Our Outrage Problem and What We Can Do about It

Resentment and indignation are feelings dangerous to the possessor and to be sparingly used. They give comfort too cheaply; they rot judgment, and by encouraging passivity they come to require that evil continue for the sake of the grievance to be enjoyed. — Jacques Barzun

We have an outrage problem in our nation. This is not a new thing. Outrage has always been a part of the political landscape. And it is not the special province of any particular political faction. Outrage has become a fundamental element of our electoral system in a way that now threatens to destroy us. We can step back from the precipice. But we have to step back actively and intentionally. It will not just happen.

Before going on, I want to acknowledge two things about outrage that aren’t usually acknowledged. First, outrage is fun. This is a dirty little secret about our species. We enjoy feeling like righteous victims of wholly evil forces who are beyond compassion or redemption. It maps nicely onto our sense of tribal identity, and it makes us feel safe, comfortable, and morally justified. The cognitive apparatus with which we do most of our thinking evolved to seek both safety and meaning as part of an “us” that can only be defined in opposition to a “them.”

Also, outrage is politically useful. It turns people into activists and brings them to the polls. Very few politicians run successfully on their own ideas or policy proposals — neither of which resonate with voters even during the best of times. Politicians win by presenting themselves as the only alternative to something worse — something inhuman, evil, and beyond anything acceptable in a rational society. In politics, outrage works.

This is why outrage has always been part of politics and always will be. But in our current historical moment, social media has exacerbated the problem by orders of magnitude, and I don’t believe that our democracy will survive unless this changes.

Here is the problem: We live in a nation of nearly 350 million people, nearly all of whom have a social media platform to say anything they want about any subject. These 350 million people believe all sorts of things, and some percentage of them say things that are irresponsible, offensive, irrational, and, yes, evil. There is no awful opinion imaginable that you can’t find somewhere on Facebook, Twitter, or the comments section.

But we also live in a society with a highly efficient outrage machine capable of finding everything that has been said, carefully curating it to produce a narrative, and then reproducing and sharing it in a way that encourages others to generalize that to everybody in whatever group constitutes “the other side.” We then share these posts, accompanied by our own outrage, because, in the end, outrage is fun.

It is the curation and the sharing, not the statements themselves, that cause the outrage problem. If 100 people in this country who identify as Democrats say that all billionaires should be fried in oil and served with a side of kale salad, that means that .000028% of the people in the country, and .00001% of Democrats, believe something stupid and evil. That is a manageable problem. It would be hard to find any opinion so rare that .00001% of a population doesn’t believe it.

But when every one of those 1,000 people posts their opinion on Twitter or in the comments section of an online publication, and other people carefully curate these statements and circulate them online ad naseum in online echo chambers, those whose main experience with “the other side” comes from such forums will naturally conclude that all (or at least most) Democrats are cannibals.

The online environment tricks our intuitive understanding of statistics to produce more and purer outrage. In most instances, seeing a hundred examples of something without a single counterexample gives us enough information to generalize to a population. When we see a hundred examples of something on our social media feeds, however, we are not dealing with a legitimate sample. We are seeing a rigorously selected, carefully curated collection of examples that have been chosen to tell a specific story. And because rigorously selected, carefully curated samples do not occur in nature, our brains are hard-wired to believe that the story is true.

This week something horrible happened in Utah, about an hour away from where I live. I work in a politically diverse environment, with colleagues who are very liberal and very conservative. I did not hear one liberal person celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk or say that he deserved it. Nor did I hear a single conservative person say that all Democrats are murderers or that we should purge liberals from our society. We consoled each other, held each other, and tried to make sense of this terrible tragedy that had so profoundly affected our community.

However, when I logged on to my Facebook account, it seemed that everybody in the country held one of those two obnoxious opinions. And there was proof, right on the page — pictures of people’s posts and tweets and comments saying some of the most awful things I could imagine. All of my friends were sharing these posts, and everybody, it seemed, was ready to go to war.

This is how the Great American Outrage Machine works. The most insidious thing about it is that it has seduced most of us into its service by turning us into curators and distributors of its distorted messages. Like other forms of pornography, it pretends to offer the cheap thrill of outrage without any real cost to our relationships (“I am just forwarding what everybody is saying, don’t blame me”). It is destroying the civic relationships upon which democracy depends.

Most of us, I think, lament the fact that this is happening. But we still play our part in the Outrage Machine by reading and forwarding all of the outrageous things that come across our news feeds, usually with our own spin about how these quotations define the other half of the country. We all have a part in the process. We all play a role, and we can stop any time. And stop we must, if we want to have nice things.

Michael Austin is a writer and educator who lives in Utah. He is the author of We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition and, more recently, of Captain Democracy, a satrical web comic strip that explores the nature of civic discourse. He speaks only for himself and not for any institution or organization with which he is affiliated.