Blog-Cabin The world's foremost informative blog... for ILS 200

To almost everyone, the public discourse is more or less pathetic, at various levels. But how much is “too much”? If we define the “too” as the extent to which it does more harm than good, I certainly do not think the public discourse is too pathetic.

Personally, I think being pathetic is absolutely necessary in today’s mass media, because that is the way to interact with audience. Recall every little detail of our life, commercials, political agitations or public good, the force that motivates us to donate for the victims to vote for a particular candidate is the messages/information delivered that resonate with our emotion, that we can identify with. It might sound ridiculous, but if we think about it, no matter how perfect the logic is or how well the argument is structured, it all has to come down to emotion if you are counting on the audience to interact and respond.

There are certainly a lot of pathetic fallacies that are designed to trap audience’s emotion and people do fall into those emotional pitfalls. I personally do not see any problem in it. It does not mean that being blindly emotional is always a sensible thing to do, but it might often be the most effective way, although some logical understanding will be a plus. In my opinion, emotion usually beats reasoning in many aspects of our life. People buy insurance not because of the propagandas that promote retirement planning but the emotional discourse that says “ give your family the future protection”; we donate to the tornado victims not because the sensible reasoning that we have the civic duty to do so (in fact, we don’t) but we feel sorry about the tragedy and would want to help as if the other people would help us under the same situations. Yes, some of them might be misleading, but in general it does more good than harm on public affairs. Therefore, the public discourse is never too pathetic.