A recent episode of Catholic Answers Focus was entitled, and started off with this subheading:
Fast from Being Furious.
It's well worth listening to. Herschmeyer deals a bit with the psychology of being angry, and how it impacts us, and how it can keep us angry when we don't really need to be.
That taps into a couple of things, one of which is raised by this recent NPR Politics episode:
Why Did Tucker Carlson Echo Russian Bioweapons Propaganda On His Top-Rated Show?
And that also touches upon the daily outbursts by Candace Owens.
I don't watch Tucker Carlson (and indeed I was stunned when somebody I know well and respect recently quoted something he said in a discussion). I don't watch Fox News, either. For that matter, I don't watch any of the cable news programs regularly, even though I very much follow the news, and I've never watched Newsmax. I've been watching the nightly news once again as I've been closely following the Russo Ukrainian War, although so far the television news on the war has been relatively superficial.
I read our local newspaper, follow a couple of local online newspapers, check out the headlines from other news outlets on the net each morning, maybe at noon, and maybe at the end of the day, and I listen to NPR Politics and all three of the network political shows that run on Sunday.
I'm not angry day in and day out, and I wouldn't want to be.
I have been baffled by how very intelligent people can end up in the anger trap. Herschmeyer does a really good job of describing that, how psychologically it gives us some immediate gratification, and how it develops into tribalism, and can develop into paranoia.
It can also develop into a monetized following for those shoveling it out. Tucker Carlson has waffled on what he thinks about what in Ukraine, as outrage at some of his positions built, but by and large, Carlson profits from making his followers mad at anyone who isn't a Trumpite. If Carlson came out tomorrow with an episode that stated Trump did try to steal the election and the January 6 insurrection was just that, the angry followers he's built up would turn on him, and he'd be looking for new work.
This is even more the case for Owens. Owens has a following for saying the outrageous, which in turn has built her a dual set of followers, one who love her and get angry at others over what she's told them, and a second that get angry at her. For some, she's the one they love as she hates, and for others she's the one they love to hate. Hate is what's going on, however.
And hate really isn't intelligent.
At the end of the Catholic Answers Focus episode, Herschmeyer and Kellett discuss a recent break room conversation they'd had, which was almost shocking in a way. The discussion was which one of two personalities was "leading more people to Hell", one being a singer, and the other being some sort of public commentator . Herschmeyer dropped, perhaps inadvertently, that the public commentor may be a Priest. Kellett had taken the position that the singer was, but Herschmeyer countered that many of the singer's followers were likely not in the faithful camp to start with, whereas many of the followers of the commentator had started off as good, faithful, people, before following the chain of conspiracy theories and hatred.
There's something to it.
There's also something to this. If a person personally profits by keeping you angry, whether that's profit is monetary, or political, or in position, it may be that you truly aren't paying attention, at least to their motives, and very likely, other things as well.
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