Dear Editor,
According to a recent article in British Guardian newspaper by Oliver Burkeman, there is a personality trait called “the Need For Drama” (NFD) developed by psychologists at the University of Texas. On the test to measure this trait, it asks if you agree with statements like ” sometimes it’s fun to get people riled up’” and “I often speak my mind and pay for it later”.
According to Burkeman, his eyeball assessment of both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, two British politicians heavily involved in the Brexit campaign, seem to fit the NFD characteristics, as does Donald Trump.
Burkeman believes that we live in an increasing NFD culture. High NFD people, he explains, have an “external locus of control”, which means they perceive events as happening to them as suppose to ” being authored by them.”
And what brings this on: the blurred line between fantasy and the real world facilitated by media. Fantasies become symbols of hope or opportunities for excitement, like buying a lottery ticket, where the chances of winning are roughly 1 in 14 million for Lotto 6/49 and 1 in 28.6 million for Lotto Max. It’s the emotional hype that draws people despite the slim chances of success where thousands of people put out money for lottery tickets.
Building a wall to block Mexicans entering the US and have Mexico pay for such a wall or banning Muslims from the U.S. are fantasies that have no bearing in the real world, where they are untethered from legal, constitutional, or international constraints.
Hoping such a confined world might eventually exist takes a page out of Zombie or Ghostbusters movies and imagines these enactments coming to life just outside McDonald’s or your local Seven Eleven store. We’re living in the era again of the evil witch and the hero on a white horse, a fairy tale world where the pragmatic details of life are replaced by bedtime stories.
George Jason