(1) Identify elite injustice.

(2) Describe elite injustice.

(3) Publish articles or social media about elite injustice.

(4) Hope that increased public knowledge will lead to public change.

(5) Increased public knowledge, if any, does not lead to public change.

(6) Decide to intensify efforts → back to step 1.

This is a surrogate replacement religion - a weak, secular, materialist one - which promises endless redemptive hope in future change without a terminating condition. Christianity promised heaven; progressivism promised the arc of history; the outrage cycle promises... more outrage. The energy goes in, nothing comes out. It promises that exposure of injustice leads to correction, but the loop never closes because the system is designed to absorb and redirect outrage without structural change.

The upper elites don't need to suppress this outrage, they just let it exhaust itself in a loop that produces no output. It has no output or payoff because (1) elite control is a closed loop system (media/government/”scientific” institutions/education system/financial system and money printer/national security state ping-ponging off each other) and it does not allow outsiders to change it, (2) the nature of elite control is such that the most spiritually malnourished will always rise to the top, and (3) this world is fundamentally fallen; any change longterm is toward increased centralization and decreased societal independence.

The same structure applies to the “left”, of course. The difference is that the left's redemptive loop still has institutional purchase (state power, media, academia), so its payoff is not zero, delivering policy wins, cultural capitulation, and career advancement. The right's loop, by contrast, operates with little access to genuine institutional leverage, and even when Republicans gain formal positions, they are rendered ineffectual by the closed-loop system. That is why the right's loop is weaker as a surrogate: it has less access to the control levers, but the structural form is identical.

There is a direct application of the stabilizer model I’ve described to political behavior. The right-wing outrage consumer is likely meaning-regulated (narrative as primary stabilizer) or esteem-regulated (righteousness as recognition). The cycle provides narrative coherence (we are the truth-tellers) and esteem (we are the brave ones), but because it lacks a genuine payoff, it eventually produces burnout or cynicism.

The way out of this failed regulatory feedback loop is to identify it for what it is and either modify one’s approach to a more spiritual perspective (the individuation process), or to narrow the scope of what one focuses on to what one can change within one’s own life (the serenity prayer). This doesn’t mean being passive about politics or culture wars, but being aware of one’s outrage feedback loop is very important to becoming less captured by it.

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* “Left” vs. “right” in this context relates to degrees of egalitarianism vs. inegalitarianism and hierarchy vs. distributed control; it is a messy heuristic and I don’t like using it very much.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5872488&forum_id=2)#49925511)