If you read the news or spend any time on social media, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a lack of morality in the world today.

There is certainly no shortage of serious social and moral problems in the world. People are discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. Many women don’t feel safe in their own home or workplace. Over 450 million children around the world lack access to clean water. There are whole industries that cause untold suffering to animals. New technologies like artificial intelligence are being used to create autonomous weapons that might slip from our control. And people receive death threats simply for expressing themselves online.

It’s easy to think that if only morality featured more heavily in people’s thinking, then the world would be a better place. But I’m not convinced. This might sound strange coming from a moral philosopher, but I have come to believe that the problem we face isn’t a lack of morality, it’s that there’s often too much. Specifically, too much moral certainty.

The most dangerous people in the world are not those with weak moral views – they are those who have unwavering moral convictions. They are the ones who see the world in black and white, as if they are in a war between good and evil. They are ones who are willing to kill or die to bring about their vision of utopia.

That said, I’m not quite ready to give up on morality yet. It sits at the heart of ethics and guides how we decide on what is good and bad. It’s still central to how we live our lives. But it also has a dark side, particularly in its power to inspire rigid black and white thinking. And it’s not just the extremists who think this way. We are all susceptible to it.

To show you what I mean, let me ask you what will hopefully be an easy question:

Is it wrong to murder someone, just because you don’t like the look of their face?

I’m hoping you will say it is wrong, and I’m going to agree with you, but when we look at what we mean when we respond this way, it can help us understand how we think about right and wrong.

When we say that something like this is wrong, we’re usually not just stating a personal preference, like “I simply prefer not to murder people, but I don’t mind if you do so”. Typically, we’re saying that murder for such petty reasons is wrong for everyone, always.

Statements like these seem to be different from expressions of subjective opinion, like whether I prefer chocolate to strawberry ice cream. It seems like there’s something objective about the fact that it’s wrong to murder someone because you don’t like the look of their face. And if someone suggests that it’s just a subjective opinion – that allowing murder is a matter of personal taste – then we’re inclined to say that they’re just plain wrong. Should they defend their position, we might even be tempted to say they’re not only mistaken about some basic moral truth, but that they’re somehow morally corrupt because they cannot appreciate that truth.

Murdering someone because you don’t like the look of their face is just wrong. It’s black and white.

This view might be intuitively appealing, and it might be emotionally satisfying to feel as if we have moral truth on our side, but it has two fatal flaws. First, morality is not black and white, as I’ll explain below. Second, it stifles our ability to engage with views other than our own, which we are bound to do in a large and diverse world.

So instead of solutions, we get more conflict: left versus right, science versus anti-vaxxers, abortion versus a right to choose, free speech versus cancel culture. The list goes on.

Now, more than ever, we need to get away from this black and white thinking so we can engage with a complex moral landscape, and be flexible enough to adapt our moral views to solve the very real problems we face today.

The thing is, it’s not easy to change the way we think about morality. It turns out that it’s in our very nature to think about it in black and white terms.

As a philosopher, I’ve been fascinated by the story of where morality came from, and how we evolved from being a relatively anti-social species of ape a few million years ago to being the massively social species we are today.

Evolution plays a leading role in this story. It didn’t just shape our bodies, like giving us opposable thumbs and an upright stance. It also shaped our minds: it made us smarter, it gave us language, and it gave us psychological and social tools to help us live and cooperate together relatively peacefully. We evolved a greater capacity to feel empathy for others, to want to punish wrongdoers, and to create and follow behavioural rules that are set by our community. In short: we evolved to be moral creatures, and this is what has enabled our species to work together and spread to every corner of the globe.

But evolution often takes shortcuts. It often only makes things ‘good enough’ rather than optimising them. I mentioned we evolved an upright stance, but even that was not without cost. Just ask anyone over the age of 40 years about their knees or lower backs.

Evolution’s ‘good enough’ solution for how to make us be nice to each other tens of thousands of years ago was to appropriate the way we evolved to perceive the world. For example, when you look at a ripe strawberry, what do you see? I’m guessing that for most of you – namely if you are not colour blind – you see it as being red. And when you bite into it, what do you taste? I’m guessing that you experience it as being sweet.

