Fortitude

I left my Washington, D.C., office in the Cannon building to go vote on the House floor of the Capitol, as I usually do multiple times a day while Congress is in session. It was spring of 2019, and I had just been sworn in to my first term a few months prior. It was sunny outside, barely above 70 degrees, the air pleasant and crisp, so I avoided the underground tunnels that connect the Capitol to the Congressional offices and crossed Independence Avenue above ground instead. It’s a far more enjoyable experience to walk toward the Capitol with its majestic dome in full view, and hard not to be awestruck by the experience of entering the beating heart of our republic.

You never know who you will run into during that five-minute walk. Capitol Hill is teeming with journalists, activists, and tourists, most of whom are rather pleasant, most of the time. That particular day I noticed a group of protestors outside the Capitol. This was not an unusual scene; activists often gather at the steps of the Capitol. It is the People’s House, after all. But this was an unusual group of protestors, because it wasn’t clear what they were protesting for. There were no calls for the passage of a particular bill or attention to a certain issue. Instead, they wore shirts that simply read “stay outraged,” along with a matching assortment of signs and buttons that appeared to be professionally crafted from an established vendor, not purchased hastily from some ragtag print shop.

I was puzzled. I wondered about the meaning of their slogan, stay outraged. Why this phrase? Why not instead rally around a slogan that more accurately depicted what they protested or advocated for (assuming there was one)? What drew these young people to the slogan and more importantly to the notion that staying outraged was the desired end goal? Perhaps I was simply too unenlightened to understand the value of perpetual outrage?

Perhaps. But unlikely. It was more likely that this small group of activists was born of a larger cultural paradigm, one that has permeated our media and national discourse as of late. It was far more likely that the antagonistic headlines of the last few years had finally succeeded in manipulating the behaviors and emotions of our citizens and directed these activists to the steps of the Capitol to encourage others along the same path of indignation and everlasting anger.

This aimless rage was deliberately designed, intended to produce this exact result.

“It’s Important to Stay Outraged” implored the title of a 2019 op-ed, in the hope that their readers would not fall back into the complacency of their cheerful daily routines. “Get outraged and stay outraged” exclaimed another headline, equally desperate for sustained irritation. “Never lose your sense of outrage,” tweeted Senator Bernie Sanders, knowing the most effective political manipulation is achieved by raw emotion. One recent op-ed acknowledged the psychological tax of outrage, giving more in-depth advice: “How to #StayOutraged without Losing Your Mind: Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance.” Outrage is in vogue, they proclaim, and more than that, it is a necessity. But this story of unrelenting ire goes far beyond the abstract sloganeering of politicians and media: “Stay Outraged” is also sprawled on countless T-shirts and stickers and buttons for sale across the internet, as these young activists had clearly discovered.1

It’s a peculiar thought, this notion that if only you were sufficiently informed, aware, and woke, that you would have a duty to exhibit an intense state of fury. The apocalyptic nature of our unjust reality must surely enrage you. It must! Not only that, but once you’ve achieved an enlightened state of madness, then you must stay that way. Perhaps forever.

Being a normal person with normal concerns, you may read those headlines with healthy skepticism if not outright confusion. Don’t we live in the most prosperous nation on earth with a quality of life and freedoms that are the envy of the world? But, respond the outraged, this is just proof you aren’t paying attention! If you only knew the true depths of disaster, despair, and injustice in our midst, you’d rush to join the mob in righteous cultural warfare, scream slogans in solidarity, march arm-in-arm to cancel those who disobey, destroy the careers of those who misspeak, and pile on those who dare to defend anything other than outrage orthodoxy.

A peculiar thought indeed. Let me suggest an alternative.

Outrage is weakness. It is the muting of rational thinking and the triumph of emotion. Despite what you’ve been hearing and seeing as of late, it is not a virtue. It is not something to be celebrated, nor praised, nor aspired to. It is a deeply human emotion—even understandable at times—but rarely is it productive, virtuous, or useful. It is an emotion to overcome, not accept, and overcoming it requires mental strength. This book is about acquiring that necessary mental fortitude.

Let’s define our terms. What do I mean by “outrage”? It is a specific term with a specific meaning. Not all forms of outrage are always unjustified—far from it. There is such a thing as righteous indignation. This book is not about “proper outrage,” stemming from real tragedy or wrongdoing or injustice. This is not a book about overcoming true grief. It is about outrage culture, and the newfound tendency to reflexively assume the worst of intentions when reacting to news or commentary or political discourse, and default into an emotionally driven hatred of the “other,” whoever that may be. It is the petty, weak-minded, and ultimately unproductive response to our neighbors, fellow citizens, and political opponents that has been normalized and even elevated in our culture.

