Recreational Outrage

I was born at the tail end of the 70s, was a kid in the 80’s, a young man in the 90s. I remember the last few years of rotary dial phones and cassette recorders as they gave way to push button phones and CD players, then beepers and the World Wide Web, and somewhere in the late 2000s, everyone started carrying a computer in their pocket, linked near instantly to all the collective knowledge of humankind. I was an early adopter, I had a 2400 baud dial-up modem connected to my Apple IIGS as a teen. I didn’t realize that I would be one of the last generations to remember what life was like before we were all online, all day, every day, from wherever we are.

The expectation of the consensus opinion was that high speed, readily-accessible internet would spawn a new Golden Age of Enlightenment. When we wanted to learn something in the before times, we had to head to the library, use the card catalogue, find a dozen books on the subject, comb the index for relevant passages, read and record them, then coalesce all the information we had spent hours assembling to form an opinion. It was laborious to be a well-informed human before Wikipedia came around. Critical thinking and independent research were the standard for the last generation that read books. No longer.

In Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (a novel written about a dystopian future where books are illegal), the main character – a fireman tasked with finding and burning books – meets a man named Faber, who explains to him the importance of these ancient purveyors of information. He argues that the quality of information, the time required to digest and reflect on that information, and the freedom to act on what you have learned are what separates books and reading from the screens and comics that citizens of his future world learn everything from. The youth are disaffected, and spend their time doing extreme and dangerous stunts just to feel alive. The people of that world are numb.

Despite the warnings abundant in dystopian literature, that promised Golden Age of course did not materialize. With instant access to information, condensed and bite sized, people became increasingly intellectually lazy. We thought those hours of study would turn into hours of more efficient study, not a 2 minute replacement for them. Someone is talking about Isreal? Well 5 minutes of very basic summary online and you figure yourself an expert. Wikipedia gave way to blogs, which gave way to social media, and now here we are; everyone is convinced they know the absolute truth without the burden of having to find or prove it.

There is an extremely large contingent of the western population that has formed their entire world view and belief system based on brief online interactions with information that adheres to no code of ethics, requires no proof, and is reinforced with an echo chamber of the opinions of those who similarly based their world view and belief system off of the same information. And there is so much information! It bombards you 24/7 from every angle, right off the pages of 1984. So which information gets the most engagement in a world of excessive stimuli? The hyperbolic, dramatic, extreme, loud kind.

Journalism is dead. Whatever yellow journalism remains has no integrity, no ethics; it is a propaganda tool. “Journalists” compete for attention with click bait social media accounts to see who can make the most outrageous claim. At a certain point, truth became irrelevant; one could get much better engagement analytics if opinions came without the burden of reason and leveraged hot button emotional responses instead. And so, what used to be a deliberate and time-consuming process has become push-button “knowledge” that frequently isn’t true. People still form their world views on this “knowledge”, however, and when you control what people know, you can control what they think.

Clever political and corporate leaders saw this as a perfect opportunity to build on decades of research into obedience, conformity, public relations, and propaganda theory. The goal? Power. Power for its own sake. Power over people’s thoughts and actions. Just how far could they brainwash their way into being a puppeteer of the people?

Apparently, they can push very far. 20 years ago, if someone told you, “I was born a man, with a penis and Y chromosomes. I put on a dress and made a wish, and when I opened my eyes, I was a real, literal, menstruating, child-bearing woman. You must agree that I am a woman, or you are a Nazi. Oh, and I want to change my 7-year-old daughter into my son using chemicals and surgery to alter her/his natural growth and development.” then you would of course assume the person was mentally ill, suffering from delusions, and shouldn’t be allowed to make medical decisions for his child. This was not a questioned assumption. No sane person was arguing that yes, in fact, he did magically change into a woman. What changed?

The #metoo movement kick started cancel culture around a decade ago. Suddenly, it was fun and trendy to completely destroy someone’s life because of something you spent 30 seconds reading online. No trial, no facts, no second thought – just “Off with their heads!” The normalization of this behaviour taught netizens that horribly abusing others from behind the safety of your keyboard was perfectly fine to do, as long as you were outraged for “correct” reason. The “correct” reason being fed into the propaganda machine by teams of highly paid PR experts, sociologists, and psychiatrists – researchers who are well paid to guide the topic that millions would blindly and completely base their understanding of the world on.

