“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
Well, they’re certainly different statements, and I can imagine people with either emotion saying either, so again it’s not about the words.
And I got what I wanted, and didn’t feel a huge need to talk about it afterwards, as I recall. (The felt need to keep talking about relatively minor offenses might be a topic worth pursuing.)
Yes, as I discuss in some of my courses, when you find yourself going over a situation over and over again, it’s an indication that you think something “shouldn’t have happened”, when in fact it DID happen… which is definitely a symptom of the category of emotion I’m talking about, as well as a failure of rationality. (i.e., arguing about what “should have” happened is not productive, vs. actually thinking about how you’d like things to happen in the future… After all, we can’t change the past.)
Would you take a crack at the matter of political action? Suppose that the government decides that reviving frozen people is impossible, cryonics is based on fraud, and therefore freezing people is illegal. How could political action be taken without encouraging a sense of outrage?
I’m not saying you can’t use outrage as a tactic. I’m just saying that having outrage be an automatic response to almost anything is a terribly bad idea. In programming terms, we’d call it a “code smell”… that is, something you should be suspicious of.
Some people might say, “ok, I’ll just be suspicious when I’m feeling outraged, and be extra careful”, except it just doesn’t work that way.
Because, when you’re already outraged, you feel certain that things shouldn’t have happened that way, and that you’re in the right, and that Someone Should Do Something. Self-suspicion simply isn’t going to happen when you’re already filled with a spirit of total self-righteousness.
What’s more, outrage is self-maintaining: under its influence, you are primed to defend whatever principle created the outrage, and the very idea that you should give up being outraged is, well, outrageous!
IOW, outrage is a form of not-very-pleasant wireheading that makes people not want to take out the wire, because they believe that terrible things will happen or society will collapse or some unspecified outrage will occur. If you think you want to keep the wire in, it’s almost certainly the wire talking.
So, IMO, one should not have the wire plugged in, when deciding whether it’s a good idea to have it plugged in! There may be valid game-theoretical reasons for you to want to precommit to be say, outraged about parking spots. However, you are not in a position to make that decision rationally, if you currently do not have the choice to not be outraged.
That is, if you automatically become outraged by situation X, then you are not in a good position to reflect rationally on whether it is a good idea to be outraged by situation X, because by the very nature of automatic outrage, you already vehemently believe it’s a good idea.
If you’re using outrage as a tactic, is that equivalent to trying to train other people to be automatically outraged about something you want changed?
Yes, so whatever you’re going after had better really be worth it.… or at least more important than whatever those people would have been outraged at instead!
(The media makes a living by provoking outrage, so it’s not like most people aren’t already being outraged by something.)
Well, they’re certainly different statements, and I can imagine people with either emotion saying either, so again it’s not about the words.
Yes, as I discuss in some of my courses, when you find yourself going over a situation over and over again, it’s an indication that you think something “shouldn’t have happened”, when in fact it DID happen… which is definitely a symptom of the category of emotion I’m talking about, as well as a failure of rationality. (i.e., arguing about what “should have” happened is not productive, vs. actually thinking about how you’d like things to happen in the future… After all, we can’t change the past.)
I’m not saying you can’t use outrage as a tactic. I’m just saying that having outrage be an automatic response to almost anything is a terribly bad idea. In programming terms, we’d call it a “code smell”… that is, something you should be suspicious of.
Some people might say, “ok, I’ll just be suspicious when I’m feeling outraged, and be extra careful”, except it just doesn’t work that way.
Because, when you’re already outraged, you feel certain that things shouldn’t have happened that way, and that you’re in the right, and that Someone Should Do Something. Self-suspicion simply isn’t going to happen when you’re already filled with a spirit of total self-righteousness.
What’s more, outrage is self-maintaining: under its influence, you are primed to defend whatever principle created the outrage, and the very idea that you should give up being outraged is, well, outrageous!
IOW, outrage is a form of not-very-pleasant wireheading that makes people not want to take out the wire, because they believe that terrible things will happen or society will collapse or some unspecified outrage will occur. If you think you want to keep the wire in, it’s almost certainly the wire talking.
So, IMO, one should not have the wire plugged in, when deciding whether it’s a good idea to have it plugged in! There may be valid game-theoretical reasons for you to want to precommit to be say, outraged about parking spots. However, you are not in a position to make that decision rationally, if you currently do not have the choice to not be outraged.
That is, if you automatically become outraged by situation X, then you are not in a good position to reflect rationally on whether it is a good idea to be outraged by situation X, because by the very nature of automatic outrage, you already vehemently believe it’s a good idea.
If you’re using outrage as a tactic, is that equivalent to trying to train other people to be automatically outraged about something you want changed?
Yes, so whatever you’re going after had better really be worth it.… or at least more important than whatever those people would have been outraged at instead!
(The media makes a living by provoking outrage, so it’s not like most people aren’t already being outraged by something.)