The Waning Power of Outrage
Rah rah raaaa....
I’m old enough to remember the early days of the internet. Life on the internet before The Feed was inherently local and curiosity-driven. If you wanted to learn about cats, you looked for “cats.com” until early search engines made it easier for you to find the internet of things you were looking for. MySpace emerged as a cool way to showcase who you are with exhibitionistic authenticity, photos, music, descriptions and updates that capture the essence of you and the only people whose updates, descriptions, music, and photos you encountered were people you sought out and clicked.
The Feed consumed the old internet like a black hole devouring light. The power of The Feed came from the constant novelty, from finding things you didn’t seek out or expect to see. Photos from someone you connected with but forgot about, relationship status changes of people you thought were cute but didn’t bother to stay connected with, and, most of all, provocative posts that sucked you into debate.
If The Feed were a black hole, then provocation and allure were the gravitational forces that sustained it, drawing people in to post more, thereby creating more provocation, more allure, more gravity to suck us all into the darkest days of the internet.
I view a lot of our modern political animosity as a well-intentioned effort to make sense of, or in some cases exploit for political advantage, The Feed and the outrage that powered it. When push comes to shove and shove comes to a punch in the face, most people aren’t as angry and provocative as they appear on The Feed, and most people wouldn’t say in person the things they’re saying on the internet if they were within punching distance of the person they’re outraged at. Nature had a way of selecting against uninhibited provocateurs, but when we all siloed ourselves inside homes barricaded away from punches in the face, we slowly lost that inhibition and let loose the rabid, ranting beasts within.
The left became outraged at injustices that now exploded on their feeds. Seeing injustices they were previously unaware of, an army of white liberals eager to look righteous took up causes dear to disenfranchised groups but often weaponized to center the outraged white liberal and not actually help or even fully understand the needs of the disenfranchised groups.
In response to a perceived normalization of hostile righteousness from liberal coworkers and neighbors, many on the right felt their freedoms of speech and belief were under attack. However, instead of reacting with compassion and being the change they wanted to be in the world, many chose to protest by standing their ground after saying offensive things and hating people who are different. Trump has been, in many ways, a counteroffensive mounted by the right, a protest against norms of internet discourse and demeanor. Suddenly, with the protection of Trump, jerks feel free to be jerks again, to say mean things, to believe in the supremacy of their religion or race, to hate whoever they want and openly advocate for race-based arrests by the state whole protesting race-based admissions at private colleges. The false righteousness of loud voices on the left was met with normalized hate from loud voices on the right, an eye for an eye escalated to go after ears, noses, hearts and lungs.
And so it came to pass we all spiraled into the black hole of The Feed, sucked in by an inescapable outrage, screaming madly with our fingertips mashing furiously at the keyboard while a computer screen glows in our lonely eyes. If one can’t see the absurdity and hypocrisy of “their side” as we spiral towards a tribal dissolution of our politically diverse community, one has been fully consumed by The hungry Feed.
Outrage is a remarkable gravitational force, but if it were the only force in our moral universe then our ancestors would have all murdered each other generations ago. Since time immemorial, people have had disagreements that, at the time, felt as critical and provocative as the disagreements we have today. Eventually, outrage grew until the fury was so massive it exploded in Supernovas and wars, punches in the face, decapitations, foxholes with best friends strewn about, beaches and fields littered with corpses, mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The end game of outrage is war. The mirage of domination that many dream of, a glowing vision of a world submitting to one’s will reflecting the Platonic Ideal of civilization one believes is better than the rest, is but a mirage and chasing the mirage often leads us further into a desert of moral desolation.
I have felt the force of outrage. I have drunk from the vial of vitriol. During The Feed, I too posted provocative things. Ashamedly, I too let the rush of virality warp my moral compass and point my ship towards the center of the black hole.
