Why Do Protesters Activate the Rage Center of Our Brains?
And boy do they ever activate the rage center of our brains!
People fucking hate these campus protesters. If you want empirical support for that statement, here you go, but I think it was pretty obvious even without numbers. Right-wing media currently knows nothing besides these protests; Jesus could return to Earth, knock up Taylor Swift, and hit 75 home runs for the Marlins, and his exploits would still only make the crawl on Fox News while they aired footage of the dumbass college protester du jour. People on the left seem to understand that the demonstrators are bad for their cause and are encouraging people to look away. Protesters are getting the worst press right now of anyone who didn’t have their brain eaten by the Very Hungry Caterpillar or kill a puppy in a gangland-style execution.
Why do left-wing protesters annoy us so much? The outrage seems disproportionate to their impact. And I’m not castigating others here: I feel rage in myself that doesn’t seem rational. I confess that when I see a cop toss some trust fund kid wearing a keffiyeh onto the grass and cuff them, I experience a sense wholeness bordering on euphoria. That feeling goes beyond politics — there’s something happening deep in my lizard brain. What is it?
My thoughts about what’s going on start with the observation that the main thing that differentiates “left” and “right” on the political spectrum is how much change each side seeks. People on the left see society as imperfect and want change; people on the right think everything’s nifty as-is and seek continuity. This dynamic becomes more pronounced as you move to the edges of the political spectrum. The far left wants radical change — I’m talking “let’s-abolish-September-and-call-it-’Fructidor’”-level change. Meanwhile, the far right believes that things used to be great, and we not only need to halt change in its tracks, but actually go backwards. This is why the right and left fringes often resemble each other: Though they have opposite visions of what society should be, they agree that the current order needs to be torn down so that something better can be built. And they’ll build it just as soon as they clear out the piles upon piles of corpses that built up during the revolution.