To Change the World, Embrace Anger, Not Outrage
My Great-grandmother died of childbed fever in 1885, shortly after giving birth to her fourth child. She was 29 when the massive infection raged through her system, causing a painful and ugly death. When the doctor showed up to the home for the grand finale, the family story says that the nurse attending Great-grandmother confronted him. “Doctor, did you wash your hands?”
“Don’t be silly,” he replied. “I’ve only been working in my garden.”
I’m turning this episode into a short story. A writer friend familiar with my project recently forwarded a brief item from BBC news: Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth declared, on air, that he “hasn’t washed his hands in 10 years” because germs don’t exist, being invisible to the naked eye. It helps him “inoculate” himself, he stated, by giving his immune system a workout.
I was outraged!
Fortunately, I didn’t offer this tidbit to the Facebook Beast. It turns out, Hegseth was joking. Making a point about how sensitive we all are. I’d be outraged at him for being so insensitive, but I confess I have a similarly demented sense of humor. I love irony, sarcasm, and non sequiturs. I just don’t spread them on TV. Not that I’ve had the chance, but you never know.
How Productive is Outrage?
The incident made me examine my own outrage response. It’s a seductive emotion. I feel like part of a club when people are outraged with me. Expressing outrage in words offers a satisfying emotional mini-catharsis. Outrage is very easy to spread on social media. But it has sinister qualities. Shared outrage creates a closed feedback loop, confirming what I already believe. It doesn’t make me question my assumptions, or force me to grow. Outrage invites me to project onto a vilified Other those qualities I fear might be actually true of myself.
The Outrager-in-Chief
Donald Trump is a perpetual-motion outrage machine. He exploits anger among his followers, whipping them into outrage froth. He provokes outrage on the left, like an orange-haired P.T. Barnum prodding a lion into attack mode.
Does anyone benefit from all this? Well, Trump does. Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep doing it. Facebook, Twitter, and cable news shows clearly benefit from exploiting our outrage. They’ve monetized outrage, and we can’t look away. And, I’m pretty sure that even if the US overestimates his power, Vladimir Putin finds pleasure in how neatly our outrage fits with his anti-democracy playbook.
A Public Health Risk
A public discourse based on outrage is a national problem. Nobody benefits in the end. Outrage sucks energy from the deep, complex anger that can fuel actual change. It distracts us from our fear, from our hearts, our loneliness, from listening to the Other. A political system predicated on outrage is little more than a seesaw — every four years, somebody comes out on top and somebody else loses. Change, real change, never has a chance to be assimilated.
Anger, Not Outrage
The solution lies in embracing anger’s full complexity. When I am explosively angry with my husband, it’s because I am most afraid — something he says or does triggers my trauma history. He’s not an abuser, but at that moment, he feels like one to me. To the traumatized parts of me, going into a rage feels like a protection.
Inside each one of us, our emotions are intertwined. I’ve learned a lot from the rage I carry at having been sexually abused as a young child and adolescent by two different men. Within that rage, I’ve discovered sadness, grief, excruciating vulnerability, longing for safe intimacy, and a strong desire to prove my abusers wrong about me. Healing is the best revenge; paradoxically, healing means coming to terms with the fact that they, too, though distorted and pathetic, were fully human.
Outrage is not the same thing as a desire for justice. There can be no justice without anger, but vilifying the Other is not an expression of justice. If anything, outrage keeps us in such a passive state of rage that we can’t envision how things might be made better.
A Long-Polarized Community
In 2014, a Justice Department investigation found the police force in Newark, New Jersey guilty of abuse of force within communities of color. Shortly thereafter, inside their commitment to improving the police force with extensive training, the Newark Police Department took on a pilot trauma training for police and community, together.
Good guys/bad guys in the same room? Not quite. The trainers who worked on the ground understood that both sides had experienced trauma, and that this was exacerbating the conflict. When the program evaluation was planned, the evaluators encouraged each side to speak their truth. It may seem paradoxical, but this heightened tension guided the outrage into a consensus-building process. As the two groups explored these tensions and each side listened to the other, a common ground emerged. The police force and the community both wanted the same thing: to be understood and appreciated for the heroic efforts they were making toward what was, in fact, a shared priority: a safe community.
Nobody Loses
The program also demonstrates that conflict and anger are not “bad” in themselves. We should be angry over injustice! But when anger morphs into outrage that finds emotional resolution in vilifying those who are wrong, our motivation to pursue change is actually weakened. Anger is complex. When I allow myself to sit with my anger over the direction Trump is taking the nation, the reality of our collective divisiveness taps into deep grief and fuels my desire for large-scale healing.
Let’s disappoint the Trumps, the Zuckerbergs, the Twitterites, the exploiters of outrage for their own ends by not taking their bait. I have a habit of scrolling through the news on my phone. “Oh, my God,” I’ll groan from my comfy chair. In the kitchen, my husband will call, “Reading the news again?” Instead of mindlessly scrolling, let’s cultivate interest in those news stories that grab, not our outrage trigger, but our full humanity. What moves you? What motivates me to act? Let’s allow our anger to lead us into full awareness — of our common vulnerability, of our power to act. We can change the world.
Helen W. Mallon is a Contributing Editor to Fierro Consulting. On her website, she blogs about trauma, resilience, and the healing process. Her short fiction is available for free download onto any device. Helen’s writing on Medium takes a deep dive into contemporary culture. In May 2019, she will graduate from the Gestalt Training Institute of Philadelphia. She has an MFA from Vermont College.
