Outrage Is Opium Of The People.

Outrage is opium of the people. 

What's that I hear you say, isn't it meant to be television? (or religion, the old guys at the back grumble). Well no longer, what better to calm the raging masses then tricking them into thinking they have voice and agency? Outrage is omnipresent these days, in the old media, in the new media, on our social networks, but unlike in the past, when outrage lead to revolution, today it's manipulated to provide false assurance and calm the dangerous beast that can slay the rulers of our world.  

This time there has been a slight change to the programme. Where before the youth were the foundations of revolution, now they are foundations of outrage culture, as the millennials culture is dominated by identity politics born of postmodernist roots. and they dwell in an electronic haze of mutable reality where facts, reason, evidence, and science can be ignored in favour of self affirming feelings, experiences and values.

Now here is the clever part, back in the Seventies, a guy in Chicago called Saul Alinsky put forth a set of rules for activism, the Rules for Radicals, a new method of activism. Many make good sense, many are familiar, adopted across the political spectrum but one matters in this conversation. 

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” 

Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

This seems reasonable but when it was written, the politics of the personal was at a local level, isolated by lack of communication and contained by distance, groups of activists could target the elite, and force change through ensuring a self-preservation instinct of the target. The press could apply this at a national level, but there are only so many pages in a paper, but now it's a bit different. 

Look down. 

It's a keyboard, or it's a phone, perhaps a pad but it's also something else. Its a symbiote, a silicon Siamese Twin, and our relationship with what it provides is as essential to our life as the blood beating round our veins. The millennials are especially, in thrall each one in a bubble of dual realities, the physical local and the electronic global, their body present in the here and now, yet their awareness inhabits a server on the other side of the world. It is this binary existence that intertwines every aspect of their lives and displays it to the world. Privacy is a near forgotten concept, with the most personal details of your life to be shared with the world.  So here we are, living with a symbiotic gateway to the virtual world and something happens.

Someone, somewhere is outraged.

With You.

Me? What the hell? Why me? What did I do? What that? It's made me responsible for the ills of society? H...h... how? I'm a white cishet what? and who are you? and you? and all those people? Why are they all mad with me? 

Welcome to the world of social media shaming and the politics of the personal, an intra-society cull of undesirables with the weaponised vocabulary of identity politics. 

Racist. Outrage! Misogynist. Outrage! Homophobe. Outrage! Transphobe. Outrage! Ableist. Outrage! 

Racist? Really? Because I wore a kimono? This is ridiculous. I have a outraged mob of people I don't know on social media baying for my blood. 

and now the media are interested? and they are writing articles about me? and my employer is on the phone? 

I want off. 

Except I can't. That damn symbiote has morphed in to a monkey on my back and it won't go away. 

...and so another racist is dealt with. We sure showed him eh? Racism is such a problem, do you see how the authorities treat minorities? They are executing them! It's outrageous! I really admire all those who attack the racists among us, let us laud the loudest, the most vicious, and quickest to anger and raise them on the pedestal of the role model. And so more fall. We are sated, and satisfied. Our outrage is progressive and forces change on society

Except it does not. The system remains, the institutions unchanged. The cops still kill. The bourgeoisie remain untouched and untroubled in their golden enclaves. Our anger is forced on each other, our rage is focused on our friends, on our peers, on our neighbours, on our fellow man, on the proletariat. For those in their ivory towers our outrage is muted and safely contained, the energy spent and dwindled. Docile and compliant. 

The offspring of the ruling classes dominate the infrastructure of outrage, the media, technology, and social sciences and maintain the barriers that outrage raise in protection. The bourgeoisie are not just the fat felines of capitalism and the industrial world, but also those who claim to be on the left who dominate the informational world, the pipe through which the opiate of outrage is fed to the people.