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Ranting For Results — There Must Be A Better Way
Do we really harbour so much anger? Or are we just addicted to it?
Rants are one of the most dangerous activities we may get addicted to.
Rants make for great articles, great posts, great videos. They make for great speeches. They make for great staffroom chat. There isn’t much greatness about rants other than the results they achieve, but since our world mostly cares about specific, measurable and — if possible — immediate results, rants are great.
An angry article catches our attention. It’s loud. It’s passionate. There is no need for it to be particularly accurate. It exudes feeling and emotion, it moves us… and there’s the result: it moved us. An irritated post prompts us to comment. We may feel compassion. We may feel empathy. Again, it conveys an emotion to which we relate because we have also been irritated before. An outraged video is even better. One can grunt. One can gesture. Half of it doesn’t even need words for it to resonate with us: here’s someone who is feeling something, someone real, like us.
Accordingly, demagogues are having the time of their lives — in the Information Age! Who would have thought? Information is for liberals, information is for the elite. This is about real people with real feelings and real problems that…