Addicted to Outrage Read online

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  Millions of us have spent the last several years engaged in our new favorite national pastime, expressing outrage at everyone and everything that is different from ourselves. It’s an epidemic worse and more insidious than our growing crisis of opioid addiction, far worse than our addiction to caffeine, sugar, or fast food, because our Outrage Addiction is destroying our nation. Unlike addictions to so-called vices and chemicals, which are universally recognized as bad for us and therefore carry negative social stigmas, Outrage Addiction adds the enabling element that makes it almost impossible to overcome: It is viewed as a virtue and as proof of our social value. Being constantly outraged is inherently reinforced by everyone around us; it is seen as a demonstration of our moral, cultural, and intellectual awareness, as proof that we are, in fact, “woke.” It’s like your mom finding out you’re using cocaine and then buying you an eight-ball and giving you a pat on the back. With Outrage Addiction, each of us has become a massive enabler of the addiction of those in our tribe, because we provide Outrage Addicts the very real physical, social, and psychological rewards that feed and reinforce their addiction.

  Our Thumbs-Up or Like or LOL make each of us an unwitting dope dealer. Thumbs-up? Dopamine surge. Retweet? Serotonin hit. Kicked off a new subreddit thread? Splash of oxytocin. “Dopamine” is the root word of the slang: “dope.” Make no mistake, our addiction to outrage is as real and as chemically rich as the latest street drug, but even worse because it’s 100 percent legal and is being reinforced by the press, social platforms, celebrities, and political leaders.

  I say all of this as an admitted and recovering addict myself. Look, I’ve been there and done that. In fact, it’s fair to say that identifying things to be outraged about and expressing that outrage to my audience is part of my day job. And there are certainly things deserving of outrage, though they’re not nearly as prevalent as the media would have you believe.

  If you listen to my show, you know that my outrage generally isn’t directed at specific people. I don’t despise any particular Democrat. (Well, maybe Woodrow Wilson.) They all make me furious and have for a long time, but it’s not because I don’t like them as individuals; in fact, I count many who identify on the political left as personal friends. They make me frustrated because I believe their ideas on policy and government are so bad. In fact, I’ve found most of the Democrats whom I’ve known over the years to be downright good, likable people, despite their fanciful, utopian, irredeemably bad ideas. I thought—I knew!—I was CERTAIN that they were all corrupt; I was frustrated by the belief they were terrible liars and they were doing horrible damage to my country. Make no mistake, I still think they are corrupt, but so are the Republicans. As far as the Democrats are concerned, the party as it was even of Obama is now dead. It has been fully hijacked by the über left, and until they begin to listen to the Democratic voters in the center of the country, they are going to have a hard time winning elections. I may be wrong on this, but I still do not believe that the average Democrats in the center of the country believe what is happening in our universities is good, healthy, or right, nor do they agree with partial-birth abortion or that the Second Amendment should be abolished as now almost all of the leadership does. My problem is not with the people who are working hard every day and not living or breathing politics—it is with those who actually are a part of the system, who truly believe that it is best for our schools to pay teachers to sit out their contract and remain on the payroll after they have been wildly inappropriate with children.

  But somewhere we began judging people not by their character or their actions but by their political affiliation and beliefs. A person who had different opinions than you wasn’t just wrong but suddenly became a bad, deplorable person, someone not to be trusted. Someone who must be ostracized, isolated, and destroyed. In today’s America, we deem that person a “traitor.” We seem, nowadays, to use that word more than at any time in my lifetime. Does no one see that we are becoming the America of the McCarthy hearings? There were communists in the government in the 1950s, but McCarthy, unfortunately, was a deeply flawed messenger. The real problem was the fact that we believed, as a people, that if you believed in communism, you should be in prison and should have no part in society. How does a country where freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition our government is OUR FIRST AMENDMENT yet try and jail those who believe differently?

