The right to non-indignation

Judging by the number of people who are outraged, we might think that, more than a right, outrage is a duty. But if outrage is a duty, the question arises as to why we should fulfill this duty and become so commonly outraged, and why should the most common state among our fellow human beings, that is, outrage, necessarily become our normal state as well.

Just as copying the feelings of our fellow human beings doesn't make us more like them, so not sharing those feelings doesn't make us members of another species or another planet. Those who fail to fulfill their duty of indignation are no less a part of the species of those who are indignant: they are, at most, like a person who isn't exactly like all members of their species; that is, they are like any member of our species.

The notion that we should be indignant in principle depends on a characteristic idea about the world. This idea could be called "the evil of things." The evil of things is the metaphysical property of the world that predisposes objects, people, and intangible arrangements to something wrong. Indignation is, at its core, a feeling of someone who believes everything is constantly going wrong; especially a protest against what has been stipulated as the fatal inclination of things.

The notion of the evil of things is a very common way of suggesting that the duty of indignation is natural. It isn't; and when we don't accept this duty, we are excused from believing in it. It's not hotter or we lose a button because everything in this world goes wrong. What the non-indignant say to the indignant is that the events we deplore sometimes allow us to draw conclusions about people or improve ways of doing things; but they don't allow us to discuss what happened.

The world of the non-indignant person is different from the world of the indignant person. It doesn't depend on the duty to imagine that we stand in relation to things as if we were checking whether a promise made to us was kept, or whether an item we ordered was perfectly executed. For the non-indignant person, even when trying to protect and maintain things, we are not customers of things, or users of the world; and it is idle to imagine that we can return to their origin the things that displease us.

Not fulfilling the duty to be indignant isn't just a matter of freeing ourselves from fulfilling exhausting responsibilities; or of feeling at ease enough to go do what truly interests us, without having to answer to anyone. It's primarily the recognition that the world isn't a commodity, a task, a project, or an object about which we can complain, but something that was already the case long before we first noticed it.