Summary: Progressives often rely too much on outrage to drive change, which can lead to exhaustion and disillusionment. They fail to recognize the successes of past programs, like the War on Poverty, which have significantly reduced poverty rates. Embracing positivity and acknowledging progress could help sustain motivation for future reforms.
Organizational behavior researchers and management experts will generally tell you that flagellating your employees can motivate them to greater efforts for a while, but will eventually lead to burnout and cognitive exhaustion. Theories of long-term motivation, like the broaden-and-build theory and self-determination theory, emphasize harnessing positive emotions of hopefulness and growth. (View Highlight)
But over time, staying outraged all the time probably leads to general burnout and exhaustion. (View Highlight)
sustaining constant negative emotions is a form of self-punishment, and self-punishment incurs heavy long-term costs. (View Highlight)
positivity could fix one of the biggest problems with progressive messaging — the obsession with outrage as the sole motivator for change. (View Highlight)
Outrage has been a successful motivating force for many positive changes in the past — civil rights, prison reform, suffrage expansion, and so on. (View Highlight)
outrage often manifests as the search for a bad actor or villain to get mad at. (View Highlight)
there’s another, more subtle cost of perpetual outrage as a theory of change. I think it leads to premature exhaustion and unnecessary disillusionment, (View Highlight)