OUTRAGE AS A SHIELD FROM MORAL JUDGMENT
Moral outrage is also effective as a shield from judgment. Being morally outraged seems to function very effectively as a mechanism to protect the purveyors of outrage against any evaluation of their actions, tactics, honesty, or morality. After the horrific shooting at Parkland High School in February 2018, parents, students, and teachers were excused for accusing all gun owners, NRA members, and civil-rights advocates of being baby killers, because they were (justifiably) traumatized by those events. Never mind that they were caught lying, exaggerating, engaging in verbal bullying, and invoking violence against NRA leaders and congressmen. They were outraged, and outrage excuses one from having to tell the truth or exhibiting moral behavior.
OUTRAGE AS A WEAPON
Outrage is also an exceptional weapon that can pierce the armor of nearly any foe. It’s like a bow with three magically tipped arrows: shame, guilt, and fear. Moral outrage expressed against opponents can strike them with any one or all three of these instruments at any given time. The instant that someone outside of your tribe slips up and says or does something that you might have the slightest chance to paint as insensitive, racist, politically incorrect, outdated, judgmental, or insulting to a protected class or group, that person has opened up an opportunity to attack with a weapon they cannot possibly resist.
Shame almost always comes first, a form of stripping the subject of attack of any normal form of moral defense by replacing rational argument and discussion with a disarming sense of betrayal—betrayal of the group, the tribe’s trust and code of behavior. Shame leads to a reduction in the offender’s social status or, worse, outright banishment from the social circle.
As a tribe begins using shame and guilt more brazenly as a weapon, fear begins to overtake each member’s normal sense of morality and reason. Fear of being shamed and ostracized can eventually paralyze a culture and prevent constructive dialogue, reason, and the free flow of ideas.
OUTRAGE AS IDENTITY
By far the most destructive aspect of Outrage Addiction is that over time it tends to overtake and replace the addicts’ identity. They surrender the responsibility of developing a caring, rational, human persona. Hallmarks of a genuine and healthy human personality tend to be smothered below a facade of impulsive, manic emotional responses driven by the addiction. Rather than actual empathy for the misfortune or suffering of others, addicts respond with oversized and obnoxious levels of self-righteous indignation, always scattering blame against the alleged perpetrators of the crime, against some victims, or against humanity itself. Rather than quiet, reasoned introspection, addicts instead make a grossly obvious, grand spectacle of their sympathy and protestations that bespeaks their inner disquiet and self-loathing. Wrongdoers didn’t simply make a mistake, they have acted in a subhuman manner and must be castigated by the tribe, fully and wholly shamed in the public square, ostracized from the group, and ultimately destroyed. Only this victory will fill the void, the hole that has been left in the moral outrage addict—the hole left by the absence of an actual human soul.
This is why Outrage Addiction is so dangerous to our culture and to mankind: It deprives human beings of genuine humanity, replacing it instead with an outwardly facing caricature of a virtuous human being wrapped around a rotting corpse.
Look, it’s not that all outrage is wrong all the time. There are times, of course, when outrage is a perfectly appropriate and reasonable response to actions we see in others. As with any addiction, the problem isn’t the chemical or the behavior itself. America isn’t having an opioid crisis because opioids are inherently bad or evil. It’s the abuse and the involuntary need of the object of the addiction. The unhealthy dependence upon the thing in order to feel, to function. Expressing moral outrage has become the automatic, compulsive response to anything we see or hear that challenges our tribe’s beliefs. And instantly and automatically supporting the outrage of others is even more important. That’s the concerning thing. Moral outrage is simultaneously a badge of honor and a shield against any objective judgment. And that makes it destructive and divisive.
Outrage Addiction has replaced constructive dialogue and suppressed genuine empathy and warmness. It’s no wonder that suicide has become the tenth leading cause of death in America—we don’t have authentic conversations anymore. We don’t express actual sympathy when others are suffering or being abused; we express outrage instead. As a result, we don’t know what’s real anymore. Do people really care about women being sexually harassed or assaulted in Hollywood and the Arkansas governor’s mansion, or are they just following the crowd because to avoid doing so would be to aid and abet rape culture?
