After a days work I may sit down to read a book, watch the news, or maybe a film. I wish to escape my own circumstances in some way so I engage my mind in the elsewhere. you do this too I’ll bet. Now I have many choices, but a quite common one for some folks would be to read a tragedy, watch a film that is about struggle, or maybe they are just news junkies. I often watch the news.
I have recently read what I consider to be the big 3 (just my thoughts). Brave New World by Aldus Huxley, Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. These are not uplifting works where hope is abundant and joy is on every page, quite the opposite. They are books that stir the mind into considering frightening future possibilities and fearing the trajectory of certain ideologies we know to be very much in play in all epochs, even this one. Why have I spent my time reading negative works? Why did I not just watch some semi entertaining Disney nonsense that re-enforces the comfortable misconception of the good guys always winning?
Put simply I have gone for a genre that will alarm me and make me fear the future in many ways and for many reasons. We all do this, everyone watches the news, and the news is always always bad. In fact the news is the news because we only want to hear what is bad, if the news was good nobody would watch it, would they?
Many theories are in play here. I personally think that we are providing ourselves with balance, the mind needs to know that we have it good, a reality check of sorts for our own feelings of negativity. Let me elaborate, watching the news provides us with the idea that we know what is going on, therefore we know what our part is in it, but that is not exactly true. What we do know is that the bad thing that happened did not happen to me or us, so its okay in some way. We gain a feeling of thankfulness about our circumstances, so a negative experience absorbed as an observed reality can result in a positive emotional response about the self. Another theory is that we must, from an evolutionary point of view, come to know as experience (assimilated by any means) what good and bad (from both a survival and happiness perspective) actually consist of, so that we can use this to shape our decisions. Knowing the difference between things allows for future planning and some surety of outcome.
Paul S Wilson
From a conversation with David J Watts and Henry Nurdin based on the work of Daniel Dennett
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