Amid today's deepening polarization and conflict, fundamental doubts are emerging about the proposition that politics based on rational knowledge, with emotion excluded, is even possible. Politics grounded in rational knowledge requires the premise that reason can solve everything.
German neuroscientist Maren Urner's new book, "The Emotional Society: How Emotions Influence Politics," directly challenges this old conventional wisdom and urges readers to view how democracy works in a new light. From a train driver on strike, to a person with a disability demanding safe passage, to a traveler roaming the world, the politics that shapes their actions is rooted in the most personal of concerns. Drawing on research in neuroscience and psychology, the author persuasively shows that social and political choices and judgments cannot in fact be separated from emotions tied to the social reality an individual belongs to, and that they depend deeply on those emotions.
This stems from the judgment that decisions about what is right and wrong, what to choose, and what kind of society to build are always made together with emotion. And that emotion arises from the common conventional wisdom of the long-standing community, society, and organization to which a person belongs. In other words, the author points out that the very attitude of suppressing or excluding emotion can become a cause that distorts the public sphere and deepens social conflict.
The author argues: "Individuals judge for themselves what is right and wrong, what is timely and what is outdated, what they believe, and whom to trust and not to trust. And all of these actions are always political." In other words, politics is essentially a process of negotiation that coordinates differing emotions and connects them to shared values and ideals. The author adds, "Almost all the information we convey as human beings carries my convictions and values."
In the end, the author's consistent argument is that we must change the perspective from which we view politics. For this reason, the call to set aside emotion and have a debate is mistaken. Rather, emotion shapes our shared life and determines the political space that exists everywhere and always. This is because it is a matter of how we will live.
As a practical alternative, the author proposes "dynamic thinking." That is, the suggestion is to now focus not on "what one opposes" but on "what one supports." This way of thinking, in the author's view, enables more constructive social discussion that goes beyond fixed camp-based logic.
At a time when political fatigue and distrust are deepening, understanding emotion and handling it maturely, rather than suppressing it, is the key condition for advancing toward a healthy democracy. The book demonstrates, both scientifically and through the humanities, that understanding individual emotion is precisely the act of understanding society.
As politics has recently failed to function properly, concerns about the far right, the far left, and the like are growing worldwide. The author warns of this threat as follows: "When people no longer find their own story in politics, trust in politicians disappears. What happens next? People begin to look for answers to their own questions and desires elsewhere, for instance at the edges of the political spectrum." Priced at 18,800 won.
