Emotional Intelligence and Empathic Linguistic Power in Times of Crisis

Introduction

Language has the power to shape and modify the way people think and perceive the world (DeFranza et al., 2020). Language indeed is far more influential and powerful when it is part of a social act. Depending on the context and variables of the era and time, language can be so powerful that it can transform society as well as it can carry the destructive power to even devastate society. If wrong words are chosen with an inconvenient style, the linguistic code in question could transmit a massive crisis message, which in return forms a domino effect by creating ill-formed chaos within society. “Crises as rhetorical constructs are specialized kinds of communication whereby urgency takes over routine and conventional processes (Kiewe, 2012, n.p.).” It is therefore critical to explore which variables activate empathic emotional intelligence, and how crises are handled among societies through linguistic power.

What’s even more striking, empathy is the only remedy that activates emotional intelligence for civilized societies, and societies that lack empathy and emotional intelligence invite crises for inevitable catastrophic futures. The presence of emotional intelligence in communication styles, and how this linguistic variable is valued in a society is the indicator of whether the individuals within that community show empathy towards each other. The state of self-consciousness about emotions, and the ability to control emotions are critical domains of emotional intelligence to be able to feel empathy (Faye et al., 2011). In the first place, it seems clear that there is a direct correlation between emphatic linguistic power and emotional intelligence and how societies handle crises (Swart et al., 2011). Therefore, this study proposes a framework through which the empathic linguistic power within a society could be a determining power for crisis management and wellbeing at times of turmoil.

What’S Wrong With Societies?

Baboons are key to understand human evolution (Strum, 2012). Yet, it is not possible to understand why humans stopped evolving while Baboons evolved democratically without using a complex communication method, which is language. It may be the world’s most complicated question as to how baboons achieved to live in a more civilized society than humans when some geniuses among people invented “google” to find instant informative answers for all humanly questions. Within the context of emotional intelligence and empathy, baboons surprisingly have a system for shared decision-making without the privilege of the language people are using. What is far more interesting is that baboons never follow dominant characters, who unkindly dictate to them what to do in their tribes, and this means they have their own language for shunning bullies. In a baboon society, the dominant character who is good at finding resources and food, are often not the most popular figures, and the majority of baboons value kindness and respect when choosing a baboon leader, and they interestingly experience democracy when many communities of people lost their access to democratic privileges (Conradt & Roper, 2007). To illustrate, baboons are not male-dominant societies, where females are oppressed as the less valued secondary gender as it is still the case for human beings. In Baboon families, females can indeed be the head of the family, and they can even be political figures within the tribe to make critical decisions for the tribe’s well-being (Strandburg-Peshkin, 2015; Strum, 2012). Baboons live in this democratic surrounding with their rather limited intelligence and language whereas the unsolvable mystery of how humans are continuously deprived of their basic human rights in an undemocratic world remains the mystery of the artificial modern world.