The Anger Merchants
Human beings have a passion for outrage. This might be our fatal flaw; perhaps it will cause our extinction.
Social Media
In the news: This former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, is blowing the whistle on Facebook for sowing discord, anger, and other negative emotions in societies around the world: https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI.
How is FB doing that? Because FB’s algorithms favor content that maximizes users’ engagement, and it turns out that hateful, outrage-mongering, or panic-inspiring content gets the most engagement.
Everybody already knows that, though, so I’m not entirely sure what the big news is here.
The Traditional Media
The regular media has been doing something similar for about as long as they’ve existed, albeit less skillfully than modern social media platforms. They didn’t focus as much on outrage, possibly because they hadn’t yet figured out that outrage works better than anything else (except perhaps porn, which apparently is more disreputable than hate-mongering), but they strove to stoke the passions in order to maximize engagement. This is why we have the phrase “yellow journalism”.
Media outlets regularly sensationalize the news and try to make everything more dramatic. This video from the Weather Channel is an excellent metaphor for the entire media: https://youtu.be/tocuyJ1Fu7U. (Summary: reporter pretends to be barely able to stand due to the high winds. Two guys appear and walk behind him casually, showing no difficulty standing.)
Why would they do this? Because traditional media have the same basic business model as Facebook: Capture attention, then sell it to advertisers. Haugen points out the perverse incentives Facebook is under: the content that helps them make money is also the content that divides us and causes harm to society. That’s long been true of media in general. Social media is just the efficient, modern version of an old business.
Modern Ideology
Today, the most popular ideologies are particular versions of leftism and rightism that are both relentlessly outrage-mongering. The difference is that they’re meant to appeal to different people. If you’re a leftist or a rightist, you probably understand exactly what I’m talking about when it comes to the other side. But maybe you don’t understand how your side is doing the same thing.
Left Outrage Mongering
The left’s outrage-mongering is mainly race-based (and, to a lesser extent, based in other “identity groups”). It is designed to maximize anger for members of minorities, as well as non-minority people who aim to sympathize with or take the side of minorities. The core message is always, “Your group is under attack.” Society is exploiting, robbing, murdering your people. The ones responsible are the dominant race/sex/other group, plus the people who disagree with this ideology. They did it to your ancestors, and they’ll do it to your children. They hate you. They have no respect for you. They’ll never stop unless they’re physically forced. Practically everything those people do is designed to destroy you.
Examples: Say a black person was just shot by police. The most outrageous explanation would be that cops just go around murdering random black people for the hell of it, because they’re a bunch of Nazi bastards. Therefore, that’s got to be the explanation. And if anyone doesn’t agree with this, that is because they are also a white supremacist bastard who supports murder.
If you’re a minority member, and you have a negative experience with someone, it’s probably due to racism, or sexism, or something like that. When we don’t get our way politically, that’s also due to racism/sexism/etc. If someone voted against Obama, that’s racism; against Hilary Clinton, that’s sexism.
Most successful belief systems contain elements that function specifically as belief-system defenses. Hence, it’s extremely popular to throw in the belief that those who disagree with this very belief system are destroying society and must not be listened to, and that promoting this very belief system is the key to saving society. Thus, in modern Left-Outrage Ideology, it’s of crucial import that everyone be told about how unjust and outrage-worthy their current society is, and that no one be permitted to deny the core points of this ideology.
This is why we have the current conflicts over “Critical Race Theory” in American primary schools. Nobody gives a crap about an esoteric legal theory. What people are fighting about is the project of sowing outrage against America and society’s dominant groups: the left-wing educators think it is of crucial import to do that; the parent protestors resent it. (Of course, the educators wouldn’t use the phrase “sowing outrage”. They’d probably say they are “educating people about injustice”. It’s just that their method of educating about injustice is indistinguishable from what you’d do if you were trying to sow discord and rage.)
Right Outrage Mongering
The right’s outrage-mongering is the same core message: “Your group is under attack.” In the rightist case, though, the culprits are a little different. It’s the “elites”, the government, the media, the academics, the people who disagree with this ideology, and of course the immigrants.
The hatred against elites and “the ruling class” used to be a staple of the left. Today it is a staple of the right. (See, e.g., “This is your ruling class in action,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ50nUvTQJM.) Today, right-wing commenters are warning about the billionaires who are running our society and cheating the little guy. (E.g., https://youtu.be/rQgb3EYxhOw.)
It seems that the modern right has learned a few things from the Marxists and socialists.
