Savoring our Outrage
“It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense…just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the safe of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea-he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility….”- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The above quote kept rattling around in my brain after reading this article about the life lesson of Justine Sacco: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0
Ms. Sacco, in case you don’t remember her, is the young woman who tweeted out an exceptionally thoughtless, an exceptionally unfortunate tweet about AIDS and white people. One of those tweets that make you immediately shake your heard and think,”Oy. Vey.” She said something stupid online and she paid a very high price. I was thinking about her situation, not just because in the early 1980s, my uncle died of AIDS, but because of the international on-line rage she received, and the fact that on my business Facebook page, a friend essentially said, “People need to relax.” People do need to relax–I need to relax–but having lost a family member to AIDS, I don’t think I would so casually tweet out about AIDS…but I probably have tweeted out stuff that was offensive to other people for other reasons. And I wondered about the people who seemed, somewhat gleefully, to be savoring the wave of vengeance washing over Ms. Saccco: were all of these people so morally offended by her remark…or was it the joy of witnessing someone experiencing a real-time life lesson? When you’re frustrated/bored/depressed in your own life, it can be glorious fun to watch someone else get humiliated.
I’m not excusing Justine Sacco’s thoughtless tweet; as someone who worked in media, as an adult, come on, she should have known better. But I also think that Dostoevsky had it right when he spoke about the pleasures of savoring our outrage at another person’s expense. How many of the people who attacked Justine Sacco on-line were also jealous of her (perceived) lifestyle? Life lessons can have many different lessons, for many different people.