Column | Forever in the drama triangle

How did you feel in the last few days, in the midst of all political turbulences? If that was a feeling of confusion, you can happily praise yourself. Because something is wrong. Rarely, such intense, hyperbole emotions were made by and about world leaders, and rarely were those emotions so one -dimensional and flat. In that light, ‘confusion’ is a pearl of emotional layering and depth.

Because the number of public sentiments were actually counted on three fingers. 1) Leaders are ‘furious’: Trump was ‘furious’ on members of his party. The European countries were ‘furious’ on Trump. Yesilgöz was furious with Faber. 2) Leaders are ‘cold’: NRC a whole article granted the fact that AfD leader Weidel had always been such a ‘cool frog’. Faber was ‘unaffected’. And Merz was ‘arrogant and elitist’. 3) Whether they are ‘shocked’ or ‘indignant’, including associated tears of frustration (at Christoph Heusgen, the chairman of the Security Conference in Munich).

The emotional sample card is shriveled into three poor shades, which also seem to neutralize each other. When one is furious, the other uses it with even more frenzy. If one has to cry, the other (musk) thinks that Pathethisch. Or, on his talk show-Dutch: there should not be ‘yank’ (Jort Kelder).

There is no room for intermediate forms, nuances, ambivalences on the market of attention and fuss.

And that is not of all times, we can even state fairly precisely in the Netherlands when that started. Perhaps in this newspaper, on March 11, 1999.

A crying minister

A quarter of a century ago this side had a scoop. Four photos of a crying minister appeared on the front page, shot immediately one after the other. On one photo with one hand desperately beaten in front of the face. “Tears maij at interrogation,” headed the newspaper. This includes a report of the interrogation of the parliamentary committee of inquiry on the Bijlmer disaster, in which former minister Hanja Maij-Weggen (Traffic and Water Management) lost “her self-control and burst into tears.” There had been tears in the room before, and even briefly on TV (VVD party leader Hans Wiegel in 1981 about widowers, Minister Jan Pronk about Somalia in 1993, and there are still some examples to be found). But what was the scoop in 1999 was that there were cameras in the Lower House that led the tears live. Who then ended up in a salvo of images on the front page, and in the evening in the talk shows (also just new) were further milked. The medial space had become a attention market of an information market. ‘The only thing the media are after‘, said media huro and communication scientist Gabriel Weimann once,’ ‘is to look for the features of a dramatic story. ‘

For example, we ended up in an emocracy, in which we are now scored in forever through the online drama machine of the Socials.

In part, that was a pre -programmed effect of folk democracy. Henk te Velde wrote a beautiful book in 2002, Styles of leadership. In it he shows that the arrival of democracy itself already contained the germ of that emotional erosion. Thorbecke, the man of 1848, from before the people’s parties, “made no effort to charm the audience and made such a stiff impression that his friend WCD Olivier published memories of Thorbecke to show how warm he had been in a domestic circle.” Thorbeckes style was then overtaken by people’s parties and large newspapers, and folk drivers such as Abraham Kuyper and Pieter Jelles Troelstra gave him the check. Te Velde: ‘They were carried on their hands by their supporters, but the first was often an impossible person for his friends and the second hardly any personal friends. In mass meetings, however, they created an impression of great warmth. ”

Empty hyperboles

In other words, it was already there, and is now only accelerated by the Socials. And, maybe a young voter will ask, why is that bad? Don’t emotions just belong? Certainly, emotions in itself Are not the problem. But the shriveling of it to empty hyperbols that only lead to cynical counter reactions and ultimately to a descent. And therefore undermine the democratic debate and stop.

Look again at Maij-Weggen in 1999. She did not cry because she was angry, indignant or shocked, but because she struggled with the complexity of boards in times of crisis. Her struggle was brave, layered and honest. And could have leaded to real administrative innovation. But prosecutor Rob Oudkerk walked straight through it, did not settle for that complexity and wanted to score in the room and talk show for running cameras by simply exposing ‘the culprit’.

Because that is the problem of that limited emotional sample card. Politics has turned into a drama triangle: prosecutor, victim and savior hold each other in an infertile clamination. The Bijlmer survey, in particular, yielded even more anger, feelings of powerlessness and conspiracy theories. It brought closure Neither catharsis.

What can you do about that? Anyway something, but that requires practice and self -control: do not go in the drama triangle, stretch your emotional bandwidth (check Plutchiks ‘Wheel of Emotions’ (1980)), and reward politicians and journalists not for drama, but for reflection. And yes, then it is still possible to weigh inwardly.

Beatrice de Graaf is a professor of history of international relations in Utrecht.

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