In political media and advertising, there is usually what’s referred to as a “call to action” style of communication. This simply means that someone is trying to get someone else to do something. When it comes to politics and advertising, people are trying to convince other people to give them votes, and give them money. Politics and advertising both use the same science to figure out what the most effective methods are to convince people to actually get up and act. Whether that action is getting up and voting, or getting up and buying something, the methods are identical. It has been discovered that the most effective way to get someone invested to the point they will actually do something, is by creating an emotional response. This is why so many advertisements feature families, animals, and other symbols of emotional depth. The easiest emotion to create in an audience, however, and the emotion that is felt the deepest by viewers/readers, is anger. Anger is the easiest to trigger, and when people feel anger it escalates the quickest. So whenever possible, media outlasts, politicians, and to a much lesser degree, advertising, will trigger anger in order to get an emotional investment from their audience. It is carefully calculated and contrived. Such pervasive causes of anger may have a big effect on society. It does feel as if there is more violence on the world today than there was in the past. This feeling may or may not be accurate. Perhaps the focus on creating an anger response predicates itself on politics and media focusing on violence, or perhaps there actually is more violence and perhaps this constant anger-triggered call to action communication contributes to that. A repeated and sustained exposure to media designed to cause anger may even cause anger to become a more natural reaction to other stimuli that otherwise would not be met with an anger response, and cause us to feel more anger, frustration, and stress than would be natural for us. I ran a small experiment on the Destiny 2 forum. I made 2 posts, some days between them so they wouldn’t interfere with each other. One was an emotionless analysis of Destiny 2 season 8, with well thought out and relatively clearly presented suggestions on what might be an improvement to upcoming seasons. The other was an inflammatory post with a suggestion that would be predictably ill-received, and written in a tone that was engineered to be inflammatory. The first post got zero likes and responses. The second got an overwhelming number of downvotes, and a significant number of negative responses in a relatively short time. While this isn’t definitive, it is a microcosm example of how we can be manipulated into responding and engaging. If we aren’t self aware, we can eventually slip into a habit of switching between two modes. One mode is to act from anger, the other mode is to not react at all. When watching, listening, or reading anything in the media, politics, or advertising, try to be aware of the emotional response you feel. If it’s anger, try to take a moment and analyze your feelings and shift into a non emotional state before deciding what to decide based on what you’re hearing. It’s important that we attempt to live in a state of compassion as much as possible, and think with clarity, free of the manipulation that is so pervasive in almost everything we see and hear and read.