I can be a fiery speaker. I can get into the rhythm of an old time fire and brimstone preacher, and fall into passionate speeches to make my point. I can get caught up in the moment, and in the emotion of the point I am trying to make, and lose sight of the logical and rational reasons that I feel the way I feel.
While most humans respond positively to passionate speeches, they are more entertainment than agent for change.
All change is hard, and most humans are change resistant. Because change is hard, it often takes a strong emotional motivation to make change. Logical, reasonable arguments often lack the driving force necessary to make people want to accept the pain of change. Because change is also always painful.
Unfortunately, those emotional speeches are often devoid of fact and logic, so that we end up making change based on weak data, or end up not making change based on weak data.
The world shouldn't turn on emotion, but it often does.
I may be misreading things, but it feels to me like the United States is more prey to emotional rather than logical decision making than we have been in generations.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the fear of communism led to many emotional decisions and behaviors that almost define my childhood. People really did build bomb shelters in their backyards so that their families could survive a nuclear attack. The idea was that in the event of a nuclear attack, the family would stay underground in the shelter for two weeks, and then gradually return to the surface for two to four hours a day, returning entirely to the surface in three months or so.
Work with me on the logistics of that for a moment. Think of the food and water requirements for two weeks. Think of the human waste that will be produced. Think of the heat that will be generated. People spent real money preparing for a nuclear attack from the communists, building personal and community bomb shelters. We spent real money and lives on a war in Vietnam to control the spread of communism. And none of it logically or reasonably had any impact on communism, or actually provided additional protection or safety for US citizens.
Terrorism, rather than communism, is the threat of modern times that is frequently responded to with emotion rather than logic. Emotional calls for expulsion of entire ethnic and religious groups are heard. Emotional calls for war, for bombing, for wholesale extermination of people are made. There is a need for calm and measured dialogue.
Terrorism, like communism, is a very difficult enemy. Ideologies defy combat rules. At least in the Cold War years, it was easy to paint the Soviet Union and Communist China as our direct enemies. People try in modern times to paint Iran, or Iraq, or Syria as our direct enemies. That defies logic. There are terrorist organizations in those nations, but those same terrorist organizations have cells in the United States and Canada and Great Britain and Germany and France as well.
People want to make terrorism an act of violence committed by people who practice a radicalized form of Islam, people who pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda or ISIS, but terrorism is bigger than that. Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. And it comes in many forms. And emotional calls for actions that cost lives and money need to be very carefully analyzed for logical and rational reasons they will work.
I suppose it is part of being human to respond more passionately to emotional dialogue. But I think we would all do well to remember that real solutions come from data analysis, and calm and measured debate of the facts.
After the debate, solutions can be proposed and analyzed, and the solutions most likely to create success can be deployed.
But first, we have to all stop responding to the impassioned rhetoric, and start the hard work of data collection, and calm analysis of the data.
Solutions exist to the challenge of terrorism. Until we commit to real analysis and debate, we will be stuck in emotional responses that are not solutions.
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