Poornachandra Tejaswi’s Chidambara Rahasya is a popular Kannada novel. It begins with the scene of a few small-town boys deciding on the inevitability of a large-scale revolution. Apparently, the motive for the revolution is to end the myriad ills plaguing their society. The amusing reality, though, gets uncovered later in the scene.
The boys’ repeated failures in enticing the girls in the town had frustrated them so much that they begin to seek comfort in the fantasy of revolution as a true panacea. The quest after girlfriends had mysteriously morphed into a zeal for social revolution!
One gets similar thoughts about the motives of “keyboard warriors” who write rage-filled comments on social media sites. These arm-chair “revolutionaries” typically ally themselves with a political group or an ideology. The alliance, however, is seldom the result of any studied understanding of the ideology; it is simply due to the influence of what the cognitive sciences call the bandwagon effect.
Bandwagon effect refers to the common human tendency of forming beliefs based on trendy opinions. The human mind has a natural penchant for trendy opinions because being on the side of large groups confers on it a sense of belonging and security. Loneliness and fear abate, at least fleetingly.
Once the bandwagon effect operates and beliefs get formed, the “likes” and “shares” on social media sites only reinforce them. In addition to promoting lazy habits of the mind, the illusive camaraderie birthed by these “likes” and “shares” functions as a balm for frustrated hearts. The keyboard warrior is thus left with scarcely any incentive to calmly appraise facts that are contrary to his beliefs. If intellectual laziness brings emotional comfort too, why care to become intellectually active?
Over four centuries ago, Francis Bacon cautioned against falling prey to this lazy habit of the human mind. Trendy opinions, he called “the idols of the marketplace”.
A worshipper of such idols is actually a victim of words that “plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies”.
There is a time-honoured solution to the problems of loneliness and frustration that our keyboard warriors can employ: the noble company of classics and imaginative literature. Loneliness gets relieved when the the imaginative work pleasantly dislodges the reader from his small egotistic world and places him in the expansive realms of wider humanity. Frustration gets relieved when it gradually changes the reader’s outlook by providing him with a deeper appreciation of life and its common realities.
As Harold Bloom wrote, “Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”
Will our angry warriors listen?
krishnagl@iisc.ac.in
