The Folly of Perpetual Outrage

I recently unfriended someone on Facebook who I had been friends with online for years. We hadn't met in person, but we'd exchanged a fair amount of comments and a few messages, and I liked her as much as I knew her, and still do actually.

We'd also had a few differences of opinion at times that occasionally got a bit contentious, without turning into full-on arguments. Actually we had a lot of differences of opinion. But mostly it was a matter of her posting views I disagreed with to some extent, me reading them and usually not commenting because I knew it would likely lead to an argument. It wasn't so much her positions I disagreed with as it was her tone and her approach to solving the problems she would bring up.

The last post of hers that I commented on, which ultimately led to my unfriending her, was one I expected would lead to an argument. But I commented anyway, prepared for a fierce rebuttal from her. I was worn out with her constant negativity and this latest post was the last straw for me.

Her post on Facebook was about the trees. She lived in Canada. I was in California at the time and there were fires raging all over the west. The town I was in was choked with smoke from the largest fire in California history burning away uncontained right nearby. British Columbia, where she lived, was also getting hit by a terrible wildfire season. I suspect that sad reality was the reason why she felt inspired to post on this particular topic, but I could be wrong.

In a nutshell, she took the most extreme position possible on the issue, as she always did, which was that anyone utilizing trees for their own use was a murderer.

So I replied that I disagreed there was anything inherently wrong with humans utilizing trees, despite the forest fires. In my comment I made it clear that greedy overuse of trees, clear cutting and the like was unacceptable and that we needed to seek out other more sustainable sources for our very real and present human needs. But people who chop trees down to build their homes or burn a fire to warm themselves or create a book or a paper bag or toilet paper are not murderers, anymore than people who eat carrots and potatoes are murderers. As a meat eater, I don't think that people who kill pigs or cows or chickens or fish to feed themselves are murderers either. I think people who kill other people are murderers.

I do think that people who kill anything needlessly, who mistreat animals, humans or plants, or who greedily suck up the Earth's resources for profit with no consideration for the environment and the animals and people who depend on it, are unconscious, disconnected individuals who are wrong in their ways of living and need to change for the sake of all life on Earth. Or just call them jerks and assholes, whatever you prefer. Either way, they do need to be confronted (I've been to logging protest rallies myself), or we need to be part of the change in the world by finding other ways to create the things we need. But I don't believe that an effective or realistic position to take is that humans should not use trees whatsoever to meet their needs.

This person, who I will call Julia, responded to my comment with a long rant, as I had predicted, accusing me of "mouthing the words of the oppressors", among various other things. In short, she saw zero validity in my perspective and cast me in the polar opposite extreme from her of being just as bad as the clear-cutters and politicians and corporations ruining the world, etc. Classic black-and-white thinking. Either you agree with her or you're on the complete opposite side of the argument and as good as being her enemy. Something like that. And so I unfriended her. I'd had enough.

The thing is, all of her posts on Facebook were along these same lines. Every. Single. One of them. Everything she posted was outrage. Outrage, outrage, outrage. In however many years we'd been friends, I don't know if she ever posted anything with joy in it, with appreciation, a fun experience, something with a generally positive energy to it. Maybe she did and I don't remember. But I do very clearly remember a deluge of non-stop heavy intense outrage about a myriad of different topics coming up in my newsfeed from her on pretty much a daily basis. Her language was always in the extreme. There was always someone to be harshly judged with the intense and condemning fury of a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

To some extent I supported her fiery nature. I got the impression she'd had a pretty rough childhood. It sounded as if she'd been through some difficult stuff growing up in eastern Europe. She was pissed about what she'd experienced in her life and she was pissed about the unfair state of the world. Me too. And that kind of fire in the belly, of passion for supporting a cause, even anger channeled appropriately and effectively is needed in this world to make a difference against such mighty forces as the politicians and corporations and preachers who are involved, directly or indirectly, in ruining the planet.

I am not the type of spiritual person who advocates for avoiding anger. Quite the opposite. I've made a number of videos on the subject, including one titled "The Quickest Path to Enlightenment":

But embracing anger does not mean wallowing in it, getting stuck in it. Embracing anger means diving deep into it in order to merge with it, embrace it, yet move through it to get to the other side beyond it. Because anger is not a natural state of our soul. Anger is a temporary, fleeting emotion that is meant to be just that: an emotion we feel as a natural response to a situation in life that causes us to feel that way and helps us to navigate the situation, avoid harm and preserve the integrity of our being. We feel it because it's what we honestly feel, and then we move on.

Or more often, we feel it, we suppress it because it's not considered appropriate and then the emotion stays in our consciousness until it eventually subsides into our subconscious where it then eats our soul from the inside out as long as it sits there. Because it's not supposed to be there and our soul doesn't want to be stuck in anger constantly, because it doesn't feel good and isn't good for us to hold onto it.

There are many unjust things happening in the world that are worth being outraged about. But our effectiveness in changing any of those things will necessarily be diluted by being outraged about all of them, especially in the information age with so much happening around the world which is now readily accessible to be witnessed right from our computers or phones.

And outrage is meant to be an extreme response to an extreme situation that needs to be dealt with immediately. It is not the right answer to all problems in the world. Outrage and anger run wild will almost certainly fail to create better situations than the ones we're already in and may feel outraged about.

Outrage and anger has its place. But it shouldn't be at the forefront of consciousness and the guiding light of our attempts to make the world a better place. If we want to create a world of greater peace, we need to come from a place of peace, love, joy and happiness that we've created within ourselves.

Facing anger and negativity is an absolutely essential element of creating true peace within. But anger and negativity is a temporary state, not our true state of being at the soul level, which is a state of inner peace and joy of being. The path of awakening, and changing the world, needs to embrace all of it, the dark and the light, the ecstasy and the misery. But that does not mean that we hold them as equal. Feeling ecstasy means we are on the right path. Feeling misery means we are on the wrong path on some level and we need to make changes to get back in the right direction towards love, happiness, joy and bliss.

Embracing the negative does not mean being stuck in the negative. If we want to create a happy world that we want to live in, we need to embody that within which we seek to create without.