It's Easy To Overestimate Outrageous Things Done By Your Political Opponents

Outrage is lucrative

Rob Henderson

, a thoughtful writer who I often find myself agreeing with, recently had an article titled “A Sex Strike isn't Going to Work,” about the new 4-B movement—a movement of feminists who have sworn off all relationships with men because of the election. After noting that several mainstream news outlets have covered the movement, Henderson asks:

Why is the legacy media so hyped about promoting a fringe movement from a country with cratering birthrates? Because many of the people who staff these organizations are sad and want to spread their misery. So they promote anything that helps to take sword and fire to romantic bonds, which are a core source of happiness for most people.

Why are you writing about this, Rob?

I would guess that the reason that the mainstream media decided to write about the 4-B movement is very similar to the reason that Rob Henderson wrote about it—writing about outrageous things is lucrative. A public dumpster fire orchestrated by those ostensibly on the other side is quite a grand spectacle. It’s the sort of thing that’s constantly covered. This woman became world famous simply by having an unhinged meltdown in response to Trump getting elected:

The reason that the 4-B movement is being endlessly covered is the same as the reason that this woman was endlessly covered—the media likes drama and spectacle. Stories that point to some unhinged reaction from the other side are entertaining, and the media, more than providers of information, are providers of entertainment.

None of the media coverage of the 4-B movement has been particularly positive. The movement has also been incredibly fringe. Nevertheless, it’s gotten attention because it’s such a pure manifestation of hideous and perverse insanity on the left. It’s for the same reason that statistically rare school shootings, deaths from doctors not performing abortions, and migrant murders are endlessly covered; despite being rare, they serve as a dramatic representation of some narrative.

Why did the right-wing media endlessly cover a few nutters who threw soup on paintings to protest climate change? The same reason—it was a spectacle that supported the narrative that left-wingers are insane. The media is driven by clicks, and clicks are driven by outrage.

Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. My favorite podcast is Blocked and Reported which spends its time covering hilarious and insane internet drama. Much of what is enjoyable about listening to Blocked and Reported is that the stories are so insane and over-the-top that they’re deeply hilarious. I’ve written various articles over the years about insanity in college debate, wherein one of the leading debate coaches in the country suggested that it’s racist to believe in space because some black people haven’t been there. When asked if you could cite other people reporting they’d been to space as proof that space is real, the professor replied, “That’s called colonialism.”

But one thing that’s commendable about Blocked and Reported is that the producers don’t try to mislead readers about the extent of the insanity. They report on lots of insane things, but don’t see the world purely through the lens of a grand civilizational war between the woke anti-woke. As Jesse Singal, one of the producers of Barpod (and a reader of this blog, in case you doubted that this blog is read by Elite Human Capital) writes:

That being said, there is a subset of people who join the fight against illiberalism in liberal spaces and who subsequently go a little bit crazy. There’s no need to name names here, but they often start in a relatively reasonable place, as progressives criticizing certain forms of contemporary progressive excess, and mere weeks later they are ranting about how the Powers That Be are attempting to sweep the side effects of mRNA viruses under the rug, how Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in US history, how trans activists aren’t just wrong about specific arguments but are groomers, and so on.

I think you can reasonably point to the 4-B movement as a particularly acute instance of left-wing insanity and provide a reasonable analysis of it. But acting like it’s some totalizing representation of the modern left is silly. I don’t think there’s anything with nutpicking, so long as you recognize that you are nutpicking, rather than acting like the mainstream media reporting on the nuts is indicative of secret sympathy, even though they write quite critically about them.

I think Michael Shellenberger is a good example of a guy who has gone way too far. He started out as a critic of wokeness and the excesses of environmentalism. Yet just pointing to a few crazies makes for a poor ideological narrative. As a result, he writes sweeping articles trying to argue that the woke rot in the Democratic party is very widespread. In doing this, he ends up making major errors and engaging in quite sloppy motivated reasoning.

Brett Weinstein is another good example, though a much more extreme case. He starts out as a milquetoast liberal upset with the excesses of the political establishment, and ends up going completely insane and thinking that the 10/7 attack was carried out specifically to divide anti-vaxxers in the U.S..

I’m pretty anti-woke. I’m on the record comparing wokeness to climate change, in that it’s pretty bad but not catastrophic, and arguing that it’s responsible for a good bit of depression and racial division. But one can easily go overboard when reacting negatively to bad things that are viscerally outrageous. Everything we know about human psychology gives us reason to expect people to overestimate stuff that’s outrageous. Our assessment of how bad things are is significantly affected by our emotional response to those things rather than by a rational assessment of how bad they are. Tuberculosis is obviously much worse than wokeness, but I think probably most anti-woke people would deny that because wokeness is much more personally outrageous.

This cautions against going overboard on being anti-woke. Probably the things that fire you up the most emotionally are not the most important. The best explanation of the reporting on the 4-B movement is that the media frequently reports on things that are outrageous, not that they’re sympathetic and miserable. It’s important not to let your hatred of the woke eat your mind—you should spend more of your time getting outraged about seriously terrible things, like shrimp farming. If you end up noticing a suspicious correlation between things that you viscerally hate and rationally regard as very bad, you should suspect the correlation is explained by bias.