The Playbook for Tomorrow’s Leaders
Hey Reader,
The recent murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by emerging anti-hero Luigi Mangione, has highlighted the limits of moral outrage as a driving factor in our social progress.
Everyone is yelling but no one is saying much.
Social discussions today are mono-planar, binary and tribal. Ethical challenges, by definition, are multi-dimensional, complex and require us to look beyond our immediate affiliations.
As tragic as this death was, it could be a starting point for a larger discussion on the central question facing any society and the heart of healthcare itself:
How do we take care of each other?
What has emerged, however, is the usual left-right scapegoating and histrionic finger pointing. Andrew Witty, CEO of United, blames providers for excessive spending in a leaked video to investors and board members. The right feels the left is condoning violence and ignoring the humble roots of Mr Thompson’s rise to corporate titan. And near everyone has hate against the health insurance industry for their denial of health claims, though that is at odds with public reporting on the topic.
Empathic anger is needed. It helps identify the harm done to victims. It is constructive, illuminating, healing.
What we have today is outrage inflation. It is a simulacrum of authentic moral sentiment. Much like its monetary counterpart, outrage inflation devalues real moral injustice. Today’s outrage simply reinforces entrenched identity politics while breaking down actual dialogue. Defend the hive mind, after all.
This outrage economy, especially on platforms like Twitter/X, is a business model centered on emotional manipulation for attentional capture. Companies have long used tactics to monetize people’s emotions, but the speed and scale of what current algorithms can accomplish is exponentially more effective and dangerous than ever. Its a provocative phenomenon of emotional contagion.
Social media takes the traditional media motto of “if it bleeds, it leads” to the utmost extreme. They know outrageous content goes viral much faster. But the social dynamics online are different. There are few reputational costs to engaging in theatrical outrage and the potential benefits – heightened social status amongst your echo chamber – is accrued much faster than in the real world.
The clickbait social media fueled frenzy is a large scale rhetorical attempt at cultural hijacking.
Anger begets clicks which reinforce anger and exacerbates more extremist content. Insecurities are triggered. We lash out at others. We become our avatars. Collective discourse collapses. We know contempt causes with interpersonal relationships to wither. Societies are no different.
We are left tainted and compromised.
The tragic irony is that we are aware of more problems than ever – too many – that often require some degree of real outrage. But empathic fatigue has set in, almost to the point of collective learned helplessness. As Dave Chapelle recently said, we know about every tragedy so how can we care about any of them?
The corrosive effects of performative outrage are so hard to appreciate precisely because it feels like we are fighting injustice. It’s a sliding scale that can delude the best of us. It appears that we are standing up and calling wrongs out – but we aren’t.
Recall the 2020 case of Kyle Rittenhouse, another troubled young man accused vigilante justice and gun violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We had the same maelstrom of outrage, epithets and finger pointing. But in the end, the national conversation was coarsened not elevated. No policy changes occurred. Rittenhouse ended up a GOP cause celeb and symbol of white privilege to the Left. And we have now reports of yet another mass shooting, this time again in Wisconsin – another community mourning in America.
Anger as a moral force has long been discussed in ethics. At its best, it clarifies when values have been breached. It can spur collective action. That’s its inherent purpose. The Civil Rights movement was a classic example of the higher use of anger for constructive change.
But outrage can never be an end point in and of itself. Outrage quickly devolves into moral blindness precisely because it inflames as opposed to illuminates. It is best used as the starting point, not the final destination, for serious moral inquiry. Without it, outrage devolves quickly into nihilism. In fact, the glee and self righteous indignation many have had upon hearing the murder of CEO Thompson is being called an example of de-civilization. It is nothing less than an undoing.
This is not merely academic. I have friends who have morphed into full time internet trolls, so confident, brash, and pugilistic they are in their worldview. Their entire personalities have become regurgitated Twitter threads. The post pandemic era has radicalized more people than we care to admit. It is directly related to the mental health crisis among men.
This outrage also unhealthy. As Yuval Noah Hariri describes, this perma-excitement is not aligned with our physiology:
source: Sirius XM
The only response to performative outrage is moral humility.
Ethical decision making does not need rapid fire soundbites like First Take on ESPN. But our media have purposefully cultivated an entertainment framework of the news cycle with speed, rapid judgment and little nuance. Speed is not always our friend.
JFK took 13 days to address the Cuban Missile crisis, the closest we ever got to nuclear armageddon. Now, we argue about foreign policy on Twitter/X.
Moral certainty is predicated on moral humility, because confusion precedes wisdom. You can’t learn what you think you already know. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, we have a society awash in information but starved of real truth.
Truth has to earned through arduous questioning and critical conversations. It doesn’t come easy. Just ask Socrates.
That, in fact, is the central problem of our modern political leaders. They evince no moral doubt, no confusion, no ambivalence in the face of truly complex dilemmas. It’s as if they fear being labeled intellectually promiscuous if they flirt with contrarian ideas.
It would be refreshing to hear that phrase my attending taught me many years ago when I was asked on rounds a question I couldn’t answer: “I don’t know, but I plan on finding out.”
So how do we lead in the era of outrage when flashpoints are everywhere? Researcher Kartik Ramanna of Oxford has good advice: stay calm, listen to others, be thoughtful and develop sustainable solutions that pull in all stakeholders.
If this sound boring, well, because it is.
The first injunction – be calm – is the hardest to master. It explains why Stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy centered on emotional sobriety, has had a newfound resurgence. People are looking for strategic ways to respond to a VUCA world – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – while maintaining their emotional center.
To this I would add the power of framing.
Framing, language, optics is everything. Whoever controls the frame of discussion controls that interaction. Setting the terms of the debate is a legitimate form of soft power. It can sway elections, shift policy and mobilize capital. For all his flaws, no one understands this better than President Elect Trump, who has defied polls twice; started a billion dollar media company; and broadened his base on a culture of defiant populism and, yes, outrage.
We need equally compelling narratives that open a space for moral imagination and reflection. It won’t be easy since grievance travels faster than patience. Still there are reasons for hope, especially on the local level.
Macbeth, in a moment of cynicism, argues that life ” is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
America is a similar place right now. Our unchecked modern outrage machine has brought us to the Age of Spin and “alternative facts.”
The true leader’s mandate is to combat this nihilism, and demonstrate that progress is still possible. That we can effect meaningful change but not burn it all down.
Hopefully, that person is you.
Tomorrow can’t wait,
