Advertising, Kindness, and Sanity

I'm not sure if Brennan is in favor of civil codes or not, although she seems to be when she says the codes "dissipate negative and disabling affects (putting a person at ease)" (123). With our nation's leaders on their current civility kick (a bit rich coming from politicians, but there you have it), the idea of dissipating the negative affects sounds attractive.

We've talked in class about advertisements and the emotions they play on, so now I'm wondering about all the negative affects passed around in advertising. Our airwaves are flooded with images of sad children (or adults, or pets, or whatever "sad" individual the product will fix) to convince us to buy into everything from causes to toilet paper. The current run of ads featuring kids who are embarrassed by their parents' cars, for example, is sickening, only superseded by the back-to-school ads that encourage kids to shop at the right stores so they don't look like "losers". No wonder parents are faced with whining and screaming from their kids who have a bad case of "I want"; the kids have received a negative affect (discontent) from the advertiser and are merely passing it along!

So I turn my TV off. But there is a positive side to the social code; "one is open to others in a way that wishes them well and would dissipate their anxiety or sorrow if one could" (123). This is the courtesy and civility that people are always waxing nostalgic for, in a "remember when people cared about each other?" kind of way. I can't speak for everyone's neighborhood, but I know in my apartment complex we hardly have to have nostalgia; people do keep an eye out for one another for the most part, although I don't think that we know one another well enough to "feel their joy or sorrow" (123). This kind of polite distance-- which has been a part of our social code, although not everyone practices it now-- does provide a buffer against the "conflict between mental health... and spiritual health" (125) that she mentions. We are close enough to care a bit, but not so close as to share all our affects with one another.

There's a term that I hear from time to time and of course can't remember right now that describes the person who has seen too much sad stuff or had too many emotional appeals from others-- basically, people suffer from overexposure to sadness/suffering and their compassion starts shutting down as a protective mechanism. That's what I thought of many times through this reading, that we're suffering from a collective overexposure to others' affects, voluntarily or not, and that is in part what has led to the abandonment of civility. After all, why would I bother being kind if it's going to leave me exhausted? Why would I use up all my thoughtfulness on strangers and have none left for my family when I get home? There has to be some sort of protective barrier to keep one's own mental and emotional state intact, and perhaps the ignoring of social codes is one way that the human mind reacts.