  This is the path we are on. One where the mistakes of the past will be made all over again. If you do not agree with whomever is in power, you can and will be targeted. You will be targeted by the IRS, the EPA, or the NSA, or by the David Hogg–type of professional outrage peddlers who live their lives in a state of perpetual moral outrage inviting mobs of mindless addicts to join their latest boycott, die-in, or corporate bullying campaign. If you cannot be tried and jailed, then you will be smeared and blackballed. Your name and reputation will be forever destroyed. If you are white, straight, male, and Christian, you will be treated as those who were black, homosexual, or communist were treated in the 1950s. And if you own a gun, eat meat, and express doubt about your truck being the cause for climate change? Huge numbers of your fellow men are literally wishing for your death right now, my friend. Outrage targeting isn’t a weapon used exclusively by those on the left. Just ask any number of celebrities who’ve been the target of a Trump tweet-storm and ended up receiving death threats as the outrage wave crashes over them on social media.

  How is it that “progressives” (on both left and right) who believe in the concept that man progresses as a collective do not see that humans are taking giant leaps backward? Those in the past who were called un-American for what they believed, who were treated as second-class citizens simply because of their skin color or forced into the closet for who they were, now support leaders who are deciding which views are un-American, judging people by skin color, and forcing others into a closet.

  America is in trouble. We are facing challenges in the near future that literally will change the world. A century of technological advancement will take place in a decade. There are going to be massive shifts in every aspect of society that will cause tremendous upheaval. Entire industries are going to disappear; according to some, we are looking at 30 percent unemployment by 2030.

  Think about how blessed we are to live in this country at this time. Both in Obama’s and Trump’s America. Life has literally never been better for humans than it is right now. Never have a people been more free, or better fed, educated, wealthy, and healthy, or had access to information and communication than right now. And yet, if one listens to the media or browses our social media platforms, one would think that we were royally screwed. But what are we all so outraged about? Most of the time, not much.

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  For all of eternity, man was able to stay alive without a refrigerator, electricity, radio, microwave, or color television. It might have been hot, sticky, and a lot less entertaining, but survival was possible. Today, each of these self-evident “luxury” items (when measured against all of human history) are owned by between 96.3 and 99.3 percent of households.

  Take the computer. When Bill Clinton was elected, only 20 percent of American households had one. When Barack Obama left office, more than 80 percent had a computer, more than half had a tablet, and almost everyone had a smartphone far more powerful than any computer used in the Clinton years.

  The average piece of land that produces corn now yields 8.6 times as much corn as it did during World War II. This is only one example, and only positive if you like corn, but you get the point. Among other things, these increases in food production have led to a sixty-point drop in the percentage of our disposable income that we spend on food.

  The portion of the U.S. population that is homeless and unsheltered is less than 0.1 percent. I’m not saying that doesn’t mean we have more work to do, but in the rest of the world that number is over 20 percent.

  The homicid
e rate in the United States has dropped by about half from the levels of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. While the media constantly warns us of the epidemic of “rape culture,” the rate of forcible rape has dropped by over 30 percent since the 1990s. Even in Hollywood.

  Perhaps most surprising is the fact that even the number of school shootings has dropped dramatically. The rate of students killed per million in fatal school shootings has dropped by over 75 percent.

  Read that sentence again. Heard that on CNN? Or even Fox?

  Researchers at Northeastern noted that this means “four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s as today.” Their summary would shock any modern cable news fanatic: “There is not an epidemic of school shootings.”

  In 1952 there were 57,879 cases of polio in the United States. In 2017, there were zero.

  Among men in the U.S., death rates from colon cancer have dropped by 30 percent, lung cancer by 40 percent, prostate cancer by 45 percent, and stomach cancer by almost 50 percent, all since 1990. Among women, the death rate from breast cancer has dropped by 35 percent.

  Does all that mean we don’t keep trying to improve things? No. Does it mean we should take a moment to review things and gain a little perspective the next time Pundit A or Newscaster B tries to keep us from changing the channel with a headline that says “School Children Under Attack Daily In the U.S.”? Yep, it sure does.