However, this is just a trick that our mind plays on us. There really is no ‘redness’ or ‘sweetness’ built into the strawberry. A strawberry is just a bunch of chemicals arranged in a particular way. It is our eyes and our taste buds that interpret these chemicals as ‘red’ or ‘sweet’. And it is our minds that trick us into believing these are properties of the strawberry rather than something that came from us.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume called this “projectivism”, because we project our subjective experience onto the world, mistaking it for being an objective feature of the world.

We do this in all sorts of contexts, not just with morality. This can help explain why we sometimes mistake our subjective opinions for being objective facts. Consider debates you may have had around the merits of a particular artist or musician, or that vexed question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza. It can feel like someone who hates your favourite musician is failing to appreciate some inherently good property of their music. But, at the end of the day, we will probably acknowledge that our music tastes are subjective, and it’s us who are projecting the property of “awesomeness” onto the sounds of our favourite song.

It’s not that different with morality. As the American psychologist, Joshua Greene, puts it: “we see the world in moral colours”. We absorb the moral values of our community when we are young, and we internalise them to the point where we see the world through their lens.

As with colours, we project our sense of right and wrong onto the world so that it looks like it was there all along, and this makes it difficult for us to imagine that other people might see the world differently.

In studying the story of human physical, psychological and cultural evolution, I learnt something else. While this is how evolution shaped our minds to see right and wrong, it’s not how morality has actually developed. Even though we’re wired to see our particular version of morality as being built into the world, the moral rules that we live by are really a human invention. They’re not black and white, but come in many different shades of grey.

You can think of these rules as being a cultural tool kit that sits on top of our evolved social nature. These tools are something that our ancestors created to help them live and thrive together peacefully. They helped to solve many of the inevitable problems that emerge from living alongside one another, like how to stop bullies from exploiting the weak, or how to distribute food and other resources so everyone gets a fair share.

But, crucially, different societies had different problems to solve. Some societies were small and roamed across resource-starved areas surrounded by friendly bands. Their problems were very different from those of a settled society defending its farmlands from hostile raiders. And their problems differed even more from those of a massive post-industrial state with a highly diverse population. Each had their own set of challenges to solve, and each came up with different solutions to suit their circumstances.

Those solutions also changed and evolved as their societies did. As social, environmental, technological and economic circumstances changed, societies faced new problems, such as rising inequality, conflict between diverse cultural groups or how to prevent industry from damaging the environment. So they had to come up with new solutions.

For an example of moral evolution, consider how attitudes towards punishing wrongdoing have varied among different societies and changed over time. Let’s start with a small-scale hunter-gatherer society, like that of the !Kung, dwelling in the Kalahari desert a little over a century ago.

If one member of the band started pushing others around, perhaps turning to violence to get their way, there were no police or law courts to keep them in line. Instead, it was left to individuals to keep their own justice. That’s why if a bully murdered a family member, it was not only permitted, but it was a moral duty for the family to kill the murderer. Revenge – and the threat thereof – was an important and effective tool in the !Kung moral toolkit.

We can see that revenge also played a similar role in many moral systems around the world and throughout history. There are countless tales that demonstrate the ubiquity of revenge in great works like the Iliad, Mahabharata and Beowulf. In the Old Testament, God tells Moses the famous line that allows his people to take an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.

But as societies changed, as they expanded, as people started interacting with more strangers, it turned out that revenge caused more problems than it solved. While it could be managed and contained in small-scale societies like the !Kung, in larger societies it could lead to feuds where extended family groups might get stuck in a cycle of counter-retaliation for generations, all started by a one single regrettable event.

As societies changed, they created new moral tools to solve the new problems they faced, and they often discarded tools that no longer worked. That’s why the New Testament advises people to reject revenge and “turn the other cheek” instead.

Modern societies have the resources and institutions to outsource punishment to a specialised class of individuals in the form of police and law courts. When these institutions are well run and can be trusted, they have proven to be a highly effective means of keeping the peace to the point that revenge and vigilante justice is now frowned upon.

This is moral evolution. This is how different societies have adapted to new ways of living, solving the new social problems that emerge as their societies and circumstances change.

(I must stress that this does not make !Kung morality inferior or less evolved than other societies. Similar to how all creatures alive today are equally evolved, so too are all extant moral systems. My point is not that there is a linear progression from small-scale to large-scale societies, from primitive to civilised, it’s that any moral system needs to fit the circumstances that the society finds itself in and change as those circumstances change.)

