If you have felt outrage before would you care to describe it?

[Mike Gorman]

I have experienced outrage, one thing I realized is that if the feeling is sustained and you cannot find justice, it can make you very sick, those intense emotions are very powerful, finding a way to channel them into cold resolution is one of the most satisfying states you can experience, this can be very hard but as Johnny Rotten - John Lydon says: Anger is an energy. Outrage can be frightening for both the experiencer and those around you. These days I seek out peace, we are mortal, our time is limited, peace is good.

[petra]

“Anger is an energy” thank you very much Mike
It CAN make you sick. That’s part of the reason I posted about it. I almost lost my mind three times now, and I have a kid living in my head which might be a part of me that “split off”
I traced it back to the outrage

I don’t feel it anymore but I know it is still there

Finding peace is the tricky part. At least I’m not vengeful

[petra]

So if Anger is energy.. Outrage must be a different kind of energy

Things are starting to make a lot more sense. I wasn’t angered.. I was OUTRAGED and I think there’s a big difference

Outrage can.. cause things to happen in you. Like having your thoughts start talking to you

[rgray222]

The two emotions that are always used to motivate people into action are anger and fear, so arguably outrage is a subset of anger. Outrage a higher form of anger with a moral or social justice component. Those doing the manipulating or controlling know that anger may not be shown, but outrage takes anger to the extreme and may cross the line of decency. The manipulator's goal is to trigger a reaction out of you, possibly to change your behavior. Some may want you to believe this can be a good thing, but making change out of outrage is wrong every time.

If you want to listen to this is is a 6-minute-long NPR story. (follow the link)
Keep in mind the content of what they are discussing is really meaningless (don't get caught up in this) it is all about using outrage to control and manipulate people and their behavior.

How Outrage Is Hijacking Our Culture And Our Minds

It can feel impossible to escape outrage nowadays. Anger is present across our screens — from TV news to social media. New social science research asks: What's the effect of all this outrage?

Transcript

Comments on social media and cable news often give reasons to be angry. Sometimes anger seems to be the whole point. Anger draws Internet clicks, which is to say that many people now have a motive or even a business model for getting you mad. New research asks how all this outrage is affecting our minds. Shankar Vedantam is host of the NPR podcast Hidden Brain, which explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: There's a reason there is so much outrage out there. It's a very effective way to get your attention. At New York University, psychologist Jay Van Bavel and his team have analyzed more than half a million tweets, specifically those that used moral and emotional language.

JAY VAN BAVEL: Here's an example tweet from a conservative. (Reading) Gay marriage is a diabolical, evil lie aimed at destroying our nation.

And the moral, emotional words here are evil and destroying. And they're both negative, highly potent words. From a liberal, we have a tweet - (reading) new Mormon policy bans children of same-sex parents. This church wants to punish children - a question mark. Are you kidding me? Shame.

VEDANTAM: Van Bavel found lots of words generate outrage. Profanities are on the list; so are hate, war and greed.

BAVEL: For every moral, emotional word that people use in a tweet, we found that it increased the rate of retweeting from other people who saw it by 15 to 20%.

VEDANTAM: You don't need to use the specific words on Van Bavel's list to generate outrage. You can do it in endless other ways, everything from I can't believe the president said that to why do you hate freedom so much?

VEDANTAM: A story from earlier this year perfectly encapsulates how outrage captures our minds. In January, a short video taken at the National Mall in Washington went viral. It showed an older Native American man surrounded by teenage boys, nearly all of whom were white. Many wore hats that said Make America Great Again.

JULIE IRWIN ZIMMERMAN: These kids were making fun of this guy because he was Native American, because he had a drum and was chanting something unfamiliar to them.

VEDANTAM: This is Julie Zimmerman, a writer based in Cincinnati, recalling her first reaction to the video.

ZIMMERMAN: It was pretty cringeworthy.

VEDANTAM: By that night, the story was everywhere.

ZIMMERMAN: I talked to a friend of mine, who lives in New York, a former roommate of mine, and she said her yoga teacher called and said, let's drive to that school in protest. Like, that's the sort of level of reaction people were having to this. Like, this yoga teacher in New York wanted to hop in the car and drive 10 hours to protest in front of the school.

