S. Many groups try to organize a left by creating a strong boundary round the group. Once inside the group the emotional life you had outside is cut off. There are many criticisms of that method of creating left groups. My observation is that it is hard for a group to grow if it can't be semi-open to networks of people flowing in and out. To grow rapidly a left group has to incorporate not individuals into a social group, but the branching network of relationships that most individuals have in their lives. The clash between socialist ideals of what a person ought to be, and the traditional emotional ties everyone carries with them makes a closed off group a difficult proposition to grow large. Further, the media is a very important source of emotional structure for the vast majority of people. The comparative products of face to face and media emotion can often be the center of how left groups founder. Inside the group emotional life has to be as good as or better than outside the group. If conditions in the group don't compare favorably with what one can get outside the group, the group is destabilized by the attraction to sitting and watching television over the stresses of organizing people face to face. I think emotional structure is key to making left organization. There is a confusion about using text based tools to form emotional structure in left groups. In my email 'Face Blindness' I give some of the crucial elements of emotion structure that the face provides that text either poorly performs or can't do at all. Face to face organizing founders in competition with media emotion structures. Email distribution lists come closer to a model of left organizing that succeeds where face to face is not succeeding. One can belong agnostically to several lists. The group membership is loose, and relatively open to the world. Email suffers like any other text based communication tool with comparison to expressing emotion structure via the face. So for now we continue to confront what you raised as a problem in your remark. I see the problem in my way, but the commonality we share is that emotion structure is the barrier in the U.S. to an effective left. thanks, Doyle Saylor
