Outrage begets outrage

There is a "virtuous" cycle when it comes to outrage - the more you see others outraging, the more you want to outrage. Thankfully, language policing is on its way down (I think)

During a (largish) conversation earlier today, someone casually said “if you want me to describe American culture, I’ll say that it is schizophrenic”. And then he proceeded to explain why he thought so. The discussion continued.

I was reminded of some twitter threads from a few years ago about how this is “non inclusive language”. That describing something “bimodal” as schizophrenic is unfair to people who are actually schizophrenic, and makes light of their conditions. This was during the period when there was generally a whole lot of language policing, and language police (I don’t know if I’m being unfair to actual police now by using this phrase) would pounce on you were you to use “non inclusive language” on social media.

Around that time I remember my own skin thinning (figuratively; now I don’t know if I’m being exclusive of people with certain kinds of skin here). Whenever people would use terms related to mental health or neurodivergence casually, my ears would perk up and I would notice it. Stuff like “I guess it’s a sort of ADHD that I messed up this conversation”. Or “I’m a bit bipolar today”. And things like that. Of course, I never picked a fight with anyone on account of any of this stuff, since I anyway had enough other things to pick fight over with most people.

I think outrage begets outrage. When you are exposed to more outrage of a particular kind, you start becoming sensitive to what caused that outrage in the first place. And that makes you believe that it is more okay to outrage about other similar things. On a small proportion of occasions where you are outraged about things similar to things other people are outraged by, you make your outrage loud.

Now everyone else sees more outrage and a greater universe of things that they see people outraging about. On the margin, it becomes okay for them to outrage about things they would have otherwise not outraged about. This leads to a virtuous cycle (in the academic sense - there is absolutely no virtue in outraging).

This increasing outrage was the world we lived in for close to a decade, ending maybe a few months to a year ago. This coincided with the rapid rise of social media, and associated norms in terms of what is okay or not okay to speak in public. Rise of social media meant rise in outrage. It meant rise in people seeing outrage. Which normalised more outrage. And so forth.

The “trust and safety” oriented censors who oversaw the major social media platforms in this period seemed to encourage outrage, and calling out of other people saying outrageous things. Maybe it started innocuously - that such posts resulted in greater engagement. Maybe later it became political. You never know. But there was a period of time when you would be shit scared of posting on social media not because of the content of what you might post, but potentially offensive language that you might potentially use.

And I feel like we have turned a corner. I think they call it “preference cascades”. For whatever reason, people started calling out other people’s language a little bit less. And that meant people saw less outrage and themselves started outraging less. The skins have started to get thicker. And I think this can only be a good thing.

For example, the other day I was watching highlights of Chelsea’s win over Tottenham in the English Premier League. Cole Palmer (who is of West Indian heritage, St. Kitts to be precise) scored two great penalties, with the second of them being a panenka. Listen to what the Chelsea commentator says as soon as it goes in:

I’ve seen no commentary about this at all on social media. and I think it’s a great thing! You don’t need to police people’s language and invent hurt on behalf of other people.

Similarly with the casual use of “schizophrenia” today (I think I still retain vestiges of the decade of language policing in my mind, and so I noticed both this and the cheeky monkey) - people have once again started becoming real and stopping to bother about imagined offences. And this can only be a good thing!

PS: Looks like I spoke too soon! Having written this blogpost, and before I posted it, I was scrolling twitter. And I see that one of the topics of the day is outrage about the choice of words (!!!!) used by former cricketer and commentator Isa Guha! I guess thin skins still abound. Hopefully this won’t set off a whole new round of outrage and language policing and thin skins.