Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
Amygdala Hijack politics
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By Jason Lim
One of the most perplexing questions in American politics is why do white, blue-collar men ― who have lost the most socioeconomic ground in the last few decades ― continually and consistently vote for the Republicans when the latter party espouses economic policies that disadvantage labor in favor of business?
Similarly, one of the most perplexing questions in Korean politics is why do the elderly ― half of whom are living in poverty, the highest among OECD countries, not to mention the highest suicide rate ― continually and consistently vote for the conservative ruling Party that hasn’t necessarily proven that it has their best interests in mind?
On the surface, these are two totally unrelated questions. However, they share an common underlying curiosity. Why do certain people vote against their rational self-interest? What drives such decision-making?
The answer is fairly simple: fear. More precisely: fear of change.
There is the fundamental neurological truth about change. Any change, regardless whether it’s good for you or not from a rational perspective, is perceived as a threat to your brain and triggers the typical fight or flight response.
According to Daniel Goleman, the person who coined the term ‘emotional intelligence,’ "The human brain hasn't had a hardware upgrade in about 100,000 years." Most of us are still acting out of the ancient fight-or-flight response, and that upgrade is long-overdue. He further adds, "Emotions make us pay attention to what is happening right now -- this is urgent - and give us an immediate action plan without having to think twice. The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me - you don't sit around and Google it." This is the fear-based response that takes over the brain when faced with a change. It shuts down the rational, executive mind in favor of the emotional brain: Goleman termed this the “amygdala hijack.”
This reaction is especially acute when you are coming face-to-face with a stranger who doesn’t look like you. In the ethnocentric tribal world in which our brain evolved, our brain alarms us with fear of another who doesn’t look like us.
From this perspective, the blue-collar white men in the U.S. and the elderly in Korea are the two groups that face the greatest, almost existential change to their way of life.
The former faces an imminent loss of wealth, status, privilege, and even outright demographic majority in the coming years. Rationally, these can be attributed largely to deregulation, anti-labor regulations, Free Trade Agreements, immigration, and other policies and trends that are largely championed by the Republicans. Emotionally, however, they react instinctively out of fear, drawing on their instinctive tribalism to lay the blame on others who don’t look like them.
Brian D. McKenzie's "Political Perceptions in the Obama Era: Diverse Opinions of the Great Recession and its Aftermath among Whites, Latinos and Blacks” backs up this thought.
Writing for Vox, Matthew Yglesias explains, “McKenzie, a professor at the University of Maryland, finds that a large share of the white population perceives itself to have been experiencing economic distress because Barack Obama is sitting in the White House, tilting the playing field in favor of black people. He finds that, naturally enough, white people who feel they are being victimized in this way have directed a lot of anger at the political establishment.”
Yglesias further writes, “This ties together white nationalist themes, economic anxiety themes, and populist anti-establishment themes nicely — a large bloc of white voters believes they are suffering economically because their elected representatives in Washington betrayed their interests in order to help nonwhites.”
Rationally, blacks and Hispanics have little to do with the loss of blue-collar, white status. Emotionally, however, we fall back to our evolutionary framework of “Us vs. Them” ― usually based on how we look ― when faced with such monumental change we have little control over.
This is similar for the elderly in Korea. The old narrative that they built their lives on ― study hard, work hard, don’t complain, be loyal, and you will be taken care of and, by the way, commies across the 38th parallel are the greatest evil known to men ― is failing to live up to its promise. Hosts of factors ― many of them the same as those that impacted the blue-collar whites in America ― have undermined their well being. However, they still hold fast to the old narrative at an emotional level.
When faced with a different narrative, they react in fear and vote for those who reinforce the old narrative. This is why the “Northern Wind,” an election strategy often employed by the conservatives to gain votes through exaggeration of military threats by North Korea, is consistently effective in this demographic. It triggers the amygdala hijack in which their emotional brain will make the decision based on responding to fear, not a rational analysis of each party’s policy platform and how it may serve their self-interest.
None of us are free from this evolutionary response when faced with change. We all do it. And we can’t control it since it’s a subconscious reaction, although we can work to modulate it. It’s definitely not helpful when elites, who mostly have guaranteed socioeconomic status, condescend down to those who vote based on threats. It’s important to acknowledge that these groups do face huge changes and associated fears that should be addressed in a sympathetic and inclusive way.
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on
innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
He has been writing for The Korea Times since
2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook.
com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.