America’s addiction to red hot outrage
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” – from the 1976 film, “Network.”
Twitter tirades. Facebook fulminations. MSNBC madness. Fox News fury. New York Times nincompoop naming. A Wall Street Journal jeremiad. CNN cantankerousness. Yup. These days it feels like if you are not angry about something in the culture, or very PO’ed about the latest political development or super outraged about the news this morning, well, you are not really alive, right? Not really paying attention because if you were reading about or viewing or listening to the real state of our country and state of our world right now, then of course!
You are mad as hell, and you are not going to take it anymore!
It does seem that the collective temperament temperature of our nation right now, all creation in fact, is hot, hot, hot, and still rising. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers taking to the streets and loudly shouting down opponents at public protests and school committee meetings. Pro-vaxxers and pro-maskers shaming the vax reluctant or the vax fearful, that often only stiffens the resolve of those not wanting to get a shot or to mask up. Republicans upbraiding Democrats as socialist, and Democrats pegging Republicans as heartless.
Take any front-page issue – the fall of Afghanistan or the infrastructure bill still awaiting passage by the Congress or the patchwork of COVID protocols across the country. Then listen to the communal dialogue. I’m right, and you are wrong. I’m smart and you are stupid. I’m enlightened and you are dimwitted. I’m on the correct side of history and you are positively prehistoric in your opinions.
There’s a newly coined term to describe such collective and personal states of mind: “maddiction,” offered by Jeremy E. Sherman, writing in Psychology Today magazine this month. As he writes, “Maddiction is the addiction to getting mad at others for exhilarating exoneration. The more outraged we are at others, the purer we feel. The purer we feel, the more we assume it’s our duty to be outraged at others.”
We know what maddicts look like. Red faced, voices raised, fingers pointed, mouths opened and shouting and spittle flying. We know what maddiction looks like in our current news media universe. Just tune into one of the cable news stations and within minutes you are guaranteed to see a line-up of talking heads, each speaking from their own on-screen box, each either righteously agreeing with the other pundits, or shouting down, and mocking their video enemies.
It’s not that outrage is always a bad thing. Just since last summer, there have been a slew of events that demand communal and individual response, and sometimes, anger. The killing of George Floyd and the racism seemingly hardwired into our national DNA. Runaway climate change and the earth burning up. Deadlocked politicians so invested in their own agendas that they fail to have the moral imagination to work for the common good. And yes, in religions too, like my own, that claim to have a lock on God’s truth and then exclude all “non-believers”.
But here’s the rub. After you’ve satiated your anger by smashing all the dishes against the wall in the kitchen to express just how outraged you are feeling, well, what then? After the yelling, after the accusations, after the protest,