“This is unacceptable!” strikes me as a useful motivator for well-defined, achievable territorial defense.
Sure. That’s certainly what it’s arguably “for”, from an evolutionary point of view.
If I have a splinter in my foot, seeing it as unacceptable strikes me as part of the motivation for removing the splinter.
Do you see it as morally unacceptable? I expect that you are describing a different emotion here.
either the question is more complex than you say, or there’s more than one flavor of “That’s unacceptable!”
Both, actually. In the first place, the catch is that for moral outrage to be useful, you have to have enough people who share the same outrage, or at least have powerful people who share it.
And, on the second front, there are certainly many emotions that people might say, “that’s unacceptable” to, including situations with no emotional content at all. (e.g. “the terms you’re offering me to buy my house are unacceptable, because they won’t fulfill my goals”, vs. “that offer is unacceptable—how dare you insult me with such a low price”.)
In the present context, I took the original poster’s “unacceptable” to be about a feeling of moral judgment based on the other things they said around that statement.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of. I have very little temper most of the time—it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
Oddly enough, caffeine makes me more outraged/arrogant/grandiose/easily offended. I’ve had some very weird experiences with high doses of caffeine—it’s like being possessed by the Red Queen. The crippling fury of believing I’m superior to everyone around me and the mortals won’t recognize my dominion! Off with their heads! I don’t consume those quantities of caffeine anymore, since I figured out the bizarre effect it has on me. Of course, if I ever need to psych myself up for a confrontation, I can use caffeine as a handy chemical aid.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of.
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.)
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage?
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.”
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
I don’t think I’d have been as definite to the guy with his car in my flea market space if I didn’t think he was in the wrong. If it had been a minor loss to me and seemed like an honest mistake on his part, I might have let him have the space.
On the other hand, I think I felt more stubborn and determined than outraged, so it might not be the sort of thing you’re talking about. 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.)
“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
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 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.)
Sure. That’s certainly what it’s arguably “for”, from an evolutionary point of view.
Do you see it as morally unacceptable? I expect that you are describing a different emotion here.
Both, actually. In the first place, the catch is that for moral outrage to be useful, you have to have enough people who share the same outrage, or at least have powerful people who share it.
And, on the second front, there are certainly many emotions that people might say, “that’s unacceptable” to, including situations with no emotional content at all. (e.g. “the terms you’re offering me to buy my house are unacceptable, because they won’t fulfill my goals”, vs. “that offer is unacceptable—how dare you insult me with such a low price”.)
In the present context, I took the original poster’s “unacceptable” to be about a feeling of moral judgment based on the other things they said around that statement.
I’m actually going to agree with Nancy here.
The “That’s unacceptable! This is an outrage! You can’t treat me that way! I deserve better” reaction seems to be really important to protect yourself from being taken advantage of. I have very little temper most of the time—it’s very rare for me to stand up for myself, complain about being mistreated, get in a fight, etc. It’s more natural to me to blame myself if other people are treating me in a way I don’t like. I need to preserve at least some ability to get outraged, otherwise I’ll put up with any old kind of treatment.
Oddly enough, caffeine makes me more outraged/arrogant/grandiose/easily offended. I’ve had some very weird experiences with high doses of caffeine—it’s like being possessed by the Red Queen. The crippling fury of believing I’m superior to everyone around me and the mortals won’t recognize my dominion! Off with their heads! I don’t consume those quantities of caffeine anymore, since I figured out the bizarre effect it has on me. Of course, if I ever need to psych myself up for a confrontation, I can use caffeine as a handy chemical aid.
Why? Is there some useful behavior that you would not engage in if you were not experiencing the emotion?
I don’t have to actually be outraged to yell at someone… assuming that yelling is the most useful response in the first place. (And it often isn’t.)
If you have to get outraged to stand up for yourself, this is an indication of a boundary problem: it’s a substitute for healthy assertion. (I know, because I’m still discovering all the settings where I was taught to use it as a substitute!)
So, if someone has a “self-defense” objection to dropping a judgment, I first help them work on removing the judgments that keep them from being able to assert boundaries in the first place.
(IOW, the reason people usually have problems asserting their boundaries is because they were imprinted with other moral judgments about the conditions under which they’re allowed to assert boundaries!)
That’s probably a good insight.
It’s typically been my goal to put up with as much unpleasantness as I can without complaining, for as long as I can. The trouble is that some of the things I’ve taught myself to tolerate are not good for me. (Everything from untreated illness, to accepting rules that it would be smarter to bend, to letting people put me down in rather hurtful ways.) Becoming more “stoic” (in the sense of more inclined to endure bad circumstances rather than change them) seems dangerous to me—I’m already too “stoic” for my own good!
While I haven’t been doing work with the developmental stuff for very long (maybe the last 6 months), that sounds pretty much like a Levin stage 1 dysfunction… almost exactly like one of the ones I fixed recently, which has made me much less stoic in that sense.
I’d suggest Weiss & Weiss’s “Recovery from Co-dependency” and Levin’s “Cycles of Power” as being very helpful with this.
The essential thesis of both works is that there are patterns of child development during which we learn how to get certain categories of need met, wherein the choices we make lay the groundwork for personality traits (like assertion, self-care, thoughtfulness, etc.).
Generally speaking, a choice that might be adaptive in one phase (say, learning not to cry out as a baby, but instead to wait for someone to show up unprompted) can then result in making later choices that are basically workarounds.
So you end up with messy code in your brain, with lots of patches and workarounds… and the books are like a software developer’s “patterns and antipatterns” catalog, listing typical bugs, workarounds, and how things ought to be set up in the first place.
I’ve made some rather substantial changes to personality characteristics like these (e.g. becoming less stoic, being more comfortable with novelty, more flexible about changes of plans) in the last 2.5 months, and I’ve barely done anything past development stage 2 yet.
[A side note: I’m not actually using the methods described in the books to implement the changes; the books discuss roleplay in psychotherapy, and miscellaneous self-care activities. I’m instead using other, more-direct mindhacking techniques, while referring to the books as a map of what to change and what to change it to. For example, I’ve just realized this morning that a chronic problem I’ve had with planning is probably related to a missed developmental goal in stage 3, so I’m going to go dig through their case studies and such for stage 3 to figure out what I need to change so that I naturally behave differently in that area. But I won’t be making that change by roleplaying being a two-year old (with a therapist pretending to be a parent), as Weiss and Weiss suggest people with stage 3 issues do!]
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
(Just noting that you appear to be agreeing with what pjeby says in the comment you are replying to as well.)
I don’t think I’d have been as definite to the guy with his car in my flea market space if I didn’t think he was in the wrong. If it had been a minor loss to me and seemed like an honest mistake on his part, I might have let him have the space.
On the other hand, I think I felt more stubborn and determined than outraged, so it might not be the sort of thing you’re talking about. 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.)
“I won’t let you get away with this!” and “This is unacceptable!” might be really different emotions.
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?
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.)