VEDANTAM: But in the hours that followed, Zimmerman realized that she and many others had gotten the story wrong. A longer video showed that it was the Native American man who had walked up to the teenagers. He was with a large group, not alone. Another group of protesters had been harassing the students.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: A bunch of babies made out of incest.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Trailer park babies.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Right, trailer park babies.

VEDANTAM: The scene was much more complicated and chaotic than the original video had suggested. Zimmerman didn't think the teenagers were blameless. She spotted some of them making tomahawk chops. But she understood that her initial reaction had been hasty. That's when she was hit with a dilemma.

ZIMMERMAN: I was afraid to tell a few people, initially, that I had changed my mind, which is crazy. Like, why can't you just say, you know, I think I was wrong about this? But I knew some people would be upset because it's as though you're giving your enemy ammunition, and you can't ever admit that maybe the other side has a point.

VEDANTAM: When Zimmerman wrote an essay for The Atlantic admitting she had been wrong, right-wing commentators seized on it.

ZIMMERMAN: My essay was weaponized against liberals, against progressives. And I - you know, it made me uncomfortable to see that. Like, oh, gosh, did I make a mistake here? My brother-in-law called my husband to say Rush Limbaugh just mentioned your wife's name on the air. And I thought, oh, gosh, what have I done?

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW")

RUSH LIMBAUGH: One of the drive-by media outlets that really roasted these kids has published a piece - "I Failed The Covington Catholic Test: Next Time There's A Viral Story, I'll Wait For More Facts To Emerge" - Julie Irwin Zimmerman. She was one of the early pilers on and she is begging forgiveness. She failed the test. I know the temptation, but why isn't there even a moment's pause when anything from social media becomes source material in drive-by media?

VEDANTAM: If liberals like Zimmerman had initially jumped to conclusions about how the video showed that conservatives were racist, Limbaugh and other conservatives used Zimmerman's essay to tar all liberals. The first blast of misstatements and errors triggered the next blast with its own misstatements and errors. Psychologist Molly Crockett at Yale says these cycles of outrage feed on one another and can produce fatigue and disengagement among audiences. If the volume on everything is turned to 11, how do you separate signal from noise?

MOLLY CROCKETT: It's just constant. There's a constant drip feed of outrage online, and it makes it hard to know where to focus your efforts.

VEDANTAM: The massive amount of outrage on social, broadcast and print media also come with another downside. Psychologist William Brady says it's pushing Americans deeper and deeper into their own echo chambers.

WILLIAM BRADY: The type of people giving you the shares and the likes, it tends to be people who share your political views.

VEDANTAM: That's because even as outrage is effective at capturing attention, its audience is mostly people who share the same beliefs. The people who disagree are listening to rants in their own echo chambers. Brady and Van Bavel find that messages presented with less outrage are more likely to spark conversations with opponents. Those are the people, after all, whose views we want to change. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/09/76848...-and-our-minds

[petra]

Using outrage to control and manipulate.. yes that’s what I think happened to me
It was all very well orchestrated and that is what sparked my outrage
I don’t blame anybody anymore and have learned to just Trust God when it comes to this stuff. It’s the only thing that brings me peace

[shaberon]

Posted by petra (here)
I’ve tried to kick guys in the nuts but they saw it coming.

That's one of the least reccomendable options.

I've personally trained several small women as fighters. I've also been trained and defeated by one who was maybe about 5' 1", 120 lbs., not much bigger than me as a twelve-year-old or something. Size doesn't have anything to do with it.

[shaberon]

Posted by Mike Gorman (here)
...as Johnny Rotten - John Lydon says: Anger is an energy. Outrage can be frightening for both the experiencer and those around you. These days I seek out peace, we are mortal, our time is limited, peace is good.

He's talking about the vocalist from the Sex Pistols.

Punk was definitely about rebelliously changing the status quo, so it was commandeered by the entertainment industry so that rebellion becomes merely a "feeling" of it rather than actually doing it, a cheap imitation of itself. That's why we started finding a big split in "underground" versus "mainstream".

Long live the underground.

[petra]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by petra (here)
I’ve tried to kick guys in the nuts but they saw it coming.

That's one of the least reccomendable options.

I've personally trained several small women as fighters. I've also been trained and defeated by one who was maybe about 5' 1", 120 lbs., not much bigger than me as a twelve-year-old or something. Size doesn't have anything to do with it.

Dad was small. He taught me keys were a weapon and go for the eyes and nose. I never had to use keys as a weapon, thankfully. I can’t believe it I actually remember a lesson from my dad!