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Chemistry Class
Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see a bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
—Dale Carnegie
In May 2018, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg delivered the commencement address at Rice University. His theme was the “extreme partisanship” that is dividing the country and the willingness of both ends of the political spectrum to believe anything that depicts the other end in a bad light. “This is what is fueling and excusing all this dishonesty,” he said. He described it as an infectious disease. “But instead of crippling the body, it cripples the mind. It blocks us from understanding the other side. It blinds us from seeing the strength of their ideas—and the weakness of our own. And it leads us to defend or excuse lies and unethical actions when our own side commits them.”
Americans are becoming more loyal to their political party than to the country, Bloomberg warned, with their objective being gaining power rather than making progress. “Bringing the country back together I know won’t be easy. But I believe it can be done—and if we are to continue as a true democracy, it must be done. . . . Because bringing the country back together starts with the first lesson you learned here at Rice: Honesty matters. And everyone must be held accountable for being honest.”
This country is more divided between right and left, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal right now than at any time at least since the Civil War.
I’ve spent a lot of time and effort the last few years admitting I have been wrong. It was difficult at first, but once I got the hang of it, it came a lot more easily. And with it, I found, I became a lot more understanding of the other side. The “other side” in this case being anyone and everyone who didn’t agree with me. Unexpectedly, the anger I had kept inside for so long slowly dissipated as I accepted the fact(!) that the right and the left are both responsible for the situation we’re in. And that as long as we can’t even talk to each other civilly, there is no possible way we’re going to figure out how to maintain our country’s standing in the world.
I have said in as many different ways as I know how that in order to protect your rights you have to defend the rights of others, especially those with whom you disagree. It turns out, I finally understood that the Bill of Rights is fulfilling its purpose when it helps the side you wish it didn’t. We all agree that we can’t talk only to those people with whom we agree, but here’s the kicker: We can’t just listen to people we agree with either. We have to listen to them and, like Bloomberg said, at least be open to the possibility that on some tiny level, in one little way, they actually might have a pretty reasonable point.
Of course, there are many people who have criticized me for doing that, telling me—sometimes angrily—that I was wrong to admit that I was wrong. And the more they told me how wrong I was about both sides being responsible for this growing anger, the angrier they became!
But the inescapable truth is that our casual disregard for truth and honesty has already corrupted our system. When was the last time, for example, that you heard a politician, any politician, admit he or she was wrong? Certainly it hasn’t happened very often. For fun, I googled “Politicians ad
mitting they were wrong” and in return got a pretty short list. Near the top was Florida senator Marco Rubio acknowledging he was wrong when he said, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” Three years later he tweeted, “I’ve changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both!”
Just imagine how incredibly lucky we are in this country. We have 100 United States senators. We have 435 representatives. We have 50 state governors. And apparently all of them are right all the time! We seem to have forgotten the fine art of being honest. I’d like you to just stop here for a second, look away from the page, and remember the last time you were wrong and wouldn’t admit it.
Okay, 100 senators, 435 representatives, 50 governors . . . and you.
Somewhere we began regarding an admission of being wrong as a weakness rather than an admirable act of courage. A 2012 study published in the European Journal of Psychology found that refusing to apologize can have psychological benefits (and we issue no mea culpa for this research finding) and reported that when people refused to apologize, they felt more powerful and more in control, as well as had higher self-esteem. In other words, even when we know we’re wrong, we don’t want to admit it.
How in the world are we ever going to deal with the coming crises if we can’t even face the truth? How can you respect anyone else—or yourself—when they refuse to deal with reality? We have to begin by teaching our kids critical thinking. We have to be able to teach people how to think and how to teach kids not what to think but how to think.
The facts are out there for us to look at and use to form our opinions. Unfortunately, those facts don’t often square with our opinions, so we have to cut them down and shape them so that they support our beliefs, whatever they are. There was an old Cold War story told about a two-horse race between a Russian horse and an American horse. The American newspapers reported accurately that the American horse won by ten lengths. The Russian newspapers reported just as accurately that the Russian horse finished second while the American horse finished next-to-last.
It would be impossible for me to overstate the danger of the loss of our grasp on truth and facts. Giving the commencement address at Virginia Military Institute in May 2018, the recently fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned,
If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom. This is the life of non-Democratic societies. . . .
