Outrage Overload

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Outrage 014 – How we can try to make sure news enlightens rather than enrages us – Lawrence Eppard

Outrage BONUS – Why Understanding CPAC is Crucial to Political Discourse – Alexander Hinton

Outrage 013 – How moral misinformation uses emotion to generate outrage – Ritsaart Reimann

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The Outrage Industry is not broken. It’s supposed to work this way.

Every day, we’re bombarded with outrage porn, material used to evoke anger, disgust or indignation – online, in the news, political campaigns, gossip, friends venting their frustrations – it’s exhausting.

I’m making a claim that the outrage machine has been too successful, like the dog that caught the bus. We’ve been telling ourselves the other side is “evil” and now we believe it. Like a drug addiction, the outrage purveyors had to keep turning up the volume and now they have created a monster where there is no room for anything but outrage, no room for real arguments, the kind of healthy arguments that are needed to achieve anything, even within a given party, to say nothing of across party lines. Further, it’s damaging our mental well-being. The baseline of constant and chronic outrage, a persistent background level, weighs on us, creating constant stress and anxiety individually and on society as a whole.