Outrage *was* for enforcing norms, long ago and far away. It got eaten the same way taste buds got eaten by ice cream, maybe sometime around the dawn of agriculture when memes began to adapt faster and spread more virulently through larger populations.
As the infectable populations got larger, outrage got more coopted. Simultaneously, the existence of travel and multiple cultures provided the Jew, the gentile, the Gypsy, the gaijin; the violation of automatic norms would provide the seed, it would grow from the forced...
... association of the anomalously large city, the people who hated distant strangers they couldn't just split the tribe and walk away from. False accusations would water the hate, when not everyone knew everyone anymore.
Now enter the Internet. We're all pressed into...
Now enter the Internet. We're all pressed into...
...contact with billions of weird strangers, and the memes are hyperevolving out of control. Or course the only thing outrage still does is feel good to some people and provide others with a horse to ride to power and wealth. You could say *exactly* the same thing about ice...
...cream. But that doesn't mean the emotion never had a purpose except to feel good and give power to its exploiters. Why would have an emotion like that evolved?
So if you want to keep to a healthier diet of Paleo outrage, keep it to people who aren't strangers, who...
So if you want to keep to a healthier diet of Paleo outrage, keep it to people who aren't strangers, who...
...you have mutual friends with, whose dark deeds you would also have heard about 20,000 years ago, who violated bright lines already drawn.
And if your friends don't instantly agree that the supposed deed *would* be evil, it's not Paleo outrage, it's the ice cream of...
And if your friends don't instantly agree that the supposed deed *would* be evil, it's not Paleo outrage, it's the ice cream of...
... automatic norm violations. And if your friends aren't sure it's true, it's the sweet berry of rumor and gossip, which was present in the ancestral environment too as a tasty thing with some commons-burning punishment-of-nonpunishers personal-fitness calories in it.
