For his new book, Dr. Alika Lafontaine decided to delve into what is driving anger online and how to counteract it.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
A few years ago, Alika Lafontaine called an old friend who was a lawyer. What began as a routine chat quickly took a left turn when the conversation turned to the politics of the day: Justin Trudeau’s leadership, the Freedom Convoy, pandemic-era restrictions.
With disorienting ferocity and speed, Lafontaine found himself on the receiving end of a vitriolic tirade and then his friend, whom he had known for years and often good-naturedly sparred with, hung up on him. They didn’t speak for years.
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This moment was a catalyst for Lafontaine, a rural anesthesiologist, health reform advocate and the first Indigenous (and youngest ever) doctor to lead the Canadian Medical Association. As he tried to understand what had happened, he began to excavate the ways that unresolved anger and betrayal, both personal and collective, can become a destructive force.
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The result of that exploration is The Outrage Cure, which seeks to diagnose and then offer treatment for the hair-trigger rage and howling frustration that seems to be the prevailing flavour of modern life. The Globe and Mail spoke to Lafontaine about why we’re so outraged, how to stop this toxic cycle and, of course, the cure for outrage.
Over and over in The Outrage Cure, you return to this idea that anger and outrage are not the same thing. Why was that so important for you to get across?
Anger is a call for help. We get angry because we realize we can’t solve problems all on our own, and that some things are just bigger than us. It’s pretty common in medicine, for example, for patients to come in and be very upset. What they’re trying to do is get your attention. That’s a very reasonable human experience.
Outrage is where we start to lose our faith in the belief that people will show up for us. We can be let down by certain people and lateralize that feeling into other relationships, other places that we go for help. Outrage is where you stop calling for help, and you start calling for attention for people to see how people let you down.
What really makes us turn from anger into outrage is that strong sense of betrayal. That people should have done something and they didn’t. That’s really what transforms the emotion from the intent to call for help to calling for reform or retribution.
When you open up Instagram and you look at the things that people are outraged about, the root of a lot of is this sense that, “Everything that I thought was certain isn’t any more, and I don’t know what to do so I’m reaching for a conspiracy theory, or blaming that person over there or I’m screaming into the void.”
One of the things that we’ve lost in this digital transition is the ability to sit in front of people who we feel have let us down and actually have that direct connection with them, and feel like they were connecting with us as well. We’ve also lost a sense of who those people actually are.
When you go to a store and prices are high, it’s common that people blame someone thousands of kilometres away, mostly disconnected from their day-to-day lived experience. When people’s minds reach out for who betrayed them, they’re trying to figure out that line of accountability. But to a great degree, individual people can’t actually shape things that are influenced by world events. It’s an aggregation of a lot of bad decisions, or not acting on things in a timely way over time. I think it’s very important to turn to politicians or other decision-makers and say, “You need to come fix this problem,” but as far as that one-to-one accountability, that this specific experience was the result of this person’s one specific action, we’ve lost that connection to a great degree.
I think it’s a mix of us being distant from each other. Part of it is us losing the ability to work through that friction. Another big part is the way that we communicate digitally purposely confuses us. It’s a way to keep us engaged.
In the book, you say “manipulation is cheap now.” Off the internet, I’m not encountering a lot of people trying to manipulate what I think – but I just open up TikTok, and suddenly it’s coming at me from every angle.
It’s interesting that in our search to find connection, we’ve become more disconnected than we’ve ever been. One of the comments I often hear at work is, “You have a hundred friends, but no one will drop by and feed your dog on a weekend.” It’s this state that we’re in as a society, where we have so many superficial connections, and we feel like we’re close to them, but we don’t really know them. As a result, we have no way to vent our anger.
I think so many people will recognize that story about you and your friend, because we’ve been getting into these arguments where it feels like life-and-death stuff, where “If you disagree with me about this, I don’t think I want to know you any more.” That feels like a very recent phenomenon.
When we’ve been talking about anger, in particular, we use words like “polarization,” or we root it to things like misinformation. At the root of a lot of people’s anger are very reasonable things to get mad at. People are upset that they can’t afford to pay their rent and get groceries. They’re upset that they can’t go to a place where they’re supposed to get educated or receive health care and actually feel like someone sees them. When we move into polarization and those other areas, we almost invalidate that people’s anger is coming from a place that it shouldn’t. People should be angry about this stuff.
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That, in and of itself, feels like a betrayal if it happens enough. All these issues that used to be multiple things that we used to get upset at are now just this one big ball of anger and betrayal.
What is one baby step you can take to break that toxic cycle of outrage?
The very first step for me was realizing when my anger transitioned to outrage. As we fall into outrage, we lose sight of what we were trying to accomplish. The reason it’s a toxic cycle is that this cycle simply makes all the emotions worse, it makes our nervous system more dysfunctional, and we start to see betrayal everywhere instead of the places where it actually lives.
Obviously people should read the book, but if you had to summarize in one sentence: What is the cure for outrage?
The outrage cure is finding a way to open yourself and be vulnerable to someone else at the same level as their vulnerability. We live in a world where we’re taught to overshare and under-receive or to not share and over-receive. We absorb everyone’s pain and never share any of our own, or we share all of our pain and we dismiss everyone else’s. Matching that on the same level is really the path to work through our outrage, to figure out what we’re angry about and have those honest discussions.
This interview has been edited and condensed.