All of our conscious actions emanate from two fundamental emotional drivers - Control and Belonging. Each of these two can be expressed as a want or a fear (angst); our need for control, or our fear of losing control, and our need for belonging, or our fear of being alone (alienation). 

Let’s expand first on control. It is our want to have a sense of agency over our reality. This want is so powerful that it is indifferent to objective reality. It doesn’t matter if we truly have control over our reality, (and evidently, we have very little control,) most people develop a very convincing illusion of control. Next time you find yourself in your local bank branch, look around at the people. You will be hard pressed to find happy people. Facial expressions are either neutral, or anxious. It is because banks are “black boxes”. We go to the bank because we need something. However, we do not know how decisions are made or who are the people that make them. We feel helpless, i.e., with no control over what is happening. There are many other examples. 

This need for control is also at the heart of our resistance to change, innovation, and any situation which is unpredictable, ambiguous or unclear. [Don’t tell me that you love change and innovation. Not because you don’t. Although, you probably don’t. You probably like to like innovation and change, but fundamentally feel uneasy when you encounter it. Because it doesn’t matter what you experience. What matters is what the vast majority feels. Proving a point by bringing up a single or even a few data points is wrong and silly. So, stop it.]

The other emotional driver is our want to belong, our need for social affirmation, and its angst expression, our fear of being alone and alienated. It is easy to see how the two emotional drivers are connected. It is easier to have a sense of agency when we connect and agree with others. When we “feel at home” or when we encounter a situation that is familiar, when we hear our language in a foreign country, we feel better. It dispels the angst that comes from being a stranger in a strange land. Our need to commune is what drives social media, both the posting of content and the reaction to it. Just like in Avatar’s “I see you”, we need to be seen, affirmed, possessed. Think about the punishment of excommunication - banning someone from their community is akin to death. 

So what? And how does this relate to governance?

Governance is the process used for deciding in groups. Understanding the emotional drivers that govern human actions is necessary both for designing effective systems of governance as well as for mitigating inevitable resistance and opposition to governance innovation. Capisce?

In the next piece we will add another context foundation, i.e., the different types of information.