A responsibility of every American citizen is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not, and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America’s future be fact-based—not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises—but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are, and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.
When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth, even on what may seem the most trivial of matters, we go wobbly on America.
That’s my point; that’s exactly right. I wrote once, “Is it a stretch to say that freedom of speech is under attack in the United States of America? Well, I could point to evidence that if you question this president, his administration and policies, you come under vicious attack—that much is certain.”
There are a lot of people, most of them on the left, I suspect, who would agree completely with me. Well, at least they would until they found out that I wrote those words in 2010 about President Barack Obama and his administration. I had exactly the same objection about Obama. He would say things that I knew were not true, and his side would attack anyone who disagreed with him. Now that the lies are coming from President Trump’s administration, the left acts as though they’ve just discovered there was gambling going on in Casablanca!
The divide between the political factions is now so wide that every day each side presents its own version of the news. Every issue becomes that proverbial two-horse race. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, for example, is either trying to save America from Russian interference in our elections or trying to destroy America with his unfounded attacks on the administration. There is no middle ground. We get our news and opinions from different sources, networks, and newspapers that exist primarily to reinforce the positions we already hold. When we’re told over and over in many different ways that the other side is tearing down America, it makes it impossible to accept the fact that the other side may actually have a point—that they may not be 100 percent wrong about everything. As hard as it is to accept, it might make sense to listen to them.
Mostly, though, Americans distrust anyone or any source that disagrees with them. We live in partisan wind tunnels. There are few things more dangerous to our future than the Trump administration’s threatening to take away credentials from legitimate news outlets. That attempt to threaten the media should frighten every American, but it doesn’t. Instead, a large number of people are cheering for him to do just that. They don’t agree with the reporting coming from those sources, which too often attack their beliefs, so they have no qualms about shutting them out and allowing the news to be reported only by media outlets that agree with their position. Thomas Jefferson warned more than two centuries ago, “When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant.”
When we no longer know what we can believe, we’ll start believing anything. For example, I’m sure most readers believe Jefferson actually said that because it showed up on the Internet accompanied by a really somber drawing of Jefferson looking extremely sincere. And the fact that I quoted him here. The fact is, there is no record that Jefferson ever said that. It’s a handy tool to use, though; when you quote Jefferson it makes it feel real, and the unknown person who created and posted that knew it would be believed.
Unlike Trump, though, Jefferson was a staunch defender of a free press, even when he was being attacked. In a 1789 letter acknowledging the importance of a completely free press to the future of this then-new country, he wrote, “The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
Okay, here’s a little test. True or false: Thomas Jefferson was a staunch defender of our free press.
Not so quick. He absolutely was—except when he wasn’t. Several years after his stirring defense, he wrote in another letter, “[N]othing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper. . . . Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
That’s the problem with facts: They can be used by intelligent people to support almost any argument they want to make. It is factual to say Jefferson was passionate in his support of the media, and it is equally accurate to say that Jefferson was a bitter foe of the media. The point is that the people on the other side of your debate may have facts on their side, too. Their position may be just as valid as yours. In other words, two rights don’t necessarily make one of you wrong.
No wonder you get so upset. But the source of your outrage isn’t the other side, it’s you. It’s your frustration. It’s your anger. It’s outrage. And it makes it easy for other people to manipulate you.
The reason the sources of information you watch tend to support what you already believe is that they know it will bring you back for more. Who doesn’t want to be told they’re right? Maybe instead of the chicken and the egg, the question should be what came
first: Strong political opinions or partisan news sources? Roger Ailes figured out how to build loyalty, and the other networks followed. Your loyalty is valuable to them. You’re a statistic, that’s all you are. A number that is used to generate income for them. A number that can be used to win elections.
What’s true? What’s real? Among those other things I have in my collection of artifacts is the microphone used during World War II by Tokyo Rose, supposedly to demoralize Americans fighting against Japan. The nickname “Tokyo Rose” became synonymous with traitor. But after buying this mic I did my own research and discovered that much of what we had been told wasn’t accurate.
Tokyo Rose actually was an American citizen who was visiting Japan when the war began and got stuck there. The Japanese government used her to broadcast propaganda, but there is considerable evidence she also used that platform to convey life-saving information to the Allies.