THE IDIOT WIND
American politics is increasingly pervaded by outrage and hysteria, much of it feigned, and most of it staggeringly stupid.
It doesn’t take much these days to get crossways with our self-appointed PC police — cite the acronym LGBT instead of LGBTYQ , forget to include the word “fascist” before the name Donald Trump, or use traditional pronouns instead of the demanded transgender variants and you run the risk of finding yourself pursued by an enraged electronic mob.
To even remotely suggest that there might be innate male-female differences, physical and perhaps psychological, or that a contributing factor to police shootings of young black men might be the disproportionate rate of violent crime committed by young black males can quickly land you in the PC Lubyanka.
A movie like “Black Panther” can be the most diverse superhero movie to ever come out of Hollywood but still provoke fury for not having any gay characters.
Thus are the consequences of living in a politically correct “outrage culture,” wherein an increasing chunk of the populace spends an increasing chunk of their day looking for things to be offended by, and then makes sure everyone knows that they’ve been offended, to the point where the agenda of public discourse is largely determined by professional grievance-mongers, neurotics and hysterics.
Whether people are actually offended by something matters less than that they become conditioned over time to believe that they should be; it is, after all, safer to be part of the mob than its quarry. As Shadi Hamid noted in a recent essay in The Atlantic, most of the members of a typical Twitter mob probably didn’t know they were supposed to be outraged by a particular outrage until they saw others being outraged.
In the outrage culture, a competition thus develops to see who can be most offended by the most things (what Hamid calls “virtue-outbidding”), with pride of place going to those who can shriek the loudest and claim to have suffered the greatest trauma in response to the “insensitive” words of others.
To keep the hysteria at fever pitch, a 24/7 search has to be carried out for new kinds of offenses and new culprits committing them. Protecting freedom of speech is accordingly replaced with the need to restrict speech to protect the feelings of those who thrive on being offended.
A curious new right not to be offended (that is, exposed to speech one disagrees with) is thereby created.
A daily melodrama is thus played out in which Twitter erupts and the fury of the mob is directed against some hapless soul who happened to say something that was somehow thought to violate PC orthodoxy, with the duration of the fury contingent upon how long it takes the miscreant to cravenly apologize for whatever it was that he said.
Since we are surrounded by sexism, racism, ageism and all kinds of other “isms” yet to be discovered, there will never be a shortage of offenders, and, given the logic of a reign of terror, we can all probably expect our turn in the stocks to come at some point.
Heather Wilhelm, in a penetrating critique of outrage culture, recalls wise advice from football legend Lou Holtz: “Don’t tell your problems to people. Eighty percent don’t care, and the other 20 percent are glad you have them.”
If only that were true, or at least more people behaved as if it were.
How refreshing and downright wonderful it would therefore be if, next time the Twitter mob erupts, and the virtue-bidding competition starts on cue, the object of the fury said, per Rhett Butler, “Frankly folks, I don’t give a damn.”
So go pick on somebody who does.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.