But there’s a catch: moral evolution has typically moved painfully slowly, not least because our innate tendency towards black and white thinking has stifled moral innovation.

This wasn’t such a problem 10,000 years ago, when living conditions would have remained relatively static for generations. In this case, there was less pressure to evolve and adapt the moral toolkit. But the world today is not like this. It is changing faster than ever before, and so we are forced to adapt faster than our minds might be comfortable with.

This means pushing back on our black and white tendencies and looking at morality through a new lens. Instead of seeing it as something that is fixed, we can look at it as a toolkit that we adapt to the problems at hand.

It also means acknowledging that many of the social and moral problems we face today have no single perfect solution. Many come in shades of grey, like deciding if free speech should give people a right to offend, or to what extent we should tolerate intolerance, or under what circumstances we should allow people to end their own lives. There is almost certainly no single set of moral rules that will solve these problems in every circumstance without also causing undesirable consequences.

On the other hand, we should also acknowledge that there are many social and moral problems that have more than one good solution. Consider one of the questions that sits at the centre of ethics: what constitutes a good life? There are likely going to be many good answers to that question. This remains the case even if some answers come into conflict with others, such as one perspective stressing individual freedom while another stresses greater community and interpersonal obligations.

This full-spectrum evolutionary perspective on morality can also help explain why there is such a tremendous diversity of conflicting moral viewpoints in the world today. For a start, many cultures are still wielding tools that were made to solve problems from a different time, and they have carried them into today’s world, such as tools that prioritise in-group loyalty at the cost of suspicion of others. Some conservative cultures are reluctant to give these tools up, even if they are obsolete.

Other tools were never very good at their job, or they were co-opted by an elite for their own benefit to the detriment of others, such as tools that subjugated women or disenfranchised certain minorities.

Other tools are responses to different conceptions of the good life. Some represent the trade-off that is built into many moral problems. And there is constant production of new and experimental tools that have yet to be tested. Some will prove to work well and may be kept, while others will fall short, or cause more problems than they solve, and will be dropped.

One thing is clear: the world we are living in today is unlike anything our distant ancestors faced. It is larger, more complex, more diverse and more interconnected than it has ever been, and we are hearing from voices that once were silenced. The world is changing faster than ever before.

This might be taxing for our slow-moving black and white minds – and we should forgive ourselves and others for being human – but we must adapt our moral views to the world of today, and not rely on the old solutions of yesterday.

This calls for each of us to be mindful of how we think about morality, our black and white tendencies, and whether the views we inherited from our forebears are the best ones to solve the serious problems we face today. It also means we must rethink morality as being a human invention, a toolkit that can be adapted as the world changes, with many new problems and many tools that can solve them.

What matters today is not clinging to the moral views we were raised with, but looking at each problem, listening to each other, and working together to find the best solution. What we need now is genuine moral evolution.

“It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

I have been reflecting on this quotation from C.S. Lewis. It seems to contain a warning for our time, when people are inclined to gorge themselves on the nectar of “righteous indignation”. Intoxicated with the sensation of apparent virtue, the “righteous” then set upon anyone who falls beyond their moral pale.

Indignation has no natural political or ideological home. It can be found in equal measure among so-called “progressives” and “conservatives”. Each group has its own ranks of “shock troops” ready to do the most terrible things in the firm belief that they are justified by the rightness of their cause. They are like the sans-culottes of the French Revolution or the Nazi “Brown Shirts” of the last century — convinced that callous indifference should rule the fate of those whom they bully until their targets either retreat or break. Any sense of common decency, based in a recognition of a common humanity, is dissolved in the acid of resentment.

Fortunately, in Australia, righteous indignation rarely gives rise to violence on the streets. Instead, it is enacted, for the most part, in an online environment made all the more vicious by the fact that one can cause harm at a distance (and often cloaked in anonymity) without ever having to confront the awful reality of what is done.

My colleague, Tim Dean, has written about the ethics of outrage, which touches on a number of the matters that I point to above. My intention, here, is to look at a particular philosophical problem with righteous indignation — namely, its tendency to destroy (rather than express) a capacity for virtue. This is not simply a matter of philosophical interest.

The implications of this argument also have practical implications, especially for those who are truly committed to changing the world for the better.

