Turning the Page on Personal Outrage
What to do About the Spread of Malignant Antagonism (Vol. 6; Issue 21)
Are you starting to feel like outrage has become, well, all the rage? The social media-sphere, long known for acrimony, has become dominated by outrage in recent years. Immigrants, political parties, GLP-1s, explicit sex scenes in movies, wokeness, erectile dysfunction drugs, people who take Disney cruises, people who don’t use turn signals, shoppers that don’t return their grocery cars, singing audience members at Broadway shows or poor people holding signs asking for money — the list of topics that elicit fury is excessive. It’s a sign of our times. People are outraged everywhere, and their reactions are rarely justified.
Outrage, a different emotion than anger or hatred, is defined as a combination of anger, resentment and shock triggered by acts perceived as offensive, violent or cruel. Of late, common prompts include the War in Iran, rising gasoline and grocery prices, ICE arrests and Trump’s golden White House ballroom.
What accounts for the popularity of outrage?
Perhaps most significantly, outrage emerges from a primitive form of thinking known in psychoanalytic circles as splitting. Splitting and projection, the two foundational defense mechanisms, are normal in infants and toddlers. Their immature body-minds, overwhelmed by the complexity of the world, transform their experience into two basic categories: good or bad. The division simplifies. And, as one regards the bad, they project it out whenever possible. As they mature, especially when they develop the capacity for language, these infantile defense mechanisms recede. Mature defenses, such as sublimation, suppression, anticipation or humor, provide ways to deal with life’s shades of gray.
The prevalence of outrage in everyday conversation, not to mention in the anonymous world of internet exchanges, validates the predominance of splitting. And splitting, in turn, results from a lack of critical thinking. Outrage also provides for projection. The outraged person projects onto some “other” person, thing or event they find outrageous. Whatever is “outrageous” about the aggrieved party is evacuated into the “other.” It simplifies their world while allowing them to ignore whatever is flawed in themselves.
A combination of mirror neurons and memes* makes outrage spread rapidly through social networks. The intense emotional arousal associated with outrage drives individuals to share their feelings. They express their ire in coffee houses, gyms, workplaces, bars and at social gatherings of all types; they fill their social media pages, their emails and their texts with their outrage. Social media alone enables communal outrage on an unprecedented scale, allowing people to broadcast their indignation worldwide.
Such broad social networks run on the fuel of personal anonymity. Anonymity emboldens users, allowing them to express opinions and emotions without the fear of real-world repercussions. This phenomenon, in turn, leads to deindividuation, a psychological state causing individuals to lose their sense of self-awareness and moral evaluation and to behave in impulsive, often aggressive ways. The disconnect between online behavior and real-life accountability allows individuals to voice outrage without confronting its direct emotional impact.
Closely related to splitting and anonymity, outrage also has an addictive quality. It feels good to have the world so simplified, to be on one side or another. That word, addiction, is also overused though. Nonetheless, and particularly when considering the border between compulsions (behaviors that feel uncontrollable) and addictions (behaviors that bring withdrawal if discontinued), people get hooked on the feeling of outrage. It becomes self-reinforcing.
These forces behind the pandemic of outrage, splitting, contagion, anonymity and addiction swirl around in social spheres. They create a toxicity, an outrage culture. The capacity for dialogue becomes stifled, thoughts echo one another and remarkable polarization develops when outrage becomes society’s dominant emotional response.
Addressing any negative habit begins with bringing the problematic behavior into consciousness. If too accustomed to the feeling of outrage, then ideally you’d notice it, reflect on it and consider alternatives. Splitting and projection can be addressed by proposing only arguments for which you can offer counter-arguments. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974), imprisoned in a Russian Gulag from 1945 to 1953 (for criticizing Joseph Stalin), believed evil was a capacity of every human being. One must understand how the brutality of the prison guard lives somewhere in the body-mind of the prisoner (which Jungians would call the Shadow). As soon as you can articulate an argument opposite to your own, you are neither splitting nor projecting.
The infectious and compulsive features of outrage can end in a similar way, namely bringing the propensity for feeling outrage to consciousness and resisting the temptation to enact it. You’ll be less likely to infect others if you’re feeling less of it yourself. Many, if not all, human conflicts can be resolved through reasoned dialogue. But such conversations require the mature capacity to understand the other party’s point of view, to engage with reciprocity and empathy.
Finally, finding oneself excessively immersed in feeling outraged, particularly if expressing it anonymously, shows cowardice. It is a way of hiding from authentically encountering the world by engaging in what Friedrich Nietzsche (1886/2002) called "herd mentality" (Herdenmentalität). Nietzsche critiqued the way most people mindlessly conform to social norms, adopt conventional beliefs and experience emotions without independent thought or reflection. His idea of the Übermensch (Overman) has nothing to do with Naziism or superiority. Instead, it refers to the person who thinks for him or herself, and acts accordingly. If you often feel outraged and realize its banal commonality, why not break the cycle and stand out from the herd?
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*Memes, deliberately derived from the word genes, refer to how information is spread through groups in a manner resembling how genes affect biology. A meme refers to how an idea, behavior or style spreads by means of imitation (mimesis) (mimesis) within a culture. Richard Dawkins (1976) popularized the concept. The emotion of outrage illustrates a meme taking form as a type of emotion.
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References
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. London: Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1886/2002). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Cambridge University Press.
Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1974). The Gulag archipelago, 1918-1956: An experiment in literary investigation. Trans. T. P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row.