The politics of manufactured outrage
The best way to command the attention of others is to piss them off.
The best way to get them to comply with your objective is to keep them pissed off.
I see this strategy applied all the time — among individuals of influence, among special-interest groups, among religious figures and organizations, and among the mainstream media.
It’s a shrewd, if sometimes reprehensible tactic. Instigating anger certainly isn’t the only way to get people to listen, but it is one of the best ways to keep a captive audience.
Anger is a negative emotion, and negative emotions sustain themselves in two ways: by clouding your sense of intellect and reason; and by driving you, against your better judgment, to further subject yourself to whatever is fueling that emotion in the first place. If you have an irrational fear of germs, you’ll go to extreme, obsessive lengths to stay clean. Eventually, that negative emotion, in a sense, controls you.
This came to mind during the recent flap over the (later reversed) decision of the Susan G. Komen foundation to discontinue funding Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings.
From the outset, I was a bit perplexed as to why it was such a big news story. The rationale for the decision seemed fairly straightforward and, at least on the surface, benign: Planned Parenthood is under investigation by congressional Republicans, and Komen’s new guidelines prohibited the funding of an organization under scrutiny by U.S. authorities. Whether or not Planned Parenthood should be under investigation is another matter; the breast cancer charity was simply enforcing its funding criteria.
Did such a move really merit such widespread public outrage?
Worth noting, though, is the socially volatile procedure with which Planned Parenthood is most often associated. Abortion is a debate that involves extreme emotions, regardless of one’s perspective on the issue; and if Planned Parenthood has been inherently linked to it, then any controversy over Planned Parenthood becomes a controversy over abortion.
It no longer matters that abortion actually constitutes a tiny 3 percent of the organization’s services; or that the funding in question had nothing to do with abortion; or that there was never any proof that the Komen decision was politically motivated. The story was framed in such a way to make people angry. The media used that anger to sell their headlines. Other groups sustained and kindled that anger to keep people paying attention and ultimately get Komen to reverse course.
In any case, this debate was ruled by emotion, not intellect or reason. It’s an example of what I call “manufactured outrage.”
Special-interest groups and the media aren’t the only ones who practice it, either. Individuals do, too. Mark Driscoll — the controversial Seattle pastor whose own apparent insecurities over his masculinity, sexuality, and relevance seem to be the root of a lot of his outrageous remarks — is an expert at it.
Does he really believe that yoga is demonic? It doesn’t matter. The guy isn’t an idiot. He knows that such comments will draw ire, meaning that people will pay attention, and he’ll stay in the headlines. Once Driscoll stops making provocative remarks, he becomes forgettable. That’s why his Facebook page periodically (and reliably) contains posts like this one.
Fox News political commentator Bill O’Reilly, Driscoll’s colleague in the rage manufacturing industry, has a style very different from the Mars Hill pastor, but one that achieves the same effect. Driscoll plays the cool, collected dude who calmly stands on stage and says something he knows will draw ridicule and disdain. O’Reilly plays the loud, obnoxious, incensed bully who interrupts his guests and patronizes them with finger-pointing and dismissive sarcasm.
His reaction to the recent Proposition 8 ruling is a classic example. “You can’t do that!” he seethed, smoke billowing from his ears as he referred to the recent court ruling that it’s unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. “That’s tyranny!!!”
Translation? “I am mad as shit about this, and dammit, you need to be, too!!!”
Speaking of gay rights, Washington on Monday will become the seventh state to establish marriage equality (and only the fourth to do so legislatively, following Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York). It’s a foregone conclusion that opponents will try to instigate outrage here in the Evergreen State in their misguided efforts to repeal this historic law. (Oh, I’m sorry; they already have.) These groups certainly don’t have reason on their side; their only recourse, therefore, is to try to preempt civil discourse with base emotion.
Anger and other negative emotions exert powerful influence and motivation. But when they supersede an informed, intellectual, rational debate on issues of great importance, everyone loses. And individuals or special interests who use them as a substitute for such debate implicitly concede that they can’t achieve their objective any other way.
