verging_on_random

Politicians and emotional labour

August 6, 2007 on 9:56 pm | In Uncategorized |

A comment by gandhi over at LP got me thinking about the life that politicians live.

In recent years, a few scholars have been researching what they call ‘emotional labour’. This is an expression used to describe work where the most valuable element is the worker’s ability to act out an emotion that s/he doesn’t really feel. For example, flight attendants have to act caring and attentive to customers for 8 hours at a time even though they detest some of their passengers and in the reverse way, prison guards have to be tough on inmates no matter how much they might secretly like or admire some of them.

Lots of people get by with what’s known as ’surface’ acting. This is like the checkout operator who looks past your shoulder with a mechanical smile and asks “How are you today?” You know they don’t give a shit if you’re dying, and they know you know … it’s just an act.

However when people engage in what’s called ‘deep’ acting, they convince themselves that they genuinely do feel the emotions they are supposed to feel. Thus a nurse might persuade herself that she isn’t affected by the deaths of patients because she has cultivated a sense of professional detachment; or a counsellor might persuade himself that every child he tries to help is a victim of something or other and deserves care and compassion.

Problems arise when deep acting clashes with someone’s genuine emotions: for example, deep down the nurse actually does feel anguish over the death of her patients, or the counsellor’s spontaneous gut reaction is that some of the kids he sees are appalling little shits who should have been strangled at birth. When someone’s real experienced emotions clash with the emotions they are deep acting, the result is emotional dissonance and a phenomenon known as self-estrangement. In other words, the person is unable to tell who they truly are because they can no longer distinguish genuine emotion from the emotion they believe they are supposed to feel.

When you think about it, politicians spend virtually all their waking moments engaged in deep acting. It’s inevitable that some of them will experience a sense of self-estrangement … or as gandhi put it in his comment about John Howard that prompted this post:

What stopped me in my tracks was the crazy look in his eyes: it was kind of pathetic. Shouting at him would have felt like harrassing a mentally ill person. His eyes were fearful and darting, but his body language was desperately trying to convey his sense of self-importance. It was sad, in a deeply disconcerting kind of way.

Self-estrangement would be a possible explanation, I believe.