The Woke Mind: They are addicted to outrage
Or, how to survive an attack by an online cancel mob.
The Woke Mind is a series of articles that seeks to explain, in plain English, how you can expect the woke left to behave and why they do what they do. If we don’t understand this, we can’t defeat them.
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Last week, I had thousands of trans activists taking over my feed on Twitter because they don’t like that I told the truth about Transmaxxing.
Being mobbed on social media is a jarring experience when it happens the first time.
Suddenly, you’re getting notification after notification of people who seem to be acting like lunatics that are flat lying about who you are and what you stand for. It’s not just onesies and twosies that you can easily ignore - it’s thousands of people.
Luckily, this isn’t my first time.
I’ve experienced mobbings like this dozens of times over the past few years, both from the woke conservative right and the woke progressive left.
Yes, there is woke on the right too, mostly because they’ve begun to become no different than the woke left. We’re even seeing it right now in regard to the feigned outrage over Eliza Bleu, who is being racked over the coals by popular content creators for refusing to bend the knee to their bullshit:
When you have experienced online mobbing more than once, it becomes very evident that there is a consistent pattern to it. Thousands of people, many of whom have never heard of you before, come out of the woodwork all saying the same thing, almost as though they are completing some cult ritual that requires total obedience to the will of the group. There is no room for any dissent. And it’s made very clear that if you don’t participate in the ritual, you could be their next target.
Conform to the group or become an outcast yourself. Logic, reason, and free thought go out the window.
Mobbing is not normal human behavior. It serves one purpose and one purpose only: To feed an addiction to outrage.
Human beings can become addicted to emotions.
The Woke Mind series is about the psychology of the woke left, helping you to understand why they do what they do so you are prepared to go into battle with them effectively.
The key word in the title of the series isn’t “woke” - it’s “mind.”
If you want to understand why people do what they do then you have to understand that what goes on in the mind drives all human behavior.
Emotions are the most powerful driver of our behavior. Apart from instincts relating to our own survival (food, safety, sex), our emotional brain makes the vast majority of our decisions. We may believe that most of our decisions are made logically, but that’s just because our logical brain is the only part of our brain we are consciously aware of - the emotional brain largely exists on a subconscious level.
So, if you want to know why human beings do what they do, you must consider what they are feeling. Are they happy? Sad? Excited? Depressed?
The emotion that the woke left experiences more than almost any other is OUTRAGE.
Outrage is even greater than anger - anger is a stinging pain, while outrage is a destructive rampage.
Outrage drives everything they do. They are constantly in search of things to be outraged about - racism, the patriarchy, transphobia, imaginary fascists, white supremacists that aren’t even white…every day they’re upset about something new and have to declare a new thing offensive or oppressive.
And if they can’t find something to be upset about, they’ll make it up. There’s a reason that there’s a list a mile long of things that are considered racist, everything from trees to hockey to milk to streetlights to dogs (you can find a more complete list in my book). The value they place on outrage is even higher than the value they place on truth, or fairness, or justice.
Or even consider this example from just this week - the woke left was outraged that Mr. Beast cured 1,000 people of blindness. You can’t make this stuff up!
They’ve become addicted to outrage.
The point is that the target of their outrage is immaterial. What matters is the outrage itself, because they need to feed their addiction.
Think about a person who is addicted to smoking.
They smoke every day, even though they know it’s unhealthy.
They carry their cigarettes with them everywhere.
They crave them, looking forward to their next opportunity to take a puff.
And if they go a day or two without a cigarette, their body starts to go through physical withdrawals, demanding to get its fix.
This happens because every time they smoke, they are feeding their body the chemicals in the cigarette. When their body doesn’t get those chemicals, it starts to demand them.
The same is true with any type of addiction - alcohol, drugs, sugar, etc... We put these things in our body consistently, our body grows used to them, and when we stop putting them in our body, our body rebels and demands them.
But here’s something many people don’t realize: You can also become addicted to emotions in exactly the same way you can become addicted to a substance. The process is the same.
Think about a time when you’ve had a nightmare. Perhaps you dreamed that you were being chased through the woods by an axe murderer. You wake up, and your heart is racing. You’re sweating. Your fists are clenched. You’re on high alert, frantically scanning your surroundings.
Did you just run a 5K? No. You were laying in bed. Then why does your body feel like you did?
Because you dreamed that you were running through the woods, you experienced the fear and adrenaline associated with that experience, and your brain fed hormones into your body to make you physically react to it. It doesn’t matter that it just happened in your head - your body is unable to tell the difference between the two.
This doesn’t just happen when we have nightmares. Every time we experience an emotion, our brain sends hormones into our body to make us physically feel that emotion.
That’s why when you get excited, your heart races. Or when you get angry, you may clench your fist or grind your teeth. Or when you get nervous, you sweat. Or when you’re in love, you feel flutters in your stomach.
Your body is physically feeling the emotions you’re having in your brain because your brain is producing chemicals that makes your body have a physical reaction.
What happens when you’re addicted to an emotion?
You can get addicted to any emotion if you experience it over and over and over again, consistently.
But let’s consider the obvious addiction to outrage exhibited by the woke, and what happens when their ability to engage in the outrage is taken away.
From the moment they wake up in the morning until the moment they go to sleep, they are looking for things to be outraged about. Racism, the patriarchy, transphobia…oh my!
Every time they find something that remotely fits the bill, they express that outrage through comments, tweets, videos, or even just screaming at the sky.
They do this over and over and over again, all day, every day, for years, to the point where the outrage reads all over their face and they begin to deteriorate physically.
Almost three years ago, the outrage addictions of millions of leftists were suddenly ground to a halt.
The pandemic and 15 days to slow the spread first started back in March of 2020, this was the first time in years the woke left were forced into taking a break from their outrage addiction. Suddenly, there was a real problem to worry about.
Think back to that time - it was so quiet. Gone were the charges of racism or the screams of transphobia. Everyone was far too focused on finding toilet paper and figuring out how they were going to support their families with the economy completely shut down!
But the addiction stops for no one. And as the weeks wore on, they begun to direct their outrage in different directions. This is when mask nazis were born.
Then George Floyd died…and the woke left shot out into the public square as if they had been shot out of a cannon. They rioted all summer causing $2 billion of property damage, set fire to the white house, and even declared racism a public health crisis so they could justify continuing to ignore the COVID guidelines they demanded as long as they were protesting racism.
None of it made any sense, but it wasn't about that. The mob doesn’t require logic, and will reject it when it doesn’t serve their master of outrage.
The response to George Floyd was so disproportional because the addiction had not been fed for months. It was as if you had just put a kilo of coke in front of an addict. What did you think they were going to do?
This is why James Lindsay’s concerns regarding a potential “Drag Floyd” are well founded - because if they don’t have something to be upset about, they will create it.
There is always some new outrage going on because they left needs to feed the addiction. And that is why it will never stop, even if they manage to achieve their permanent revolution.
When you know what you’re dealing with, then you can survive it.
Would you take a crack addict seriously if they were attacking you?
No.
Then why would you take an outrage addict seriously?
What do you think?
Leave a comment and let me know! And please share this with your friends and family who need to learn this information.
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It's been incredibly helpful to read your book and posts like these, because they really help me explain what's happening with my friends. It's been months since I have been bullied by the online mob, and there are still people stalking my blog and getting "outraged" by the most ridiculous claims, twisting my words out of context and accusing me of things I said that just aren't there. Addiction to negative emotions, looking for things to be angry about and creating them out of thin air just beautifully fit the bill...to so many of my former friends.
Excellent analysis! Thank you.