How Political Parties Harness Admiration and Trust to Woo Jobless Minds and Redirect Loathing

In social media, emotions can be both a driving force and a tool for manipulation. 

Plutchik’s cone of emotions throws some light on understanding emotions and giving people the emotional intelligence to then use it in their best interest. 

Trolls are everywhere today. And while we know how to best ignore them, this cone made me see a world I have never bothered understanding. Why are trolls the way they are? Why do they behave the way they do? Why are they so angry and how are they so efficient and unified? 

To know that, we need to understand the underlying emotion that drives people’s behaviour, and that’s where the Plutchik’s wheel of emotion helped me see this world differently. A look at that chart and understanding how it works made me realize how political parties are tapping into the loathing minds of the unemployed to make them trigger happy trolls.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion

Rober Plutchik was a famous psychologist who created the wheel by studying animals. He identified 8 core emotions or rather 4 pairs of emotions. The emotion pairs, he reasoned, are caused by physiological changes in the way we tend to that particular emotion. The pairs cause opposite reactions. The way we react to guilt is polar opposite from the way we react when ecstatic. 

It’s this simple yet beautiful framework that will shed light on how having emotional intelligence, people can exploit it for their own gains.

Boredom and its implication on joblessness

Boredom, although a seemingly unremarkable emotion, is a powerful emotion that can impact a person’s psyche, especially when joblessness is involved. Lack of meaningful employment can give people a sense of purposelessness, that transforms to frustration, dissatisfaction and a disconnection from society. These people feel that the society is at fault, and look for external reasons to as root cause for their current state. The disgust with themselves and the society at large makes them loathsome.

Tapping into loathing for trolling

Political parties understand the core emotion that drives this all. They leverage the loathing minds and use these ‘mindless souls’ to attack the opposition or key public figures. The loathing mind finds solace in going after these people online - keeping their identity at bay. But more importantly, they now have a purpose, a reason to wake up every morning. A means to divert all that loathing. A place to belong. 

The politics of emotions

People, when they find that their friends have used them to get their way, often say that the oppressor has played politics. It basically is a shorthand for the feeling of being used by leveraging one’s emotion. Politics has, for a long time, understood the fundamental drive of humans and have always been at the forefront of being able to understand these emotions and manipulate people and address their vote bank.

An unemployed individual is pissed at the government, and rather than letting this anger damage the aura of the current government, politicians use a hot tai-chi move to divert that anger towards the opposition party and the rest of the world, while they stand tall, unhinged, untouched. 

Navigating disgust to trust

How is the troll army so efficient? It’s because these political parties have figured out how to tap into loathing’s opposite emotion - admiration. They figured that to make these people work for them, they need to make them feel wanted, to give them a purpose, to make them feel a sense of belonging. This helps them establish trust over this now almost mindless, reckless and angry mob, waiting to spew out vile things. The trust builds to admiration, in this case, towards the supreme leader, who gives them hope that their work will pay off, that things they are doing is worthwhile and why not - since they are being paid for this. So now, these unemployed people’s boredom fuelled loathing, doesn’t need to be addressed or changed as society expects them, since they are now being paid to feel so.

This, I feel is how political parties are exploiting jobless, bored and loathing individuals to become paid trolls who have a blind admiration and trust for a political party they know very little about.