I imagine a lot of it is to do with being fast. I’m pretty fast.. I’m just not fond of pain. Punching hurts, who knew? That’s why girls slap.

[shaberon]

Posted by petra (here)
Dad was small. He taught me keys were a weapon and go for the eyes and nose. I never had to use keys as a weapon, thankfully. I can’t believe it I actually remember a lesson from my dad!

I imagine a lot of it is to do with being fast. I’m pretty fast.. I’m just not fond of pain. Punching hurts, who knew? That’s why girls slap.

It takes five years to learn to throw a punch.


Keys are a bit difficult to use. What we promoted was the Kubotan:

A Kubotan is a self-defense keychain weapon developed by Sōke Takayuki Kubota in the late 1960s.

The demonstration was that this person stood there demonstratively, and he took a low swipe and tapped me on a pressure point in the instep of the foot, at the joint. It was not a feather stroke, but it was not much more than if you tapped a finger on a table top with enough force to make it thump. But it was the tip of the kubotan straight on like a cue stick.

I collapsed.

My leg did not work for a while.

I've never recovered.

My leg works fine, I mean it in the sense of nerve pain that flares up and causes tension. It used to be constant and I have got it to the point where some days it does not bother me. But it still hasn't stopped.

He said, "That works if they're wearing sneakers."

I can't imagine what it would be like if it was actually a hard strike.


I'm going to add something about that girl's older brother.

So, yes, me and most of the kids around me were rude to each other, for fun. There wasn't anything that was seriously angry about it. And sooner or later, we just didn't find it entertaining any more.

In my experience, at least, it's a completely different group of "other" guys that actually are angry and serious about something. They usually look kind of stupid, and it's hard to understand what the big deal is. And usually it's just a bunch of yelling. To me, that's not a fight, it's a bunch of noise. I just don't get it.

First thing one morning, I get off the school bus, and this girl's brother is there. He's a dropout, and he works at McDonald's, and pulls up real fast in a VW Rabbit and slams on brakes and goes after some guy off another bus while wearing the uniform. And so more or less right in front of the school doors, they're standing there having a yelling match, and so we're watching, going oh, is somebody going to do something, or is it another one of those.

They were loud but it was another one of those, and the brother stomped off in his McDonald's uniform into the Rabbit, peeled out, swerved, and caught a telephone pole with the rear bumper so half of it broke off, it was still attached, scraping and bouncing on the street making a terrible racket in front of almost everybody in school.

None of that stuff ever impressed me. Never had anything to do with it. The one time I hit somebody out of anger was a slingshot. It was so quiet and fast because it was involuntary, like being possessed. Almost literally like Evil Ash. If half of me had not reacted, he would have been hospitalized.

[petra]

I know what it’s like to be possessed. Not by a demon but by something else. It’s like you get compelled to do stuff but you don’t know why. Me and the thing in my head think the outrage is what triggered possession to be possible

Edit: Evil Ash? I saw the funny evil dead movie.. I think it was 3. It was so funny man. The best part was when he forgot the magic words

[shaberon]

Yeah. You should have been there. First Evil Dead was this miraculous, straight-to-video low budget masterpiece. You never heard of it in the theater, and you browse these films you can rent and...there's this thing...you can't ignore...and it was bone chilling.

The second was a little different, and the third is camp humor that you just can't see the connection to the original, even though it is the same character.

Here's an idea why something like that makes you incomplete.

People are about the same, but, this is more easily studied in dogs wired to electrodes. You monitor their sleep, and, you see a foot moving. The dog is dreaming about chasing a rabbit or something, but electrically, there's traffic from the brain to that one foot. It keeps going "by itself".

To be well rested, a person has to get a sleep paralysis. In many cases we don't, because there is some kind of partial activity in a hand, foot, etc., because our brain won't stop whatever it thinks is important. But that's not what leads us to wholesomeness.

The typical human nervous system is a bunch of fragments, not an integrated whole.

Beating on your emotions will of course cause that.

Possession, as a transfer of ownership, is not something you can perceive as a totality, because you would be outside of your body. You'd have to be adept at that type of consciousness that allows you to watch yourself from outside, which is rare, chances are you would not be conscious at all.

More commonly, we have cases of obsession, an unrelenting mental return to things we may not like, but we have some awareness of it.

