Fear, anger and how to counter the manipulation of the human mind | Nicole LeFavour | TEDxBoise

How can we push back on a world focused on anger and turning fear into blame? Learn how everyday acts of bravery and symbolic gestures can be used to give hope and inspire action rather than despair. Nicole LeFavour is a student of cognitive science and former State Senator who left elected office to organize peaceful civil disobedience in her own state capitol. Here she draws on the work of Jennifer Lerner and her research on decision making, going on to discuss the manipulation of human emotions, and how we can combat the crisis of despair by changing memes which anger us and taking action in real life to make others feel less alone..

Nicole LeFavour served for four years in the Idaho House of Representatives and four years in the state Senate. She left formal elected office to try to make change from the outside. In 2014 helped organize over 200 people to do silent, peaceful, respectful acts of civil disobedience to change state policy to protect the rights of gay and transgender Idahoans. After well over 200 peaceful arrests inside the state Capitol, people can still be fired, evicted and refused service in Idaho for being gay or transgender. Ever focused on all that has been gained, LeFavour and others continue to work for protection on the state and national level.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

So, let's talk about fear and anger.

I'm going to give you a scientific,

a practical, and a fairly radical
set of notions about what we can do

to push back on attempts
to manipulate our emotions and our minds.

So, these are very
difficult times for many of us.

Debt, politics, racism, terror

have left us fearful
of things outside ourselves.

And few of us realize
how vulnerable fear makes us.

We like to think our emotions
and our choices are our own.

But what do we really know about fear?

Jennifer Lerner is a scientist
at Harvard who studies fear.

And remember this because it's important:
she also studies the effects of anger.

But in her studies of fear she found
what we would expect:

that fear makes us cautious;
it makes us avoid risks.

This makes sense because after 9/11,

it was fear that froze
the nation's stock market;

fear that made thousands
of us cancel vacations

and start saving rather than spending.

Fear kept us glued
to television and radio.

And this was true while they
fed us more and more -

knowing we were anxious.

Waiting for that one bit of information
that would make us feel safe again.

I'm afraid the media knows
a truth about us, and that is this:

that making us afraid
makes us more dedicated viewers.

Now, it gets more interesting.

Lerner, in her research on fear,
also studied anger.

And fear and anger are closely related.

Very closely.

She describes anger as fear plus a target,

or fear plus a cause
or a person to blame for it.

Now think about that.

In her research
with thousands of subjects,

she found something surprising
about anger compared to fear.

Anger actually makes us
take unreasonable risks.

It can make us invest badly,
shop irresponsibly,

make bad diet and health decisions,
like choose junk food.

It can make us fail
at basic math and risk calculations

that most of us make successfully
every single day.

It stands to reason

in a time when the political decisions
that we're making

will so clearly shape our future,

that we'd be deeply suspicious

of anyone who tries to use blame

to turn our very real fears into anger.

Because this can make us make decisions
that are against our own best interest.

So,

what you need to notice,
and what we all notice

is how the media focuses so often
on blame and scapegoating.

How also it focuses on human brokenness -

and not on things we can fix,
but on things we can't.

Notice how media's fixation,

and especially advertising
industry's fixation,

on unrealistic ideals of beauty and wealth

make us want things that we don't have.

And our own insecurities
and our own fears

are used to feed insecurities further,

and make us buy products we're told
are going to make us more beautiful

and more successful.

So, the question at this point is

we need to pay attention
to how this feeding of our insecurities

tends to feed our fears
and turn them into another emotion.

And that other emotion is despair.

Despair.

I'm afraid if you contemplate it,
loneliness feeds despair.

But what happens if we try
to mask or dull our fears,

our sense of despair or anger,

rather than consciously
trying to reverse it?

This we know can lead to addiction.

It can lead to self-harm,

even suicide.

And I don't know about all of you,
but I have lost far too many friends.

I've been to far too many funerals.
Watched people struggle with addiction.

I'm afraid we have a culture
of anger and despair

because we allow a culture
of anger and despair to exist.

We are not powerless, though.

We can actually seek out and share
news that doesn't incite anger.

We can refuse to attack
when we feel attacked.

We can actually object when we see
attempts to anger and divide.

We can ask questions and offer solutions.

Because that cycle of attack and revenge,

it can be addictive itself,

and that can make us empty, not happy.

