Feelings Make the World Go ’Round

The world runs on one thing: feelings. This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good. And where the money flows, power flows. So, the more you’re able to influence the emotions of people in the world, the more money and power you’ll accumulate. Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people. Money is its own special, universal mini-religion that we all bought into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our values into something universal when we’re dealing with one another. You love seashells and oysters. I love fertilizing soil with the blood of my sworn enemies. You fight in my army, and when we get home, I’ll make you rich with seashells and oysters. Deal? That’s how human economies emerged. No, really, they started because a bunch of angry kings and emperors wanted to slaughter their sworn enemies, but they needed to give their armies something in return, so they minted money as a form of debt (or moral gap) for the soldiers to “spend” (equalize) when (or if) they got back home. Not much has changed, of course. The world ran on feelings then; it runs on feelings now. All that’s changed is the gizmos we use to shit on each other. Technological progress is just one manifestation of the Feelings Economy. For instance, nobody ever tried to invent a talking waffle. Why? Because that’d be fucking creepy and weird, not to mention probably not very nutritious. Instead, technologies are researched and invented to — yep, you guessed it! — make people feel better (or prevent them from feeling worse). The ballpoint pen, a more comfortable seat heater, a better gasket for your house’s plumbing — fortunes are made and lost around things that help people improve upon or avoid pain. These things make people feel good. People get excited. They spend money. Then it’s boom times, baby. There are two ways to create value in the marketplace: 1. Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much more tolerable/desirable pain. The most drastic and obvious examples of this are medical and pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility with a few seconds of a needle prick. Heart surgeries replaced . . . well, death with having to recover from surgery for a week or two. 2. Diversions (avoid pain). The second way to create value in a marketplace is to help people numb their pain. Whereas upgrading people’s pain gives them better pain, numbing pain just delays that pain, and often even makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out with friends, a movie with someone special, or snorting cocaine out of the crack of a hooker’s ass. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversions; we all need them from time to time. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will. Many diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. The more you numb pain, the worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive. You lose control of yourself — your Feeling Brain has locked your Thinking Brain in the trunk and isn’t letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever. And the downward spiral ensues. When the scientific revolution first got going, most economic progress was due to innovation. Back then, the vast majority of people lived in poverty: Everyone was sick, hungry, cold, and tired most of the time. Few could read. Most had bad teeth. It was no fun at all. Over the next few hundred years, with the invention of machines and cities and the division of labor and modern medicine and hygiene and representative government, a lot of poverty and hardship was alleviated. Vaccines and medicines have saved billions of lives. Machines have reduced backbreaking workloads and starvation around the world. The technological innovations that upgraded human suffering are undoubtedly a good thing. But what happens when a large number of people are relatively healthy and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. One of the reasons for this is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute. If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion route is a safer bet. As a result, we’ve built a culture in which most technological “innovation” is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel once said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter.” Once an economy switches over primarily to diversions, the culture begins to shift. As a poor country develops and gains access to medicine, phones, and other innovative technologies, measurements of well-being track upward at a steady clip, as everyone’s pain is being upgraded to better pain. But once the country hits First World level, that well-being flattens or, in some cases, drops off. Meanwhile, mental illness, depression, and anxiety can proliferate. This happens because opening up a society and giving it modern innovations makes the people more robust and antifragile. They can survive more hardship, work more efficiently, communicate and function better within their communities. But once those innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone and a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked. The commercial age commenced in the early twentieth century with Bernays’s discovery that you could market to people’s unconscious feelings and desires. Bernays wasn’t concerned with penicillin or heart surgery. He was hawking cigarettes and tabloid magazines and beauty products — shit people didn’t need. And until then, nobody had figured out how to get people to spend copious amounts of money on stuff that wasn’t necessary for their survival. The invention of marketing brought a modern-day gold rush to satiate people’s pursuit of happiness. Pop culture emerged, and celebrities and athletes got stupid rich. For the first time, luxury items started to be mass-produced and advertised to the middle classes. There was explosive growth in the technologies of convenience: microwavable dinners, fast food, La-Z-Boys, no-stick pans, and so on. Life became so easy and fast and efficient and effortless that within the short span of a hundred years, people were able to pick up a telephone and accomplish in two minutes what used to take two months. Life in the commercial age, although more complex than before, was still relatively simple compared to today. A large, bustling middle class existed within a homogenous culture. We watched the same TV channels, listened to the same music, ate the same food, relaxed on the same types of sofas, and read the same newspapers and magazines. There was continuity and cohesion to this era, which brought a sense of security with it. We were all, for a time, both free and yet part of the same religion. And that was comforting. Despite the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, at least in the West, we tend to idealize this period. I believe that it’s for this sense of social cohesion that many people today are so nostalgic. Then, the internet happened. The internet is a bona fide innovation. All else being equal, it fundamentally makes our lives better. Much better. The problem is . . . well, the problem is us. The internet’s intentions were good: inventors and technologists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere had high hopes for a digital planet. They worked for decades toward a vision of seamlessly networking the world’s people and information. They believed that the internet would liberate people, removing gatekeepers and hierarchies and giving everyone equal access to the same information and the same opportunities to express themselves. They believed that if everyone were given a voice and a simple, effective means of sharing that voice, the world would be a better, freer place. A near-utopian level of optimism developed throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Technologists envisioned a highly educated global population that would tap into the infinite wisdom available at its fingertips. They saw the opportunity to engender greater empathy and understanding across nations, ethnicities, and lifestyles. They dreamed of a unified and connected global movement with a single shared interest in peace and prosperity. But they forgot. They were so caught up in their religious dreams and personal hopes that they forgot. They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information. People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings. And when you give the average person an infinite reservoir of human wisdom, they will not google for the information that contradicts their deepest held beliefs. They will not google for what is true yet unpleasant. Instead, most of us will google for what is pleasant but untrue. Having an errant racist thought? Well, there’s a whole forum of racists two clicks away, with a lot of convincing-sounding arguments as to why you shouldn’t be ashamed to have such leanings. The wife leaves you and you start thinking women are inherently selfish and evil? Doesn’t take much of a Google search to find justifications for those misogynistic feelings. Think Muslims are going to stalk from school to school, murdering your children? I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere out there that’s already “proving” that. Instead of stemming the free expression of our worst feelings and darkest inclinations, the start-ups and corporations dove right in to cash in on it. Thus, the greatest innovation of our lifetime has slowly transformed into our greatest diversion. The internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want. And if you’ve learned anything about human psychology in this book, you already know that this is much more dangerous than it sounds.