Maddiction: Addiction to Self-Righteous Outrage

You can’t believe they lied to you! How dare they? Your blood’s boiling and you’re ready for battle. No one should get away with lying! Ever!

You hate liars. You would never lie. Impossible, or at least impossible to remember in your current state.

Outrage at other people’s failings evaporates all recollection of our similar failings. When outraged, we feel pure. Feel dirty? Bark at someone. You’ll feel cleansed.

There’s a practical, adaptive reason why getting mad at people makes one feel pure. When embattled, recollection of our failings would only weaken us. When accusing someone of lying, admitting that you lie too sometimes would give would weaken your case, and cause you warrior-crippling self-doubt. So you don’t. It’s a bit like emptying your bowels before your team hits the rugby field.

We say all is fair in war, a reasonable description of how the standards change in war. But it means more than that. All feels fair to warriors. Everything attack they make feels righteous to them. They haven’t the bandwidth to wonder what’s fair when they’re busy vanquishing foes. They just assume that their foes are evil and that it’s their duty to beat them.

We talk about righteous indignation, without noticing how righteousness and indignation fuel each other. It’s a virtue-signaling vicious cycle any of us can fall into – self-righteousness-fueled indignation, and indignation-fueled self-righteousness.

The more outraged we are at others, the more righteous we feel; the more righteous we feel, the more we feel duty-bound to be outraged at others. One can really rev out on that vicious cycle. It’s highly addictive.

Call it “maddiction” an addiction to getting mad for the self-purifying sensation. Maddiction is the source of common undiagnosed madness, a mental illness because, though it makes one feel purged of sin, it’s an indulgence in the greatest violation of all: Ignoring reality.

In nature, the 3.4 billion-year-old rule is this: Adapt to reality or die. Maddiction’s virtue-signaling vicious cycle is a delusion that detaches one from reality. One plays God or God’s humble tyrant-servant on earth, ridding the world of all evil. People who get maddicted feel moral but they’re really just high the self-aggrandizing buzz of moralizing at others.

Maddiction is the state of mind exquisitely encapsulated in the oxymoron “holy warrior.” “Holy” means absolutely clean; war is absolutely dirty. With maddiction, one feels clean by being dirty: “No deed too dirty for a God like me!”

Holy warriors claim they’re crusading for a righteous cause. Their cause is beside the point. They might join for the cause but they stay for the maddiction.

Anyone can get addicted to the fake self-cleansing that outrage fuels. Indeed, the dirtier one feels, the greater the temptation to play the holy warrior. Studies indicate that cultists are not necessarily more gullible than non-cultists. Rather, they tend to be more idealistic. High ideals fuel both outrage at others for falling short and more guilt about falling short oneself. Maddiction justifies outrage and assuages guilt.

In our world, there’s plenty to be outraged about. Love and forgiveness are only sometimes the answer. Sometimes we have to gird our loins for battle.

Even the best causes rely on maddiction to galvanize the troops. People fighting then good fight rarely win or make a good living. The perks for good works are often paltry. So sure, people end up indulging in a bit of self-righteous indignation, not just about their cause but because it feels good.

But without recognizing the generic quality of maddiction, instead presuming that you’re pure, right, and righteous – that’s a slippery slope. Many’s the movement that has spun out into madness on the generic, virtue-signaling, vicious-cycle maddiction to self-righteousness-fueled indignation.

No one is immune to the temptations of maddiction.