When people feel bad and act bad, if it’s just rhetoric, they make others around them worse. That is a simple account of emotional contagion.
There is a good overlap as well, but it is difficult to remove. If nine people tell you nice things, and one person makes some believable insult, it’s an insult that sticks with you.
Most social moments are a stable mix of positive and negative emotions, but sometimes the dynamics of negative contagion take over, and negativism leads to more negativism. This undoubtedly happened in Europe before WWI, and it is undoubtedly happening in many countries today, including the United States. Extreme events, such as financial crises, can also create cycles of negative contagion.
This negative contagion is self-evident. If all the negative emotions, expressed collectively, actually make the results worse, then it would appear that those negative emotions are justified. In this equation the negative feelings of “opposing others” would be true, but even so it would be better to avoid such an equation altogether.
A country can break out of a vicious cycle by winning a major war, or if a political entrepreneur comes with enough oomph and reforms to change the balance, as Ronald Reagan did in America. However, negative cycles are hard to break once you get into them. That said, over time things start to get worse, so options for good-natured entrepreneurs emerge, at least if they can overcome the interoperability issues and get enough people to feel better.
Many thinkers and writers contribute to this balancing of negative emotions, above all by writing about each other. Even if their main points are correct, their marginal social product is often negative, although you can learn from it because they compete to provide the most impressive critique.
If you can avoid being overwhelmed by the peer pressure of this negative dynamic, the private and public benefit is high. Don’t just go ahead and build things. Yet few can resist Durkheim’s logic, no matter how much they disagree. In fact, opponents are often more vulnerable to being caught in this, because they are very skilled at rejecting and rebutting the claims of opposing forces.
Happy Fourth of July!
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