In my experience, most of those who ultimately embrace the excesses of righteous indignation start from an entirely reasonable and defensible position. This is typically grounded in some form of ethical insight — usually relating to a genuine instance of wrong-doing, often involving the oppression of one group of people by another. For example, the ancien régime swept away by the French Revolution was corrupt. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement begins with a true insight that some lives (black lives) are being discounted as if they do not matter either at all or as much as the lives of others. Which is to say, BLM is based on valuing all lives. And so it is with most movements: they begin with a genuine and justifiable grievance, which risks being converted into something far less subtle and far more dangerous.

Robespierre undermined the integrity of the French Revolution by harnessing “The Terror” in service of his ideal — the creation of a “Republic of Virtue”. He unleashed the mob to ravage those who differed from them even to the slightest degree of privilege. To be “privileged” was to be doomed — as Robespierre himself discovered when the mob eventually turned on him and despatched him to the guillotine.

Unfortunately, every movement has its “Robespierres”. They amplify the general sense of there being a wrong that needs to be righted. They exploit the sentiments of those with a sincere desire to do good in the world. They fashion an “index of commitment” where you are judged by the extremity of your action — the more extreme, the more committed you are shown to be. Excess of zeal becomes a badge of merit, a token of sincerity.

So, what might this have to do with I’ve called the destruction of virtue? The answer lies in the implications of “excess”. For Aristotle, the phrōnimos (the person of practical wisdom, or phrōnēsis) attains virtue when they rid themselves of the distorting lenses of vice so as to see (and act according to) the “golden mean” — a point between two vicious extremes. For example, the virtue of courage lies between the poles of “reckless indifference to the risk of harm” at one end and “hiding away from danger” at the other. That is, a courageous person has a clear appreciation of danger and takes a measured decision to overcome their fear and stand fast all the same.

Righteous indignation disavows the golden mean. Instead, it creates a counterfeit version of virtue in which the extreme is presented as the ideal.

This distortion leads otherwise good people, with good motives, in the service of a good cause, to do abominable things.

Worse still, those who act abominably are encouraged to think that their conduct is excused because done “in good conscience”. Yet another counterfeit.

It is easy enough to justify all manner of wrongdoing by an appeal to “conscience”. That is why one of the greatest exponents of conscience, St. Thomas Aquinas, insisted that we are only bound to act in conformance with a “well-informed conscience” — and as my friend Father Frank Brennan, SJ, would add, a “well-formed conscience”.

I think it sad to see so many people being sucked into a world of “righteous indignation” that has little, if any, relationship to a conscientious life of virtue. People of virtue exercise ethical restraint. They are not wantonly cruel. They do not index the intrinsic dignity of persons according to the colour of their skin, their culture and beliefs, their sex and gender or their socio-economic status. They know that “two wrongs do not make a right”.

Instead of tormenting others for their own good — and, perhaps, for the good of the world — the virtuous will seek to engage and persuade, exemplifying (rather than subverting) the ideals they seek to promote. If ever there is to be a “Republic of Virtue”, it will have no place for the righteously indignant.

This article originally appeared on ABC Religion & Ethics.

As it stands, the term “freedom” is being utilised as though it means the same thing across a variety of communities.

In the absence of a commitment to expand discourse between disagreeing parties, we may regrettably find ourselves occupying an increasingly polarised society, stricken with groups which take communication with one another as being a definitively hopeless exercise.

Freedom and its nuances have come poignantly into focus over the past two and a half years. Ongoing deliberation about pandemic rules and regulations have seen the notion being employed in myriad ways.

For some, freedom, and one’s right to it, has meant demanding that particular methods of curtailing viral spread remain optional and never be mandated. For others, the freedom to retain access to secure healthcare systems and avoid acquiring illness has meant calling for preventative methods to be enforced, heavily monitored, and in some cases made mandatory. Across most perspectives, individual freedoms are taken as having been directly impacted to degrees not previously experienced.

The concept of freedom, for better or worse, reliably takes centre stage in much political debate. The ways we conceive of it and deliberate on it impacts our evaluation of governmental action. It appears however that the term often comes into conflict with itself, forming what may be characterised as a linguistic impasse, where one usage of freedom is evidently incompatible with another.

Canonical political philosopher Hannah Arendt addresses the largely elusive (albeit valorised) term in her paper, ‘What is Freedom?’. In it, she emphasises its inherent confusion: “…it becomes as impossible to conceive of freedom or its opposite as it is to realize the notion of a square circle.” Despite the linguistic and conceptual red flags which freedom bears, Arendt, and many others, persist in grappling with the topic in their work.