One of the latest right-wing Outrage Theories is the “replacement theory” popularized by Tucker Carlson (https://youtu.be/Z_0iFBJPWoY). According to this theory, the leftist elites are importing millions of immigrants into the country in order to dilute the voting base and outvote the existing, native-born voters.
The leftists, on this view, don’t actually believe any of the arguments supporting immigration; they don’t care about the rights or interests of foreign-born people, they don’t believe immigration benefits the country, or any of that nonsense. Obviously, immigration is destroying the country, immigrants are murdering our people, etc. The leftists all know this; they just don’t care, because all they care about is getting more political power for themselves. The children of immigrants are going to vote Democratic, and that’s going to turn all the red states into blue states, and we’ll all be living under a third-world, tyrannical state ruled by the Democrats forever after.
* * *
Perhaps your reaction to the above ideas is to ask what evidence supports them, or to start citing counter-evidence. You might wonder what’s so hard to believe about the idea that Democrats actually think immigration is good? That position, and all the arguments for it, easily fit with the rest of their political views. (Unless you think their entire belief system is a sham?)
On the other side, you might wonder what’s so hard to believe about the idea that conservatives voted against Obama and Clinton because of their political positions, rather than their race or sex?
But the partisans do not care what the evidence is. All they need to know is “this provokes outrage”.
Why do I say that? That looks to me like the best explanation of their behavior. Carlson doesn’t try to argue that the Democrats are doing the thing he says. He just asserts it as self-evident. Similarly, when I hear accusations of racism and sexism, I almost never hear anyone try to give evidence for this, as opposed to alternative explanations. And among the things that people assert (about politics) without evidence, it just seems like they keep turning out to be whatever thing would be most calculated to spur outrage by the people of that political ideology.
So it seems to me that political partisans around the world are forming their beliefs based chiefly on the Argument from Outrage:
P is outrageous.
Therefore, P.
Historical Ideologies
The key to Karl Marx’s astounding success (N.B., he was perhaps the most practically influential philosopher in history) was his genius for outrage-mongering. As Bertrand Russell once put it:
"The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under Capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’ doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners.
"[…] His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process." [Russell, “Why I Opposed Communism”]
Marxism is an anger-based belief system. Left-wing people dismiss other anger-based belief systems (such as the conspiracy theories about immigration, or Covid-19, or QAnon) as stupid. But that’s only because those belief systems appeal more to the emotional dispositions of right- rather than left-leaning personalities. When a good outrage-based belief system designed to appeal to their predilections appears, most leftists suddenly cannot help overlooking or making excuses for the most glaring errors. They aren’t against hate per se; they’re only against right-wing hate.
The most famous right-wing ideology, Nazism, was much less successful, but only because Hitler went about attacking other countries. If he’d stayed home and focused on murdering his own people like Stalin, his system could have lasted much longer, and intellectuals today would be much kinder to him. And that, of course, was another outrage-based belief system. In that case, Hitler’s aim was to stoke outrage against the Jews, who were supposedly engaged in a conspiracy to exploit and oppress the Aryan race. Again, the message was “Your people are under attack.”
Wtf?
On the surface, all this is kind of odd. Anger is a negative emotion. It is not generally pleasant. Why would so many people be so attracted to belief systems that keep them enraged?
I’m not sure how or why, but it seems that we enjoy being angry in certain contexts. We take pleasure in condemning the bad people, so much so that if we aren’t angry, we’ll look for some bad people to righteously condemn. If we’re surrounded by ordinary people (as we usually are), we’ll have to demonize some of them.
Try observing this in yourself. Listen to a strident commentator from your side of the political spectrum. When the commentator gets to their most outrageous accusations against the other side, stop and observe your emotional state. You're outraged, of course. But at the same time, I bet you'll find that you're having a good time.
Why? Maybe it makes us feel superior? Maybe it gives us a sense of meaning and drama in our lives? Maybe we’re just genetically programmed for inter-group conflict?
Lesson
Whatever the explanation, the lesson from all this is: eschew the argument from outrage. Look for it in your own belief system. If you’re feeling outraged about something you heard about, ask yourself if your source said it, and you believed it, because of the emotional reaction it provokes. Did you gather concrete evidence that the thing is actually true? Is there an alternative explanation besides the outrageous one?
Very often, it turns out that the outrageous event did not at all happen the way it was described. There’s a lot of bullshit in the world. But the world is not nearly as outrageous as you think it is, and there’s a lot less diabolical conspiring than the rage merchants would have you believe.