The English Socialist Party (INGSOC)'s logo as depicted in the film adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Nirwrath/Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0)
If all that we do, see and think each day can be graded on a spectrum with one side negative and the other posititve, it seems that all I see as I look around me falls squarely on the negative end. People talking about far-off people and organizations that are supposedly “enemies” to them, mainly, as if they saw those people on the street and they spat in their face, or insulted them, or something.
“Man, I wish <political leader> would drop dead!”
“I don’t like what <non-governmental organization> is doing!”
“<large company with well-off CEO> will make our lives a living hell!”
Our media perpetuates this, too. People love a good dose of outrage with breakfast, or in between classes, or in the evening before settling down to bed. This applies regardless of your political alignment, whether you’re as far left as the Huffington Post or as far right as Breitbart. Go ahead – pick your poison. No matter what news outlet or slice of the political spectrum you pick, the same principle applies – you just have a different set of people to get mad at.
Think to George Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Specifically, the Two Minutes’ Hate. If you haven’t read it, I’ll get you up to speed: it’s an event where members of the English Socialist Party (as it turns out, pretty much the whole populace of the superstate in the novel’s setting) gets to watch a film of the Party’s enemies for two minutes. During these two minutes, they get mad. Violent, even:
“Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”
Sound familiar?
I don’t mean to say that this is all part of some grand conspiracy to establish a New World Order which will enslave humanity for the rest of its days. All the news media, the finely tuned machines they are nowadays, want is an audience. They want a bigger one. And boy howdy, do they know that people like to be outraged so they can grow their audience.
However, a theme explored in Nineteen Eighty-Four, being a dystopian novel set in an oppressive superstate and all, is freedom (or lack thereof). In this case, in our (more or less) free society, where you have the power to choose your far-off “enemies” eligible for your daily dose of disapproval, it’s intellectual freedom you lose out on by letting yourself be consumed by this “outrage porn”, as some call it. That is, the freedom and mental capacity to think of other things and pursue other, more important pursuits.
Why waste time thinking about what bill Donald Trump’s going to try and get through the White House next when the laws of the United States of America don’t reach past our borders? Why even worry about whatever our prime minister Justin Trudeau’s doing when most of the laws in our country don’t even affect most of our day-to-day lives, when you could be thinking about your own problems, your own crazy ideas, your own solutions?
A little bit of outrage porn can be fun, but a porn addiction is a serious matter.