I'm not obsessed by simple virtue of the fact that I can clear it out. I'm not immune to the triggers, which are almost constant, although yesterday was not so bad. One of them is piped-in music. Why would someone with a stereo assume that music students want to hear anything they put on? I can't stand it. I hate drum machines and anything that sounds jangly with adenoidal yowling.

The exact spot where I work doesn't have any speakers, but the area where I have to pick up supplies, does. It's bad enough because the stuff is not laid out in a manner you can deal with it, more like digging for buried treasure. And when I have to look for something, and suddenly this jingle jangle hits my brain, it explodes. I have a violent reaction of wanting to smash the speaker with a monkey wrench, while I either forget what I was looking for, or give up because I can't stand standing there.

It's all of these small and unnecessary things that make me madder than anything. Dumb, incompetent stuff on the part of others. The only thing good about it is that I don't transfer the stress to someone undeserving, while, in fact, many times that hostility is directed at us, it's residue being transferred from some previous situation.

So, yes, I would say that psychological anger is a really deep and important subject, because it is so prevalent, regardless of examples of violence or the most mad you've ever been. That's what I, at least, am trying to address.

[petra]

Shaberon, you would have hated teenage me. I went around blasting music everywhere I go. I felt like everybody would love to listen to music, when in actual fact it annoys people greatly. I grew up and learned this, and now I wear headphones.

My feelings are muted now, I don’t feel much of anything. It’s like I got “short circuited”

Small things that used to anger me like idiot drivers I just tend to laugh at now “what an idiot..”

Stupid people don’t bother me. Perhaps because I’m one of the “stupid ones”. I don’t take offense to it, I’m just not following the news, have no idea about politics or geography etc.

The only thing that seems to anger me lately is cruelty. I was reading another thread about a targeted person having panic attacks and I almost got enraged. Any kind of cruelty, to people or animals, makes me feel murderous.

[shaberon]

Volume of music does not matter, it's the music itself.

The stuff piped in to the storage area is relatively quiet, but it's obnoxious bubblegum garbage that I have no idea what the name of it is.

For example, when New Kids on the Block was a thing, I had a band that started off called Old Scum on the Block. That just sort of happened and I couldn't do anything about it.

This part is exactly what I was talking about:

Posted by petra (here)
The only thing that seems to anger me lately is cruelty. I was reading another thread about a targeted person having panic attacks and I almost got enraged. Any kind of cruelty, to people or animals, makes me feel murderous.

That's because it explains both situations I already referred to.

That is to say, two women having panic attacks.

I've never seen this, I've hardly ever heard of it, in fact I'm not sure I have. I've seen all kinds of people with really serious mental problems, But not this.

The younger one is dead basically for that reason.

The older one, instead of having panic attacks around me, had basically the opposite, hostility attacks.

Well, for ten million reasons other than that, I had balled up in what you might call a suicidal cocoon.

At first I couldn't sleep and then I basically stopped eating. I'm having these tendencies but I'm finding I don't have what it takes to do anything to yourself. After I've been up for a few days, it's inducing a psychosis. I can imagine this is again something where people lose control of themselves, but, it's fairly familiar and I go to the Ocean of Blood:




And I dwelt in it, and I got it together and said I'm not going to give up on my life, and I went and talked to this woman and it was normal, fine.

And I'm starting to feel better, and come back to earth, which means I'll be exhausted and I need to eat something.

Then it hit me.

She snapped something, which was incredibly hostile, and it was unacceptable.

I confronted it.

From my point of view, what happened had absolutely nothing to do with any of the words that were used. We were yelling and screaming all kinds of things with a bit of an impolite intent to say the least. What I was actually doing, was making a barrier, or a fence, against whatever that spirit of hostility that must be the same as the one for panic attacks, and we went out of the house and argued all around the yard in like a big perimeter and it really was some fireworks.

On what I could only call psychic momentum, it was like a bucket of water on the end of a rope and swinging it around, and making bigger and bigger circles until it was cast off to some other part of the world, and then, that was what the barrier was for.

That worked.

It cures panic attacks.

I have no idea and nothing to say about them. But I've heard of them.

[petra]

Something BIG happened. God explained to me, but not with words, why I am not allowed to have kids. It was HIS doing!

