In today's world, outrage has become a prevalent emotion, functioning as a genre of narrative performance. This emotion, similar to religion, serves various social functions, including establishing in-group and out-group boundaries, fostering solidarity, disciplining behavior, revitalizing identity, and instilling a sense of righteousness. Social media platforms play a significant role in the performance and validation of outrage, shaping moral and political identities. Outrage is a force that provides meaning, community, and identity.
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in the world lately, you may have experienced a feeling of outrage. Maybe it’s something a politician or celebrity said or did. Maybe you’re outraged by something someone said online or something you heard or read in the news. There certainly does seem to be a lot of outrage going around these days.
We live in an age of outrage.
I like to think of outrage as a genre of narrative performance.
It’s a kind of performance that functions, surprisingly, like a religion. That may seem odd, but bear with me.
What is outrage? Outrage is an emotion, a feeling of indignation, anger, and revulsion. It’s a reaction to something that is beyond the bounds of moral acceptability.
So outrage is never simply personal. Unlike other emotions like sadness or anxiety, we don’t feel outrage for no reason. Outrage is always social. It’s always a response to, and directed outward towards, objects, persons, or events that we find outside of or counter to social and moral norms.
I think of outrage the way the sociologist Emile Durkheim thought of religion. Durkheim took a functionalist approach to his analysis of religion. That means he sought to identify what religion does—specifically, what it does socially.
I’ve adapted Durkheim’s theories of religion to identify five social functions of outrage as a performance:
First, a productive function: Outrage produces and identifies the in-group, the out-group, and establishes the boundaries between them. It produces subjects and locates them in communities.
Second, a cohesive function: Outrage knits together members of a community in solidarity. It binds its members to an imagined history, a fraught present, and a vision of potential futures.
Third, a disciplinary function: Outrage polices the set of behaviors and language practices of the community.
Fourth, a vitalizing function: Outrage maintains and revitalizes the identity of the community. Outrage must be performed regularly to renew and sustain its other functions.
Fifth, a euphoric function: Outrage establishes and maintains a sense of well-being and righteousness, especially in the face of frustration, doubt, or other threats to the stability and coherence of the community and the identities of its subjects.
Every ranty social media post is a performance of outrage. Even sharing, linking, retweeting, and liking outrage content is a public performance of outrage in the same way that shouting “Amen!” in a church service is a performance of religious commitment. Such performances produce in-group identity, confirming an individual’s status and legitimizing their membership in a community. Further, performing outrage on social media, even if it’s only liking someone else’s content, both broadcasts and confers a kind of moral status, a degree of cultural capital and authority. These acts produce moral and political identities, and the skill with which the performance is executed contributes to or detracts from the social status of the performer.