We have all realised that the daily, hourly, diet of fake outrage (strong negative emotions) from journalists and official spokesmen is dishonest - they don't feel the outrage: they are just pretending.
But clearly they do expect us to feel the outrage. And that is significant and ought to be interesting.
We are being encouraged (and sometimes this encouragement is mandatory - with social ostracism following if we fail to fake the appropriate outrage at some recognised 'tragedy') to feel outrage pretty much all of the time; and about almost anything.
For example, we are expected to be outraged over the death of a person or people we have never heard of and about which everything we know is supplied by the same article that informs us of the death.
Given that such news stories are always false in important particulars, and in ways designed to amplify the outrage, this is quite an extraordinary way to lead our lives - but this is how those in charge want us to live.
Indeed, They want us to be ever-more outraged by ever-more events; and the threshold for outrage is continually pushed downwards until a trivial altercation - perhaps a slight gesture or a fragment of a sentence - becomes an international extreme outrage.
Such a desire on the part of those who rule us goes far beyond hypocrisy. The expressed outrage is fake - but the desired response is perfectly genuine.
This is a major manipulation of the human condition. We ought to be asking what kind of people want the mass population to be in a perpetual and escalating state of outrage?
And the answer is simple: evil people.
If you want 'evidence' for the deliberate and strategic evil of those who rule us - here it is.
I have to admit, reading about what the evil media is doing almost makes me feel -- never mind.
ReplyDelete@Wm Jas: that does raise the question of the role of non-mainstream forms of outrage which go against the media narrative, as in the case of secular conspiracy theorists. Such people are intentionally made into pariahs, but their real position is ambivalent. On the one hand, being outraged about the right things is better than being outraged about the wrong things, and their rejection of one aspect of the narrative might lead to rejection of other aspects. On the other hand, some of them might be rotated into a dominant position in the future, as justified resentment is still resentment and is alloyed with Evil motivations. For example, the fact that outrage about opioid prescribing is now officially endorsed solved precisely zero of the problems that allowed such a thing to occur in the first place.
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