That fixed my outrage! I prayed for understanding and got it almost immediately. I think I’m getting better at understanding

God also told me the biggest problem is Ignorance. I prayed for something stupid.. I said I should suffer.. and now I’m just embarrassed.

If anyone else is having an outrage problem.. pray for understanding!!! God might answer you

[shaberon]

Posted by petra (here)
...the biggest problem is Ignorance. I prayed for something stupid.. I said I should suffer..

It strikes me in another way, since that basically is the root formula of Buddhism, Vedanta, and Yoga. Ignorance leads to Suffering.

And, that's exactly what doubled down on me...after that dreadful banishing act based from a rage mode, I have effectively gone to prison, that is, a prison made of the ignorance of others.

I mean that on a very basic physical level.

The situation where I live and everywhere I've worked is hopelessly broken on a five-year-old level. I can't move properly or do anything normal. I call it wearing cement shoes. On top of that, it is a munchkin mentality, eliminating the possibility of anyone to communicate with.

I, personally, can fix all those issues with relative ease, except I can't do anything about it.

But, yes, it's like I've gone to a foreign country, the land of Ignorance, just like that.

I suppose I was ignorant about peoples' ignorance because raised oppositely.

All Indian schools are a reaction to Nescience:

Devi Bhagavata Purana

(1) Nescience, referred to as Avidya, is the root cause behind many states that occur to a man as a result of their Karmas.


Garuda Purana

(4) Ignorance or misunderstanding that veils the truth of the self and the universe, blocking realization and liberation. (5) Ignorance or lack of true knowledge, which is said to be the cause of sin and bondage.

Chandogya Upanishad (Shankara Bhashya)

(1) This state of ignorance prevents individuals from recognizing the divine realm they approach daily, causing them to be led astray by untruth. (2) Ignorance or misunderstanding of reality, seen as the root cause of bondage in the cycle of births and rebirths. (3) The ignorance that causes the Self to be attached to the physical body and the cycle of life. (4) Ignorance or lack of knowledge that leads to the perception of duality and otherness in existence.

This is closer to what we "do":

Yoga-sutras (with Vyasa and Vachaspati Mishra)

(1) Nescience is the fundamental ignorance that misidentifies the impermanent, impure, painful, and non-self as eternal, pure, pleasurable, and the self.

Yoga is in a certain sense correction of a fundamental error.

Because I personally know it does this, that's why I support it.

That is the Buddhist Yogacara view of Emptiness precisely: to be empty, there must be something which is empty of something else.

If all of those states of ignorance were corrected, you would be left with something which you couldn't empty out any more, which is eternal, pure, pleasurable, and self, or the Absolute.

[petra]

I feel kindof empty sometimes. I had a whole post written on my phone but I can't connect on the phone right now so I'm on my laptop..

The jist of it was that I think I'd have to reincarnate a bunch more times before I would even begin to have an interest in Yoga. No offense, I'm just a little soul, not an "old soul" like most of the people on PA. I mean, I don't even read books anymore.

I don't doubt that this information will be helpful for someone else though!

As for talking to God, I'm pretty sure other "stuff" hears my prayers too. So the lesson there is "be careful what you pray for"

[Faylin]

My moments of greatest outrage are often companied by the feeling of a need to release physical energy, like the anger is an attached energy, i feel altered by it.
I feel the need to protect myself or another, either physically or mentally, the desire to ignore it is only followed by the need to show how absurd it is that I have to feel by the outrage.

When this happens, I often try meditating, breathing exercises and transformative energy practices. I try to think of more serene times.

[rgray222]

Posted by Faylin (here)
My moments of greatest outrage are often companied by the feeling of a need to release physical energy, like the anger is an attached energy, i feel altered by it.
I feel the need to protect myself or another, either physically or mentally, the desire to ignore it is only followed by the need to show how absurd it is that I have to feel by the outrage.

When this happens, I often try meditating, breathing exercises and transformative energy practices. I try to think of more serene times.

I was just reading today about energy, it is truly amazing. We understand the concept of energy, such as kinetic (motion), potential energy (stored), thermal (heat), electrical energy and many others, but it is still a mystery. We know how to manipulate energy to create work or cause change, but we truly don't understand it. It is still the stuff of scientific exploration and even philosophical study. So when you say your outrage is attached to physical energy, that is even a deeper mystery. When I see comments suchas your and think about the larger aspect of energy, it just leaves me in awe of the universe.