Heisenberg wrote:
>
https://hbr.org/2015/11/the-new-science ... r-emotions
> The process of quantifying and creating models around emotions
> seems like the territory of marketers and political analysts. If
> anyone knows one it may be helpful to try and re-purpose what is
> known into the context of GD than trying to reinvent the
> wheel. Definitely a hard question.
> Question for John: In thinking about the emotions that identity
> groups go through is it a semi strict sequential movement from
> denial to anger (or some other sequence)? Or is the model for
> thinking about it more like grief where there is denial, anger,
> depression, bargaining, and acceptance and an identity group will
> go through many of these emotions at different points before
> finally moving into "acceptance"?
The denial to acceptance sequence for individuals doesn't really
apply to entire populations, since each person in the population
will be at a different step in the sequence, so you get an
averaging effect.
However, there is an entirely different sequence of emotions that I've
described before.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, both controversy and
euphoria are to be expected at a military attack that could begin an
all-out war. Any military attack is going to be controversial, but
the population can also easily become heavily invested and become
euphoric.
Here's how historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes how the euphoria
at the beginning of a war is itself highly delusional in his 2001
book,
The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and
Recovery:
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat wrote:
> The passions excited in the national psyche by the onset of war
> show how deeply invested the masses now were in its potential
> outcome. Propaganda had reinforced their conviction that
> "everything was at stake," and the threat of death and defeat
> functioned like a tightly coiled spring, further heightening the
> tension. The almost festive jubilation that accompanied the
> declarations of war in Charleston in 1861, Paris in 1870, and the
> capitals of the major European powers in 1914 were anticipatory
> celebrations of victory-since nations are as incapable of
> imagining their own defeat as individuals are of conceiving their
> own death. The new desire to humiliate the enemy, noted by
> Burckhardt, was merely a reaction to the unprecedented posturing
> in which nations now engaged when declaring war.
The euphoria goes on until something goes wrong, usually some kind of
military disaster, such as the Battle of Bull Run in 1861 or the
Bataan Death March in 1941, and then the euphoria turns to panic.
The panicked reaction can be much greater when a military disaster
occurs. In his 1832 book,
On War, General Carl von Clausewitz
describes what happens:
Carl von Clausewitz wrote:
> The effect of defeat outside the army -- on the people and on the
> government -- is a sudden collapse of the wildest expectations,
> and total destruction of self-confidence. The destruction of
> these feelings creates a vacuum, and that vacuum gets filled by a
> fear that grows corrosively, leading to total paralysis. It's a
> blow to the whole nervous system of the losing side, as if caused
> by an electric charge. This effect may appear to a greater or
> lesser degree, but it's never completely missing. Then, instead of
> rushing to repair the misfortune with a spirit of determination,
> everyone fears that his efforts will be futile; or he does
> nothing, leaving everything to Fate.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the events that cause
this "sudden collapse" and "total destruction" of self-confidence are
called "regeneracy events," because the panicked reaction regenerates
civic unity for the first time since the end of the preceding crisis
war.