I’ve been thinking a lot about fear. Even when Halloween was months away, scary stuff was everywhere. And as the spooky holiday quickly approaches, it’s only getting worse. Of course, I’m talking about the nonstop tv and digital political ads portraying candidates as ghouls and evil villains who only want to do us harm.

I’m tired of it.

Tired of the scare tactics. Tired of being told over and over again what I should fear, with a lot of it based on outright lies. But mostly, I’m so very tired of the attempted manipulation of my emotions. That’s why I don’t like horror movies. I’ve never understood why it’s fun or feels good to sit in a dark room and watch Dracula or the Boogeymen doing horrible things on a big screen, and worse, doing them in a way that’s meant to shock me, take me by surprise and scare the snot out of me. It always felt manipulative, as if the director were saying, “If I have the actors do this, and then I have them do that, I’ll make the viewers pee their pants.”

I don’t want to pee my pants. It’s embarrassing. I also don’t enjoy the feeling of looking over my shoulder, of waiting for the next shoe to drop. There are plenty of very real things—climate change, gerrymandering, another insurrection, the end of democracy as we know it, and of course, clowns/Ted Cruz—to be afraid of. I don’t need to pile on, or worse, to have people I don’t even know trying to scare the crap/snot/pee out of me with utter nonsense.

Back to those ads. We all know that they work to get people to think or vote a certain way, or campaigns wouldn’t spend all that money on them. Ever wonder why they work? Science provides a clue, as it so often does. According to brain research, the amygdala, or what some call the “fear center” of our brains, is responsible for regulating our emotions and evaluating threats. Interestingly, the amygdala is larger, and potentially more active, in conservatives than it is in liberals. That’s why we see so many ads about crime and safety directed at conservatives. An article in Scientific American (hardly a political magazine) describes how brain research has long shown that “conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

So are we doomed to be controlled by political fear mongers who are simply trying to manipulate us through our established neural wiring? According to the article, no. “The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy. (But) If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship.”

In other words, know thy brain. And, get the facts.

When I see a scary political ad, I try not to let it hijack my emotions. Instead, I pull out my phone and research the facts of the ad, using several different sources. It takes a minute or two (about the same amount of time as watching the commercial). I get the information I need to either reject or embrace the ad, and I know more about the candidate. Even better, I feel as if I’m in control and no longer being manipulated into believing somebody else’s bullshit.

It’s never been easier to conduct our own research, to get the information we need to make informed political decisions—not through ads but by simply typing in the name of the candidate to check out various credible and nonpartisan sources of factual information on that candidate. Find out their past votes on issues, the current policies they support, or the opinions they’ve written or spoken about. Check out candidates on YouTube, or any other credible source that allows you to actually watch and hear what the candidate him or herself has said on an issue you care about—and not just a ten-second soundbite. Videos help illustrate one of Maya Angelou’s best and most famous quotes: ““When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Lecture alert: The following judgmental sentence comes with finger-waving, followed by a preachy opinion: 

If you spend six hours putting together your fantasy football team or shopping online for shoes, you can spend an hour doing research on the people who may control your future. All of our futures.

How about you? Are you going to let them continue to manipulate you through fear and lies? Or are you going to make up your own damn mind, regardless of the size of your amygdala?

Let’s save the shivers for Halloween.

Photograph by Karolina Grabowska at pexels.com.