Hello Reader!​

Being in a swing district, our political ads are out of control. And my kids are literally yelling, "Shut up!" at the TV. But I've been trying to teach them to think critically and so I've been asking, "What is this ad trying to make you feel?" And 9 times out of ten, we've identified that it's either anger or fear. And since anger comes from fear, we've determined that all of these ads are just trying to scare us. Then we look at what the person or group running the ad has to gain from our fear. And is that what we actually want? This is something I think we should all be thinking about this particularly heinous election season.

Here is what I keep coming back to about those two questions. They do not require anyone to change their politics. My kids are are not evaluating policy although we do talk about that, too. They are learning to notice when something is being done to them.

And something is being done to us. Not metaphorically. Fear is the most reliable tool anyone has ever found for moving human beings, and it works on all of us regardless of what we believe, because it does not operate at the level of belief. It operates below it.

So this is not a letter about who to vote for. It is a letter about the thing happening in our bodies between the ad and the vote, and who benefits from it being there.

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Feel

Notice the body first, before the argument starts

The ad plays. Thirty seconds of low strings, grainy footage, and a voice reading a sentence designed to go straight past our reasoning. And something happens in the chest or the jaw or the stomach before we have formed a single thought about whether the claim is true.

That is the order of operations and it is worth knowing. We feel it, then we decide what we think, and then we tell ourselves we reasoned our way there. By the time we are arguing about the content, the fear has already been installed and the argument is happening on top of it.

So the first move is almost absurdly simple. Notice where it landed. Chest? Throat? That specific tightening behind the eyes? We do not have to do anything about it yet. We just have to catch that it happened, because an emotion we have not noticed is running us without supervision.

Remember that the ninety seconds still apply, and that the repetition is the point

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's finding is that the physical wave of an emotion runs about ninety seconds if we stop re-triggering it. The chemistry clears. The body returns.

Now consider that these ads run four times an hour for six weeks.

That is not an accident of media buying. A nervous system that never gets its ninety seconds never comes back down, and a nervous system that never comes back down cannot do the slow work of thinking carefully about anything. We are not being persuaded. We are being kept at a simmer, because people at a simmer are easier to move than people who are calm.

Knowing that does not make the ads stop. It does mean we can give ourselves the ninety seconds the ad was designed to deny us. Mute it, breathe out longer than we breathe in, and let the wave finish.

When it has already spilled, find the fear underneath the anger

My kids are yelling at the television, which honestly seems like a healthy response. But anger is downstream. Anger is what fear looks like once it has somewhere to point.

So when we catch ourselves furious at a candidate, a neighbor, a relative, or a stranger in a comment section, the useful question is not whether the anger is justified. It usually is. The question is what we were afraid of about nine seconds before the anger showed up. Afraid for our kids. Afraid of losing something. Afraid that people we love are being lied to. Afraid that we are.

The fear is the real thing. The anger is just where it went.

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Change

Ask what the ad wants us to feel, then ask who collects

These are the questions my household is running on and I think they are enough on their own.

What is this trying to make me feel? And what does whoever paid for this have to gain from me feeling it?

Notice that neither question asks whether the claim is true. Fact-checking an ad is useful and also mostly beside the point, because the ad is not really making an argument. It is making a feeling, and the feeling will outlast our memory of the specific claim by months.

The second question examines that fear is expensive to produce and nobody spends that kind of money without expecting a return. Somebody is getting a vote, a donation, a click, or six more weeks of our attention.

Understand why a scared nervous system cannot be generous

When our threat response is active, the resources running our capacity for perspective-taking, curiosity, and genuine consideration of another person get pulled toward the immediate danger. This design keeps us safe. It is what we want when there is a car coming. It is catastrophic when the perceived threat is other people.

Which means manufactured fear is not just a persuasive technique. It temporarily disables the faculty that would let us evaluate it. That is why we cannot argue someone out of it, and why we are so bad at being argued out of it ourselves.

Work by Jeffrey Lees and Mina Cikara, published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2020, found that people hold systematically inaccurate beliefs about what opposing groups think of them, consistently assuming more hostility than actually exists. Survey work from More in Common has found similar gaps, often estimating the error at roughly double. These are correlational findings rather than laboratory certainties, so I would not oversell them, but the direction is consistent: a meaningful share of the hostility we are carrying is based on a false belief about other people.

Watch for contempt, not disagreement

John Gottman's research on marital stability, built over decades starting in the 1970s, found that the single best predictor of a relationship ending was not conflict or anger. Those are survivable and sometimes productive. It was contempt, because contempt removes the other person from the category of people whose inner life matters.

That finding scales, and it is the thing worth monitoring in ourselves this season. Disagreeing with someone keeps them human. Finding them contemptible does not. And every ad running right now is, whatever else it is doing, an investment in our contempt.

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Build

Design the exposure rather than relying on our own restraint

Angela Duckworth's new book, Situated, which came out in August, makes the case that changing our situation usually beats sheer willpower. Coming from the person who wrote Grit in 2016, that is a notable revision.

Applied here, it means the answer is not becoming someone with superhuman emotional regulation during election season. It is changing what reaches us. Streaming instead of broadcast. Muting during the breaks. Deciding we get our information in one deliberate sitting rather than in ambushes all day. Unfollowing the accounts whose entire business is keeping us activated.

None of that is disengagement. We can be deeply informed and deliberately unmarinated at the same time.

Teach the question instead of the conclusion

I am not telling my kids what the ads are wrong about. I am teaching them to ask what the ad wants and who profits. The conclusion is theirs to reach, which means the skill transfers to the next ad, and the one after that, and eventually to things I will never see.

We can do this with anyone we talk to regularly. Not the argument, the question. "What do you think they want us to feel?" is a conversation almost anyone will have with us, across almost any divide, because it does not require either person to concede anything.

Have one real conversation with one actual person

Not a comment section. Not a group chat. One person, in person or on the phone, who we suspect sees some of this differently.

The goal is not to change their mind and it is not to be changed. The goal is to leave with one piece of accurate information about what an actual human being actually thinks, because that is the specific thing all of this is designed to prevent. Every dollar of that ad spend is purchasing a slightly more distorted picture of our neighbors. A single honest conversation corrects more of that distortion than a month of being right on the internet.

That is a small build. It is also the only one that undoes the thing being done to us.

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My kids are going to keep yelling at the television and I am not going to stop them. Being annoyed by manipulation is the correct response to manipulation.

But the question underneath their yelling is the one I actually want them to carry out of this year. Not who is right. Something more durable than that, which is: someone is trying to make me feel this, and they are being paid to.

We are allowed to be scared. The things at stake are real and the fear is not irrational. What we do not have to do is hand over the aperture. The fear can be ours to feel for ninety seconds, and then it can be ours again instead of theirs.

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What is the ad you cannot get out of your head right now, and what do you think it wants from you? Hit reply and tell meW

Have a lovely day! - Kate