The world is drowning in a swamp of emotion. But not just recently. Ever since 1850 to 1980 more words connected to rational thinking were appearing in books. But then, for some unknown reason, we see a rapid rise in intuition and emotion.
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When we first saw the world post-truth appear it was a shock to many of us. Post-truth, the making of reality based on emotion rather than fact is here to stay.
Based on quite fascinating research performed by experts from the Dutch Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and the Indiana University in America it actually shouldn’t be a surprise. They discovered an interesting trend that shows facts are becoming less and less relevant in public discourse. Instead, we got unpredictable and possibly dangerous emotions.
Marten Scheffer from WUR and his colleagues analyzed the texts of millions of books. They found that roughly around 1850 the number of “rational” words such as determineor conclusion was significantly growing. On the other hand “irrational” words connected to the human experience such as feel or believe were slowing going missing. This trend existed until 1980. Then the trend suddenly changed and has gone the exact opposite way and quite rapidly. At the same time, there is a visible change in how the world is perceived from a collective perspective to an individual perspective that can be seen in the ratio of use of the worlds I/we
As Johan Bollen from Indiana University says – searching for trends in the use of language in the ocean of published books is incredibly difficult. Yet, the researchers discovered the trend. In fiction, in educational literature, and even in articles published in magazines such as the New York Times.
Why is this happening? Well, truth be told, nobody knows. There are many possibilities and it is incredibly hard to determine which, if any, is the main cause. And when it comes to the “age of reason” (1850-1980) Max Weber used to talk about the disenchantment of the modern age, where progress and the obvious successes of science pushed the rational worldview into everyday life. Even if it never before was normal.
Then there is the trend of the emotional worldview. We have no clue what should be the cause. One of the possibilities is the growing economic problems of the whole world. Rationality brought us staggering amounts of wealth but a select number of individuals have truly insane amounts of that wealth. And social media is almost guaranteed to have increased the speed of the effect as they thrive on emotion-filled language. But they aren’t the sole cause as the trend started many years before they were ever envisioned.
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