However, at one point I realized I was becoming sucked into a dark rhetorical hellscape that didn’t match my moral aspirations. My outrage and fury about things like COVID outbreak forecasting, public health policy, and origins created a warped, farsighted way of viewing the world that caused me to lose sight of things nearer and dearer to me; my ideals of how the world ought to be, and my outrage about the world’s deviation from these ideals, began to be less important than my ideals of who I ought to be. I was in some ways lucky to be a lone liberal surrounded by conservatives who I advocated for and fought beside during COVID: the second I voiced my “other” views, many pounced on me with fury, and their fury helped me delete my Twitter account, reassess my words and motivations, and escape The Feed. The journey out of The Feed involved embracing the death of ideals, accepting the pain that drove the outrage in the first place, resetting my expectations of the world, and rediscovering the power of forces beyond outrage.
The death of one’s ideals can indeed be tragic, but it can also be liberating. The death of my ideals about how the scientific enterprise could be was a tragic loss of misplaced confidence in the career I’d chosen, but has since been replaced by a liberating realization that there are alternative careers and even ways to build entirely new parts or systems that make the world marginally better. The death of my ideals about the objectivity of scientists when confronted with a likely science-caused pandemic that killed millions of people required passing through stages of grief, but while the entirety of the scientific community as a miscategorized unit did not function as I had hoped, many individual scientists within that community glow bright as beacons of the kinds of scientists I admire.
The gravitational pull of outrage comes from a mismatch between one’s ideals for the world and the realities that the world, its institutions, its people, are not ideal. Once we burst this bubble of ill-posed aspirations and accept that the world is where it is today, imperfect, flawed, but full of good people genuinely trying to do good things, The Feed loses its all-consuming power, and the gentler, kinder, more beautiful forces of the universe begin to reveal themselves. Away from the black hole of The feed, one can see the stars of billions of individual people socialized in peculiar contexts, seeking to be happy and avoid suffering. When one zooms in, one can see entire planets of personality with flowers blooming and grass growing on soils formed by traumatic, volcanic events of their past, all powered by tempests of discomfort and aspirations to be better.
Beyond outrage, there is a world full of compassion, positivity, and good feelings that I regret abandoning when I was sucked mindlessly into The Feed.
As people like me abandon The Feed and sail our ships on winds of compassion independent of the field lines of Outrage’s gravitational pull, the black hole becomes only more concentrated by those still enveloped in darkness, so powered by outrage that light can’t escape, and the stars can’t be seen. It’s not a character flaw to be outraged - sometimes outrage is justified, and people should be outraged and vocal about the harms they experience so we can all, from a place of compassion, seek to make the world a better place for all, especially those who are suffering. It is, however, a tragic waste of time to overlook the beautiful things about life, to spend one’s time so fixated on fury that one’s precious years slip by with less love, courser words, and bypassed beauty than one could experience were outrage a choice, not an addiction.
I invite everyone to sail away from The Feed. A Biologist’s Guide to Life reminds you that you are a miracle of this incredible universe, stardust assembled into molecules dancing inside cells, trillions of cells, all working together to yield a short, precious opportunity for organic clouds of this universe infused with the spark of consciousness to experience the universe.
Look at your hands and imagine what more they could do besides typing furiously. Imagine the soft sweaters they could feel, the lover’s hands they could hold, the flowers they can touch in a field, the mountains they could climb, or the waters they could swim through if that miraculous mass of bone, muscles, nerves, and skin were powered by your wonder, curiosity, and compassion instead of outrage.
Imagine your mind, full of all the memories of your life, the languages you’ve learned, the factoids you can put together, and know that your mind will never again exist in this universe. The story of your life is being etched into the canvas of time, you are becoming an eternal fact of the history of the universe, immortalized by an immutable past. What is the story you would like to tell about You?
The power of outrage wanes with the diminishing returns of rage. A life well-lived has some rage, but that rage is balanced out by a far more profound love and admiration of all that is dear and beautiful about our lives in this remarkable universe
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Bully! (in the British adjective sense)