Breaking the Cycle of Disgust
How an evolutionary emotion is being used to tear us apart and what we can do about it
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme. This month we’re exploring emotions.
This Week at a Glance:
This week, we explore an emotion that is being used to tear fellow citizens apart: disgust.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 What disgust is and its evolutionary origins;
🍬 How our culture is currently using disgusting to put a wedge between us;
🍫 How we can overcome our disgust for one another.
Disgust is visceral. It is a vibrant emotion. When someone is disgusted by something, everyone knows it—their face retracts, their lips pull down, and their mouth looks like they’re going to yack.
In their book Perception, Dennis Proffitt and Drake Baer call disgust “an evolved policing system meant to protect us from harm.”
But that policing system is being utilized to tear us apart from one another.
Historically, disgust has been assumed to have evolved as a way of protecting ourselves from dangerous foods, with the philosopher Patricia Churchland describing it as “an evolved emotional/visceral response that causes humans to avoid toxins and pathogens that might otherwise kill or sicken them.”
The emotion helps protect us because it is a motivator for avoidance with the understanding if something disgusting is consumed, it “taints” or poisons us in some way.
, being reminded of our own mortality seems to motivate the “purification” aspect of us that turns the emotion on.Our Tribal Nature
While disgust likely evolved to keep us alive by avoiding certain things, our culture has since hijacked the emotion and uses it to drive the feelings of repulsion, disdain, and contempt for those different from us.
We have a natural tendency to form tribes and face off against one another. As part of that nature, it makes sense for a tribe to use the emotion of disgust to drive a wedge between the parties and, in turn, stoke anger and fear.
A quick example of the rhetoric used to incite disgust toward an opposing party: Vermins. Cockroaches. Animals — all words that evoke a natural feeling of disgust, a desire to avoid out of fear of being tainted.
In short, this rhetoric is a way to stereotype and short-circuit our thinking by grouping people by an emotion.
People who use this type of rhetoric have triggered the “purification” aspect of the emotion by dehumanizing the other party. The emotion that was originally evolved to assist with our survival is used to separate neighbors, friends, and even family. People who use this type of rhetoric usually pair it with “end of days” type dialogue to ensure their followers feel they will be tainted and destroyed by the opposing party.
By tying the emotion of disgust to our tribal nature, we have allowed ourselves to be couped by our culture.
On top of this, our tribal nature makes us want to mimic others in our group. So, as Arthur Brooks recently pointed out in his article in The Atlantic, when we see others within our group as expressing the emotion, we ourselves feel the need to express it as well.
“Remember that disgust is contagious when people witness it in us,” he writes.
The Yale psychologist
demonstrated in one of his books just how powerful our emotions are in wanting to preserve our in-group and avoid our out group by referencing a European study that tested the empathy of soccer fans.The study consisted of attaching electrodes to the hand of a fan who was shocked and who then witnessed another person—a fan of the same team—be shocked.
The empathic neural response showed strong signs when their fellow fan experienced the shock.
However, when this experiment was run and the fan was told the opposite individual was a fan of an opposing team, the response was noticeable weaker.
Perhaps even more detrimental than our innate tribal mentality, however, is that when the emotion of disgust is triggered, we put blinders on, having what Dan and Chip Heath call a “narrowing effect” where our focus sharpens directly to the thing that triggered the emotion. When this occurs, it becomes increasingly hard to see outside of this view.
In other words, we sit in the emotional state and are unable to see anything outside of that emotional lens.
Fighting the Pull of Disgust
As we discussed last week on anger, so much of our well-being is predicated on finding a space between the stimuli we encounter in life and our responses to them.
Disgust is no different.
If we can build in space between when we’re feeling disgusted and our reaction to that disgust, we can provide ourselves room to think, and in those cases, actually come to understand our emotional response to the situation.
This ability to build space is so powerful because it allows our mind time to intervene, cutting off the erratic nature of our emotional side.
We need to build these mental muscles to be able to recognize in the moment when we’re feeling disgust for another. By not doing so, we allow the emotion to take over and we lose empathy for the other person or group.
And empathy is in fact the second tool for combatting disgust. Paul Bloom writes:
“Empathy makes one more likely to care: it boosts compassion and altruism. Disgust has the opposite effect: it makes us indifferent to the suffering of others and has the power to incite cruelty and dehumanization.”
When we stereotype others, when dehumanize them as though they are somehow lower than us, when we refuse to see people for who and what they are, we cut ourselves off from society.
“Empathy begins,” the writer and poet Anne Lamott wrote, “when we realize how much alike we all are.”
Disgust is a culturally-learned emotion. And it spreads more rapidly and aggressively than ever before with the flow of content online.
By reframing our experience from disgust to genuine empathy, we remind ourselves that the person or group we’re disgusted with is in fact us, just with different beliefs.
A third tool comes directly from the ancient Stoics in the form of cosmopolitanism. The Stoics believed in the concept that we humans were not separated by city, state, or country, but were all unified into a single state—the world—and were thus all citizens of it.
Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of this in his Meditations, writing:
“If thought is something we share, then so is reason—what makes us reasoning beings.
If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared.
And if so, we share a common law. And thus, are fellow citizens.
And fellow citizens of something.
And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it—from this state that we share—come thought and reason and law.
When we step back and realize we’re all rational beings, sharing both the ability to use reason as well as live amongst each other, in a single location, we begin to distance ourselves from the notion that we are different, that we are separated by borders, by politics, by emotions. If we are to hold onto these things, we do so but not to the degree where it becomes detrimental not only to ourselves but to those other “citizens.”
Finally, as we discussed last month, life is incredibly hard and painful. We can choose to continue to make the world that way, we can choose to be an abscess on the world, or we can choose to try and make it better. We can avoid the stereotyping, take a step back, and take stock of how we’re feeling, how we’re reacting, how we’re being manipulated by rhetoric.
Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of this choice writing:
“The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe, so far as it can”
Overall, disgust for our fellow citizens is being hijacked by our culture and pushed through technology to drive a wedge between parties. But when we provide distance for ourselves, when we remember to empathize with our fellow citizens, that we are all in fact sharing the same planet and are thus all citizens of it, we work to chip away at disgust’s hold on us and replace it within ourselves with more positive aspects.
3-Bullet Summary:
Disgust is an emotion that original evolved as a protective mechanism to keep us safe from food and toxins we should avoid;
The emotion itself is currently being used by our culture to drive a wedge between people by using the “purification” aspect of the emotion and project the notion of other people being “tainted”;
While disgust is an innate emotion, we have power over it and can take back control by building space between our reactions, applying empathy to others, and remembering we are all here as “citizens of the world” as the Stoics used to say.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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