It is about the hypersensitivity that has infected our society, where undesirable language is the equivalent of physical violence, where an old tweet or Facebook post can be grounds for ruination and public shame, and where an absence of reason or fact encourages public indictment, moral outrage, and mob rule. Outrage culture is the weaponization of emotion, and the elevation of emotion above reason. It is the new normal, where moral righteousness rises in proportion to your level of outrage. The more outraged one is, the more authentic one is perceived to be. And the more authentic one is, the greater one’s moral standing. Reason, rationale, and evidence be damned.

My debut in the public eye was premised on an avoidance of outrage culture—a rare thing these days—when I was publicly expected to take Saturday Night Live and Pete Davidson to task for wronging me with an offensive joke. I didn’t. More on that later. For now, it suffices to say that mere words could not hurt me, a statement that is becoming less and less prevalent or even desirable to many these days. It was my first personal encounter with modern-day outrage culture, but I am certainly not the first to notice this new and troubling trend.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff dissect this new phenomenon in The Coddling of the American Mind. Focusing on college students in particular, the authors find that a culture of “safetyism” has become widespread, wherein students actually feel that opposing views are a literal danger to their physical well-being. The mantra of “sticks and stones” is being turned on its head. This false sense of danger leads to extreme reactions to that perceived danger. Students and activists feel justified shouting down others, vandalizing property, and even assaulting political opponents. This sort of emotional reasoning has been promoted instead of discouraged, leading students to see microaggressions everywhere they look. Instead of seeking understanding, people are increasingly interpreting the actions of others in the least generous way possible and assuming the worst of intentions.

While Haidt and Lukianoff write about this phenomenon in terms of recent history and the modern terminology that accompanies it, it is not entirely new. I first encountered irrational microaggression interpretations when I was in third grade, growing up in Katy, Texas, just outside of Houston. We were discussing food chains in class, a fairly simple subject for a third-grader. Big animals eat small animals. Small animals eat plants or insects. But being a kid, this explanation was not really sufficient to hold my attention. I built out my own explanation of food chains, using the reality and experiences around me. After all, you master a subject faster if you put it into your own words. And so I went on to describe food chains in the context of our classroom. I pointed to my classmates, one by one, and said, “John ate Lindsey. Merril ate John.” And so on. And then I ended my lecture with the final apex predator in my food chain: my teacher. For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call her Miss Smith. I said, in perfect earshot of said apex predator, that “Miss Smith ate Merril.”

It did not go over well. My teacher, Miss Smith, was unable to imagine the audacity of a nine-year-old suggesting she might eat a student, even in the context of discussing food chains. It was clear that she thought I was referencing her weight, despite the fact that I had listed everyone in the class as part of my food chain exercise. She was decidedly outraged, lacking in facts and context with which to address the situation, and unable to assume anything but the most malevolent of intentions.

She dragged me to the vice-principal’s office, my classmates looking on in terror as I left the classroom. “Shame, shame,” they must have thought. Merril was in shock, but perhaps he was also relieved that Miss Smith had no intention of eating him. Into the VP’s office we went, where a serious woman sat and listened intently as a flustered Miss Smith explained the extent of my misdeeds. The red-haired professional administrator gave no indication that she thought this was a frivolous accusation. In fact, as she nodded along to Miss Smith’s frantic story, she brought out a book to show me. In it were the disciplinary codes and potential punishments for “profanity.” I had not learned this word, “profanity,” yet, and given my vocabularic disadvantage I was in no position to argue.

This is where the whole episode really went off the rails. The VP pointed to a section where it said that law enforcement could be called in serious cases of profanity. They were dead serious. They were threatening to call the police on a nine-year-old for saying Miss Smith ate Merril. I was scared to death as they discussed going easier on me with mere in-school suspension. My mom was eventually called into the office to be informed that I would be punished with in-school suspension. She was terminally ill with cancer and would pass away a year later. We had real struggles, not perceived ones. Life-and-death circumstances, not microaggressions. She was undergoing another round of chemotherapy, and she couldn’t care less about the hypersensitive, outrage-prone Miss Smith. At home, I was not in trouble. We had more important things to worry about.

Since that day in 1993, things have only gotten worse. It is anyone’s guess as to why—many other authors have examined this trend—but I think the internet, social media, and transformed incentives within mainstream media reporting are a good place to start. What used to be rare instances of political correctness, microaggressions, and irrational anger have metastasized into the outrage culture we see today—characterized not just by outrage and political correctness but also by identity politics and an increasingly polarizing media and digital environment. Haidt and Lukianoff note, “Common-enemy identity politics, when combined with microaggression theory, produces a call-out culture in which almost anything one says or does could result in a public shaming.” Add in the element of anonymization inherent in social media comments, and you have the ingredients for a toxic mob-politics culture.