Orwell called it groupthink. Groupthink abhors a dissenting opinion. In Orwell’s Oceania, freedom of thought is destroyed, and replaced with 2 + 2 = 5. You have millions of bored, lazy, angry people – who were raised believing they were special and perfect being fed this extremist propaganda, while being told that anyone who doesn’t share the same opinion that is being dictated to you is a (insert horrible descriptive word here), but basically a demon.

If you are one of these brainwashed, hapless ideologues, you would see the pure venomous hatred delivered on enemies of the groupthink. You would be deeply afraid to ever be the target of such intense, burning, irrational hate. You would do almost anything to avoid that. You would tell yourself that you are a “good person” because you have “the right opinion”, an opinion you did next to no work in forming, but yet hold to with a kind of zealous, religious blind faith. You’re picking the wrong line in Asch’s conformity study. You’re flipping the extreme danger switch for Skinner’s obedience project.

But you are told the entire way through that you are a “good person” with the “right values” and “superior morals”. You’re told this by the same liars who post the rage bait. Being told this is easy; earning the title of “good person” is usually difficult, but now you don’t need to do anything other than agree. In fact, any action you take in the name of “the right opinion” is not just excusable, it’s laudable – just make sure you get it on camera, right?

Like any other sane person, I both agreed and disagreed with Charlie Kirk. His value system was in many ways different from my own, but much of what he said was well-reasoned, evidence-based, and logically sound. He, for example, believed that believing you were a gender other than the gender that every cell in your body says you are was a sign of mental illness. And for daring to say this obviously true, wouldn’t-have-been-questioned-ten-years-ago bit of fact, he was murdered in front of his family and the world. The reaction? Armies of obnoxiously loud and insistent social media posters popping champagne, dancing in his still warm blood, and calling his wife a whore. I wish that was made up, or even an exaggeration.

Celebrating murder is not a normal, sane human thing to do. We are biologically programmed at a core level that murder is abhorrent. We are meant to react with fear, disgust, sadness… not over-the-moon joy. I don’t care if you disagreed with every word he said – cheering for the murder of a podcaster because his opinion differed from the opinion you were told to have is not normal – it is deeply, deeply disturbing and sociopathic. It rejects millenia of biological and social instinct development. Believing someone is a racist Nazi pedophile who, despite being democratically elected, is a fascist dictator is not mentally healthy. Disowning your family members because they voted for the “wrong” person requires a strong rejection of every natural impulse and shred of rational thinking.

When one week its a cardinal sin to drive into an angry mob of violent demonstrators to escape them, and the next week driving into a federal agent is heroic, we collectively have a major problem. The groupthink has eroded the lemmings’ internal moral compass. What is right and wrong, good and evil, is no longer based on any logical reason. It is dictated and obeyed completely and without question, to the point of violence and murder. And again, I wish I was making ANY of this up.

So what can you do about an army of blindly obedient thought muppets who have been weaponized to smile as they stab? Unfortunately, not much. The mob requires – much as a junkie – more and more of the outrage to sate their appetite. Just like Bradbury’s disaffected youths, only the extreme seems to fulfill. They will continue to push for more violence, more bloodshed, and it will only get worse because once you’ve had the pure black tar heroin of The Purge-level excused violence, you don’t want to go back to the roach clip of disagreeing with policy.

Those who do question, who do reject the spoonfed narrative, who know when they are being lied to are going to have to make a very difficult choice. If you let the insanity continue, it will crush every shred of dissent, then start to eat its own in a totalitarian state very much like Oceania. You can’t get them to see reason. You can’t calm them down because that’s the last thing they want. And as invincible as they think they are, as above consequences as they believe themselves due to existing in a virtual, digital space, they are in no way equipped for open war. They don’t have the military, law enforcement, or guys like Larry and Mike who spend two nights a week at the gun range with M-16s.