  Don’t get me wrong—there are times when the outrage is justifiable, but all too often we seem to be screaming about existential issues like whether Kylie Jenner is ignorant, racist, or both for braiding her hair into cornrows without acknowledging the cultural origin of the style, or whether the Simpsons character Apu is the most racist character in recent history. Geez, if we can get this worked up over issues like this, what happens when we actually hit real problems?

  What level of outrage will exist when a third of our population cannot find a job and doesn’t have enough money to pay the bills?

  Instead of being outraged about the nation’s ballooning debt, we’re focused on shaming Chance the Rapper into an apology for having the audacity to tweet: “Not all black people have to be Democrats.”

  Instead of celebrating the triumph of the first scientist to land an Earth-sourced spacecraft on a comet, we choose to excoriate the guy and label him as a sexist, misogynist pig for wearing a Hawaiian shirt featuring scantily clad women.

  A white teenage girl wears what the Internet determines is a Chinese-style dress (it wasn’t), and more than one hundred thousand posts accuse her of cultural appropriation.

  When Miss Nevada (in the final year of Miss America that still featured a swimsuit competition) suggests that one way for women to deal with the #MeToo movement is to get self-defense training, feminists attack her for validating rape culture.

  When a liberal sex-education instructor had the temerity to refer to “male” penis versus “female” vagina in her descriptions of sexual anatomy, she was attacked relentlessly on social channels. She now refers to these as gender-neutral sexual organs.

  Our capacity for outrage has reached the point of the ridiculous.

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  The Story of Outrage

  I often describe myself as an optimistic catastrophist. I am optimistic because I believe in Americans; I have seen what they have done in the past. I have seen them rise to the greatest challenges the world has ever seen. I have seen us come together against all odds. I am optimistic because I know who we can be when the chips are down. I am a catastrophist because I see all of the places where the structure is weak, the arrogance of those in charge, hiding behind shields of moral superiority that are born of nothing but an expression of outrage at some claimed victimhood or other. Worst of all, I see our interactions with one another. I can see the icebergs in the water, and I have counted the lifeboats. It doesn’t mean the Titanic will sink. It just means that the odds are not in our favor unless we are vigilant and actually steer around the icebergs in front of us.

  The good—no, the GREAT—news is that we can do this. Actually, we have a very simple formula to implement, one that our forefathers found self-evident and implemented and proved works to build a powerful, productive, and prosperous nation. And because we have the model and proof the model works, I’m very hopeful that we sit in a place to be able to move, as a culture, back toward civility, reason, and cooperation.

  And that starts with first admitting that we have a problem. I do believe grave danger is on its way, and I’m afraid that we’ve become too weak to deal with it. And if we don’t stop and figure out how to work with each other America is going to lose her place in the world. This demonizing of the other side is destroying our democracy. So my harshest words are reserved for the people who have put us in this precarious position—on both sides. Those people who day after day beat into us the concept that we are right and they are wrong, that we are the good guys and they are our enemy.

  Oh. Wait. Just wait a second here. Elephant waltzing around the room.

  I know what you are thinking. Especially if you are a Democrat. “I can’t take it anymore! This guy?! The Fox News blowhard? The guy who would and did say anything for ratings! The tinfoil-hat conspiracy guy who said Obama was a racist is telling me that he hates when people divide us?” Okay, you know what? You’re right. I accept responsibility for my part in all of this. Yes, I played a role in helping to set this country against itself. I said what I believed and I said it in the most entertaining way possible. Jon Stewart once criticized me as “a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking.” Good line. But we were thinking, he just didn’t care to understand the point we were trying to make.