And study after study of happiness

shows that happiness
is fed, actually, by forgiveness.

And by compassion.

[People who post mean memes
deserve to die in pain]

Then there's the world of social media.

It's a difficult one.
A really difficult one.

But even that meme that insults us
or those we love can be edited;

it can be revised and sent back
to the world to make it better.

Because we can and we should
ask the world to be better.

So we're going to edit a meme now.

Okay, on Mac or PC,

you can click on the photo
on your news stream,

and that will pop open a window like this.

If you scroll up,

you get an option for downloading it -

like that -

and on a PC you have to
chose that option, typically.

You can choose to open it
in Windows Photo Viewer

or Paint if you can there.

You may have to wait until you get over
into this screen and choose "View" up top,

right up there,

and choose "View in Paint,"
there, or "Open in Paint."

Open, so choose open
and then click "Paint,"

and it's going to give you
an array of tools up there.

On Mac, you can actually just
drag that picture onto your desktop.

And once you do,
you can click twice and open it.

There we go.

And you'll see a little
"Editor" option up there

on most photo programs
that exist on most Macs.

And what you're going
to choose then is a box,

and that box helps you block out
the text that is paining you.

OK? So we block out the text
and we can choose an "ABC" up there.

You'll see a little text box
that you can create.

Just click somewhere and the text pops up.

We're going to be able to move that,
so we type our text in.

So this is our practical solution.

And I don't know about you,

but working in politics
and as a state senator,

I'm always trying to mediate conversations
that get heated and sometimes retaliatory.

And so the essence is
to try to turn these things

into something that
isn't retaliation or revenge.

[Should post positive things]

If you use the little plus sign on a PC,

that's how you have to move
your text around on those.

And the little box,
you have to choose "Fill" from.

So you would just close this up -

we can do additional text too, you'll see.

And we can change
the color and the size of it.

And this is on a Mac, this time.

We highlight that by clicking
at the beginning, dragging to the end,

let up the click,
and then we can choose the size.

Make it better, bigger.
[Let us be better.]

Okay, and if we click to the side
and then click on the text,

we can move it.

There we go.

That's our new and improved meme.

I hope you all put that to use.

(Applause)

Sometimes, you know, social media
makes us feel really powerless.

But that is the world of social media.

And then there is the world out here.

The world made up of the words we say
and the actions we take.

And sometimes in that world,
problems are too big to solve with words.

In the wake of the Paris attacks,
we found heroes.

People who did beautiful things that day.

A waitress, a security guard,
people who shielded others from bullets.

Bruno, Didi, Sameer.

But it took far too long

for us to see that beauty
and that light in that well of violence

because the news kept us glued
to what to fear and who to hate.

Let us be better.

But even if we're determined to be brave

and to change the world for the better,

sometimes problems
are deep-seated and complex.

And only a symbolic act
may have a chance of giving people hope.

And this isn't trivial

because symbolic acts,
if they're recorded and shared,

they can defeat despair for others.

And they can inspire
compassion and change.

I'm thinking of the staffers,
the congressional staffers in D.C.

who walked out of the Capitol
in 2015 with their hands up,

in solidarity with people
around the country

who had faced lifetimes
of racial profiling and police brutality.

I'm thinking of the 44 of us
who walked into our state capitol in 2014

and stood silently,
peacefully, and respectfully

until we were arrested.

Because in that state senate,

we had spent ten years
waiting even for a public hearing

on a bill to include gay
and transgender people

in our state's non-discrimination laws.

Those are laws
that still have not changed.

I'm thinking of Amy Pence Brown,

a self-described "fat activist,"
who one day, in our marketplace,

stood alone and blindfolded,

holding a sign,

inviting people to write on her body

while she wore only a black bikini.

Inviting them to write a heart if they
had ever also struggled with self esteem.

These acts of peaceful resistance
and images of these acts

have given millions of people hope.

These acts have inspired the powerless

to feel slightly less powerless,

less isolated, less alone.

Throughout history, acts like these
have inspired peaceful revolutions.

In the end, the only way
to combat fear and anger

in a world constantly trying

to push our emotions
and turn them against us,

is our determination
to reject the path of anger,

but instead to choose
compassion and forgiveness

and every second to let us be better.

Because we have no choice
but to live in this world together.

And if we reject anger,
we will be less alone.

Thank you.

(Applause)