If you’re looking for an inspiring interview with an enlightened Democrat turned Trump supporter, check out “Candace Owens on her Journey from Left to Right”.
My favorite line from the interview is this quote by Candace Owens: “People are hungry for truth. People are waking up.”
The whole interview centered on the psychology and ideology of victimization.
The topic got me thinking about the whole outrage society America has sadly become.
What would America’s founders think of our magnificent technological and industrial progress, on the one hand, alongside a near total collapse in virtue by any rational definition?
What’s with the psychology of outrage?
We see a lot of outrage in today’s leftists. They are perpetually outraged about President Donald Trump. But this started long before Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s brash and unapologetic style simply fuels their outrage. But the outrage was always there.
Outrage is behind all political correctness. Political correctness always finds new things to be outraged about. The things cultural leftists get outraged about — reducing taxes, a strong military, deregulating business, defanging the environmentalist movement, national anthems at football games, “racism” and all the rest — rarely seem supported by any facts. No matter. Facts are never the point; emotions are. It’s almost as if the outrage is a purpose in itself.
Logically and psychologically, outrage fits with victimhood. If I’m perpetually outraged by your behavior, then I never have to exit the victim role. So long as I don’t have to exit the victim role, I can get you to do whatever I want you to do. I can make you take care of me or bow to my every wish, all because you’re troubled by my perpetual sense of outrage and you’ll hope it will go away.
Of course, it never does. It only grows worse. Case in point: Today’s emotionally and psychologically collapsing leftists.
In a healthy case, outrage is a call to action. When I KNOW you’re wrong about something, outrage can be a reasonable and principled way for me to rise up against your genuine injustice. Outrage is required as emotional fuel in fighting actual injustice. However, when outrage is manufactured to turn oneself into a victim for the sake of being a victim, it’s a whole different story.
Genuine victims wish to eventually move beyond the victim status. Today’s outraged victims — and the people in politics, therapy and culture who manufacture them — are pathological, even evil. It’s not justice they’re after. It’s the quieting of a sick psychological need, similar to the needs of a heroin addict or an alcoholic. And that need will never be quieted, as we’ve discovered with the total collapse of rational political discourse in America, especially on the Establishment and Corporate Left.
That’s what’s going on in American culture today. About half the country (leftists mostly, it’s true) are perpetually outraged. Outrage arises from a sense of entitlement. It’s based on the false belief that you owe me something that, in fact, you don’t really owe me.
Usually, entitlement means, “I feel you should give me something that belongs to you, merely because you have it and I want it.” Normally we view entitlement as material. But in today’s outrage culture, it’s beyond that. “I — the outraged victim — feel entitled to have you BELIEVE what I believe in, and AGREE with what I think to be true. And if you fail to agree with me, you’re somehow violating my rights and my sense of entitlement to have everyone agree with me.”
Throughout the interview I posted above, Mr. Rubin and his guest astutely refer to how cultural and political leftists routinely identify victim groups and then likewise determine you, the alleged victimizer — and then they’re coming to get you! Victim-outrage calls itself sensitive and empathic and yet in a crudely hypocritical matter has degenerated into the meanest, nastiest bunch of irate sycophants the world has seen since the peak eras of the Nazis and the Communists.
That explains today’s outrage culture. It’s based on a sense of victimhood in people who really are not victims. They think they’re victims of people who disagree with them, people they automatically and always label “racist” and horrible. In reality, they feel victimized because they have to inhabit a country (or planet) where millions disagree with them. The Trump election victory brought that emotion to a tumultuous climax — the social equivalent of a nervous breakdown, if you like that term — and it has not let up for a moment since it started. If anything, it’s getting worse.
Psychologically, their perpetual outrage is a way of trying to quiet the noise. The noise in their minds is caused by their false belief that they need not — and should not have to — use reason and persuasion to get people over to their point-of-view. They have quite literally turned into the fascists they vow to destroy.
Leftism is the real fascism, not Donald Trump’s attempts to restore a little of America’s lost greatness. Leftists are what they call us. It’s a truly deplorable and sad thing to watch.
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