The Mechanics of Outrage

I watched someone get dunked on

I watched a video recently that made me pause.

It was a comedic clip where someone pretended to set up a tip line to report undocumented immigrants. A woman called in to report someone she knew.

I didn’t agree with what she was doing. Trying to hurt someone’s life because you’re angry or frustrated is a terrible way to handle a problem.

But as I listened to her, I noticed something else. I wasn’t just watching someone do something I thought was wrong; I was watching someone try to make sense of her own situation.

She felt like she was working hard, paying taxes, and struggling while other people were benefiting at her expense. Her understanding of the situation wasn’t complete, but from where she was standing, the pieces seemed to fit together.

• Her frustration was real.

• Her explanation for that frustration was probably wrong.

• Her action because of it was harmful.

All three things could be true at the same time.

Why is it so easy to stop there?

Then I opened the comments. I already knew what I was going to see: people calling her horrible, making fun of her, celebrating how stupid she was.

It was fast, simple, and unanimous. And I understood why. I’ve done the same thing.

When someone does something that seems obviously wrong, condemning them feels satisfying. It gives us a clear answer: They’re wrong. We’re right. There’s no need to think about it anymore.

But I started wondering: what if understanding why someone did something is actually more useful than deciding what kind of person they are?

That doesn’t mean the behavior was acceptable. It means those are two completely different questions.

Understanding isn’t excusing

I think we sometimes confuse understanding with agreement. If you try to explain why someone behaved badly, people assume you’re defending them.

But explaining something isn’t the same as approving of it:

• I can understand why someone was angry and still think what they did was wrong.

• I can understand why someone was afraid and still think they made a terrible decision.

• I can understand how someone arrived at an idea without believing the idea is correct.

In fact, if we want to prevent bad behavior, understanding the path that led to it seems far more useful than simply labeling the person who took it. Calling someone a bad person doesn’t tell us much about how they got there—it just gives us a label.

We do this everywhere

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this isn’t really about internet comments. We do this in everyday life:

• Someone sends a message we don’t like, and we decide what kind of person they are.

• Someone behaves strangely, and we assume we know why.

• Someone makes a bad decision, and we reduce them to that single decision.

• Someone disagrees with us, and suddenly the disagreement becomes evidence of their character.

We take a complicated person and turn them into a simple explanation. Sometimes that explanation is correct, but often we’re just filling in information we don’t have. And once we have an explanation that feels right, we stop looking.

Outrage gives us a simple answer

Maybe that’s part of why outrage is so powerful. It simplifies things:

• A complicated situation becomes a villain.

• A confusing event becomes someone’s fault.

• A person becomes good or bad.

And suddenly, we know where to stand. There’s comfort in that.

Both sides of a conflict fall into this exact loop. One person looks at a situation and decides, “These people are the reason my life is difficult.” Someone else looks at that person and decides, “She’s just a terrible person.”

Both explanations feel obvious from the inside. Both leave out important information. And neither helps anyone understand what is actually happening.

The part that requires work

Understanding someone takes far more effort. It requires asking questions:

• What are they seeing that I’m not?

• What experiences might have shaped this?

• What would have to be true for this behavior to make sense from their perspective?

• What information might they be missing?

Sometimes, the answer is simply that we don’t know.

That takes a certain amount of capacity. When we’re tired, angry, anxious, or overwhelmed, the simple explanation is always easier. I experience it too. The difference is noticing it—because once I notice I’m reaching for the simplest explanation, I have a choice to ask another question.

Stepping out of the cycle

I don’t think outrage is going away. There will always be people doing things that deserve criticism, and there will always be consequences.

But I’ve started thinking there is a space between excusing someone’s behavior and joining the crowd that wants to destroy them.

You can say, “What you did was wrong,” and still ask, “Why did you do it?”

You can recognize harm without assuming you understand the entire person. You can disagree without assuming malice. You can hold someone accountable without reducing them to their worst moment.

If we only condemn the behavior, we might feel like we’ve done something. But if we understand how someone arrived there, we might actually learn something.

What I’m trying to practice

I’m not interested in becoming someone who never judges. That doesn’t seem realistic. I still get angry, and sometimes something really is as bad as it looks.

But I’m trying to leave a little more room between seeing something I disagree with and deciding that I understand the person who did it.

The question I’m learning to ask is:

“What would have to be true for this to make sense from their perspective?”

Sometimes that won’t change my opinion. Sometimes it won’t make the behavior any more acceptable. But it might help me understand what happened.

And understanding what happened is fundamentally different from excusing it.

Maybe that’s the space we’re missing: not agreement, not forgiveness, but just enough room to understand the whole picture before deciding what it means.