Yangmong T Naga
Research Activist
The 2016 US presidential campaign was often characterized by journalists and pundits as irrational and wrought with emotions like anger and fear. Such depictions fail to consider emotions as evolutionary adaptations designed to solve recurrent problems when the costs of a mistake would be high (Frijda 1986; Tooby and Cosmides 2008; Izard 2009). Work in this vein considers emotions to be triggered by appraisals, providing vital information to processing systems such as attention and perception (Clore et al. 2001). This research tradition treats emotion as a moderator/mediator (Ottati and Isbell 1996), an outcome variable (Lerner and Keltner 2000) and a predictor (Marcus and MacKuen 1993). Building on these approaches, political psychology is often interested in how emotions shape the evaluation of socio-political objects and thereby elicit a response (Lodge and Taber 2005). While emotion was traditionally seen as a nuisance to good governance (Edelman 1985; Kuklinski et al. 1991), more recent work suggests emotion is central to political participation (Valentino et al. 2007), public opinion (Brader 2006), processing of information (Lodge and Taber 2005), political discussion (Cho 2013), political tolerance (Small et al. 2006), and policy attitudes (Albertson and Gadarian 2015).
Politics encompasses the whole growth dynamics of a society. With good politics, emerges good—laws and legal social norms. Paying attention to our emotional security does not mean we are becoming a fragile society. Emotions are an intrinsic factor in our human nature which is why in modern progressive states, workplace sensitivity training are also put into program. Why does human emotion become an asset in implementation of social norms? For instance, a student who has been physically, mentally and emotionally bullied by his peers necessarily may not succumb to any physical injuries, but the mental and emotional anxiety may consequently trigger suicidal tendency upon the victim. Such personal attacks by sociopathic abusers are indictable by law and we as a society should also denounce and condemn such unhealthy ill-practices from affecting our social growth. Anti-bullying legislations this way are enacted to help and reduce bullying.
However such social norms practiced in western and other modern societies, are decided from necessities deriving out of human rational conscience comprising also of political and emotional logic, as relevant with reality and not remotely out of accessing data alone as these concepts of human contract in terms of right and wrong are figuratively theoretical and abstract.
While as humans we are also consistently trying to improve human interaction emotionally, mentally and intellectually, but there are also segregations in political logic which set aside emotional investment from right and wrong. For instance, when we state politically correct assertion like: illegal immigrants have no legal rights, and the reality inclusive of illegal immigrants flooding and endangering our territorial and economic liabilities, this does not contradict our human emotional essence – this only ensure our indigenous security and rights.
Right to personal liberty basically includes the way human should behave and interact with each other in a society. By having access of our personal liberty and rights, we are legally and morally expected to respect each other’s rights and freedom; giving each other their own space; entrenching one’s personal right and freedom in any way—even if not presently defined in our social norms, may be subjected for exploration in legal justice systems as suited in our available social context. By respecting our consecutive rights, we do not have to illegitimately infringe on each other’s space, and cohesively work and aim for common cause and progression.
Our society has been weighed down immensely extensively and embarking to stand up and having started to dust off the dirt from our entity is a good start for beginners. Time today, is the closing of the second decade of the 21st century, and it is sufficiently applicable conceivably, to say that we also need to come out of conventional boundaries and improvise our system in technical and more sensible manner to better suit our challenges in this technology driven sophisticated modernization.