This mob, unshackled by the interpersonal limitations of good manners, won’t even let progressive leaders like President Barack Obama off the hook. The New York Times Opinion section pounced on the former president after he made this all-too-sensible observation on cancel culture: “I can sit and feel pretty good about myself because, man, you see how woke I was, I called you out. That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.” The young columnist at the Times dismissed Obama as an out-of-touch boomer for his comments. It was a foolish, emotional reaction to sensible remarks by the former president.

It isn’t just millennials and Gen Z, of course. The entire US political system seems to be infected by these problematic cultural trends, cheered on by our media and opinion journalists who thrive on drama, conflict, and strife. Knowing that the most salacious headlines will get the most clicks, journalists are all too happy to oblige. As Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj of Tufts University note in The Outrage Industry, headlines and commentary are deliberately misleading and infused with “outrage speech,” designed not for substance but for emotional response. In Hate Inc., Matt Taibbi notes that this is partly because the financial incentives for incendiary opinion journalism are so strong: “There is a financial pull toward research-free stories. Writing 1,200 words of jokes about a Trump tweet costs less than sending a reporter undercover into a Mexican maquiladora.”

It has grown terribly difficult to separate objective journalism from opinion journalism. Back in the days when evening news anchor Walter Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America,” there was a well-defined separation between news and opinion. Today they have bled into each other. This exacerbates division and resentment. Whereas we have long understood that Fox News leans right and MSNBC leans left, the rest of the news networks still try to pass themselves off as objective nonpartisans. This frustrates conservatives the most, since networks like CNN still proclaim to be “just the facts” or “news analysis,” when in fact most hosts persistently engage in left-leaning opinion journalism. It is no wonder that trust in mass media has been edging lower and lower over the past twenty years, down to 41 percent in September 2019, according to Gallup.

This has deeper consequences than just heightened societal tensions. These problematic cultural trends and misleading media practices are changing the actual values that we deem good. Our culture has come to view heroes—the figures or attributes that we should emulate—differently, and that’s a problem.

A classic view of the hero archetype would be a person who is calm, collected, and self-assured. A person raised on the mantra of “sticks and stones,” or the great Rudyard Kipling line “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Of course, few people have an honest claim to such virtue—we are all prone to overreaction and emotional reasoning—but the point is that we strive to be better. We want to be that hero, the one who has a cool head, a calm soul, and a sharp tongue.

It seems that that archetype has lost standing to its own antithesis: righteous outrage, emotional reaction, and moral grandstanding. The new hero is the one who “speaks truth to power” (a tired cliché with an elusive definition) and signals their oppression loudly, ready to bravely point out how others have wronged them. Where the bravery is in this scenario is lost on me, but people believe it nonetheless. It’s an indication that certain versions of heroic attributes, like being brave and outspoken, are still valued—though their meaning has been twisted to accommodate what is clearly a victimhood mentality. And why not? In this day and age, victimhood is power.

That is the setup for this book. As a society we may have finally reached a point where we realize something is a little off. The pathos has grown out of control, often at the expense of logic, decency, and virtue. We aren’t acting the way we are supposed to. We mock virtue, without considering how its abandonment accelerates our moral decay. We aren’t acting as a culture that is mature or enlightened or educated, we aren’t acting worthy of this beautiful country and political system that we inherited from our revolutionary ancestors. Rather, we don a mantle of fragility, of anger, of childishness, and are utterly shameless in doing so.

The consequences of this decay are many, but ultimately it’s a question of sustainability. How long can our society endure when we are at each other’s throats? We don’t want to know the answer to that question. We want to know how to fix it.

These lessons will make you mentally stronger, better equipped to face life’s challenges, and as impervious as possible to the outrage culture all around us. The basic message is this: If you’re losing your cool, you are losing. If you are triggered, it is because you allowed someone else to dictate your emotional state. If you are outraged, it is because you lack discipline and self-control. These are personal defeats, not the fault of anyone else. And each defeat shapes who you are as a person, and in the collective sense, who we are as a people.

This book is about actively hardening your mind so that you can be the person you think you should be. It is about identifying who that person is in the first place, and taking responsibility for the self-improvement required to become them. It is about learning what it means to never quit. It is about learning to take a joke and giving others some charity when they make a bad one. It is about the importance of building a society of iron-tough individuals who can think for themselves, take care of themselves, and recognize that a culture characterized by grit, discipline, and self-reliance is a culture that survives. A culture characterized by self-pity, indulgence, outrage, and resentment is a culture that falls apart. It really is that simple, and it is a truly existential choice.

We must make that choice. And it must be a choice to be more disciplined, mentally tougher, and convinced of the fact that we control our own destiny. The next chapter of our American story depends on it.