By YoYo Zhang
It’s easy to be angry.
It might take a tremendous amount of opening up to share your sadness but it only takes a few sentences (think Twitter) to make everyone who sees it furious. It’s also easy to find people who agree with you on who to hate. Open up any social media and you will undoubtedly find groups spitting furiously in each other’s general direction.
“The Warrior fans are all bandwagons and their players only play for money!”
“Drake is the GOAT and every other artist can kill themselves!”
Or,
“Clearly, CLEARLY, this dress is white and gold.”
Interestingly, few opinions find their way out of their original community. Look at Reddit. Groups hate each other but the anger is bounded by the walls of their respective subreddits. If a user ventures into an opposing subreddit and posts his views, he will be downvoted into oblivion and be banned by the moderators for posting inappropriate content. But why would you do that? Why leave the comfort of being surrounded by people who agree with you? Why risk losing karma when you could gain hundreds if not thousands of upvotes by boarding the hate train happily marching around in your own subreddit?
Now expand the size of two inter-hating subreddits to the size of a nation. For more excitement, make sure that the most upvoted people get the privilege of running their respective subreddits. Now, there are two paths for people to become the moderator of these subreddits. They can conjure up a vision of a wonderful future when the forum in under his control or post something the supporters can all hate together. Way waste time persuading others when you can simply shitpost, sit back, and enjoy the torrent of upvotes thrown your way.
“George W. Bush??? Aww I hate that man.”
“I think I vomited a little (seeing Ted Cruz)”
“If you see Donald Trump, would you please stab him with a silver stake?”
Playing the political game isn’t about who proposes the most helpful legislations or who is the most benevolent to the people. It is, and only is, about counting votes. Why take that first step and engage in discourse with the “other side” when you don’t need their votes anyways? It’s the path of least resistance so why stray off into the thorny shrubbery?
It’s difficult to rally people behind hope, or positivity, or love.
It’s effortless to rally people behind hate and anger.
Keep hating each other now, don’t stop anytime soon.
Opinions expressed on the editorial pages are not necessarily those of NYU DC Violets or the NYU DC Program, and our publication of opinions is not an endorsement of them.