  It is funny, because much of what I said then is being said by the left today: “The president has too much power.” “He could easily become a dictator.” “The president is a liar.” “The president is a racist.” The last was said by me about Obama—and corrected on the spot: “I don’t think he is a racist; he has a deep-seated hatred for the white culture.” I was cornered on “What is the white culture, Glenn?” by Katie Couric. I don’t think she could even ask that question now with a straight face. “The same culture that our children are now being taught is evil, Katie.” It is the white culture—and specifically the white male culture—that is apparently responsible for all the ills of the world. This is the problem I was sensing at the time; I just didn’t know how to express it, as I hadn’t been schooled in postmodernism yet. I recognized the feeling of something amiss, I knew racism wasn’t quite right, but the language of the neo-Marxist professors was still foreign to me.

  Now, Don Lemon and others say Trump is racist and they are applauded for it by the left and vilified by the red-state voters. What Don is saying is very much what I tried to express. Something is not right here, and because I am not sure what it is I will use the most basic word to describe what I am feeling. The feeling that Don cannot pinpoint, or perhaps even understand, is the loss of heritage and national identity. Many Americans feel that every good that this country has done is being erased or ignored by the elites. “The white culture” or “white male cisgender hierarchy” really just means, to many on the left, “the Western Judeo-Christian culture.” It has been attacked on every side, and those who are comfortable with “cisgender” talk are not comfortable with “Judeo-Christian talk.” But, believe me, we are talking about the same thing. Maybe it is racist to some, but deep-seated hatred of the white culture seems to fit. Perhaps Don Lemon, whom I know and like, does hate the Western world (I highly doubt it), but what we all fail to see is that we are talking over each other. Neither side is willing to recognize that our verbiage is doing as much damage as our belief system.

  I believe what Obama and those in the Marxist, gender, race, and inequality studies world spoke of as “fairness” was and is understood by many Americans as racist and sexist. And when Trump or his supporters speak of the loss of traditional values, the left hears, “I
hate Mexicans, and them gays, too.” On both sides what we “hear” may be accurate at some level. But it is the level of those who mean it this way that makes all the difference, and at this point we don’t trust each other enough.

  But, in my defense, and in Don’s as well: No matter which way we actually meant it or how the audience took it, it works! It works incredibly well. Mind-bogglingly well. People watched my program, first on CNN and later on Fox, as much to see what I might do as to hear what I was saying. In 2009 I was pictured on the cover of Time, my tongue out derisively above the caption “Mad Man: Glenn Beck and the angry style of American politics!” “For conservatives,” the story read, “these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck has emerged as a virtuoso on the strings of their discontent.” Very much the same thing could be said of Rachel Maddow today for the left.

  Unintentionally, I fed their addiction to outrage by giving in to my own. And it worked. And there is a clear and obvious reason why it worked—for me, for Don, for Rachel, and for millions of social media users every day: Addiction to outrage is real, widespread, and (almost) fully ingrained in our cultural identity.

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  Here’s Why Outrage “Works”—and Why It’s More Addictive than Heroin

  Part of what makes outrage so addictive—and useful—is that it fulfills several key social and psychological functions. As a tool for social interaction, it checks an awful lot of boxes:

  OUTRAGE SIGNALS VIRTUE

  One of the most effective ways to demonstrate one’s own social value is by wearing the trappings of outrage on behalf of others, especially if the others are of a minority social group. The earlier you are and the more loudly you demonstrate you are outraged that some other group has been wronged, the more virtue you demonstrate. November 2016 provided an excellent case in point. In the aftermath of the Trump election-night triumph, millions of social media posts began to appear with users posting safety pins, apparently in a show of support for “minorities.” Post a GIF of a safety pin? Worth two virtue points. Post an identifiable pic of yourself wearing a safety pin? Five virtue points. Post a picture of yourself dressed as a safety pin, holding a protest sign and shouting random curse words at a Republican mayor’s town-hall meeting? Well, they don’t even have the algorithm yet to assign enough virtue points to that (though a social scoring system similar to this has actually been implemented in China), but you’re sure to feel good about yourself for a few days.