I am also sympathetic to the commitment to ongoing deliberation on the matter of freedom. Devoting time to understanding visible impasses which arise in its usage appears vital. Doing so aids in encouraging productive discussions on matters of how states should act, and to what extent a populace should comply with political directives.

As these are discussions central to the maintenance and progression of liberal democratic societies, we should feel motivated to formulate responses in situations where one conception of freedom comes into conflict with another.

The seemingly inevitable inaccuracies embedded within the concept of freedom and the difficulties inherent in the project of discriminating between the emancipatory and the oppressive remains evident across recent political rhetoric and subsequent public response. From 2020, many politicians began using the term freedom to emphasise the need to make present sacrifice for future gain, and to secure safety for vulnerable populations by curtailing the spread of COVID-19. For some, this placed politicians in the camp of the emancipators, working to defend our freedom against a looming viral force. In contrast, those who opposed measures such as lockdowns took the relevant enforcers to be oppressors, acting in total opposition to a treasured freedom of movement and individuated determination.

Both those in favour of and those opposed to lockdowns were seen utilising the term freedom in the public arena, yet freedom to the former necessarily required a certain degree of political intervention, and freedom to the latter firmly required a sovereignty from political reach. This self-oriented sovereignty is one in which freedom is experienced not in our relation to others, but individualistically, through the deployment of free will and a safety from political non-interference. While these two differing utilisations of freedom are broad and not immutable, they do provide a useful starting point from which to assess contemporary impasses.

Commitment to sovereignty as necessary for a commitment to freedom is not a new position, nor is it reliably misplaced. The individual who decries re-introduced mask mandates, or vaccines being made compulsory in workplaces evidently takes these actions as being incompatible with the maintenance of freedom, and a free society more broadly. Their sovereignty from political interference is necessary for their freedom to persist.

Both historically and contemporarily, many have seen it essential to measure their own freedoms by the degree to which states did not unduly intervene upon realms of education, religion, or health. We know countless instances where political reach has chocked public freedoms to undesirable extents. Those in opposition to vaccine mandates, for example, may take freedom to begin wherever politics ends, thinking it best to safeguard their liberties with one hand while defending against political reach with the other.

In contrast, politicians and individuals who deem actions such as vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like as necessary for the maintenance of long-term social freedoms are seen as upholding a competing notion of freedom. For this group, politics and freedom are beyond compatible, they are deeply contingent upon one another. On this conception, emancipation from political reach would result in a breakdown of society, where inevitably some personal liberties would be infringed upon by others.

This position of the compatibility between freedom and politics is articulated and advocated for by Arendt. Arendt argues that sovereignty itself must be surrendered if a society is ever to be comprehensively free. This is because we do not occupy earth as individuals, but as communities, moreover, political communities, which have been formed and continue to be maintained due to the freedom of our wills. “If men wish to be free,” she writes, “it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.”

The point here is not to say that individual rights are of no importance to political systems, or to freedom more broadly. Rather, it suggests that a comprehensive freedom cannot flourish in systems in which individuals remain committed to sovereignty above all else. Freedom is not located within the individual, but rather in the systems, or community, within which an individual operates.

We do not envy the freedom a prisoner possesses to retreat into the recesses of their own mind, we envy the person who is free to leave their home, and is safe in doing so, because a system has been politically and socially established to make it as such.

When debates are being waged over freedom, we must begin with the acknowledgement that we (as individuals) are only ever as free as the broader communities in which we operate. Our own freedoms are contingent upon the political systems that we exist in, actively engage with, and mutually construct.

Assessing the disagreement, or linguistic impasse, which exists between those who take political action as central to securing freedom and those who take freedom to begin to where politics ends has certainly not fully allowed us to realise the notion of a square circle to which Arendt alludes. Though from here, we may be better equipped to engage in discourse when we inevitably find one conception of freedom being pinned against another.

We are luckily not resigned to let present linguistic impasses on the matter of freedom mark the end of meaningful discourse. Rather, they can mark the beginning, as we are able to make efforts to rectify impasses that turn on this single word. Importantly, we have more language and words at our disposal, and many methods by which to use them. It is vital that we do.

Rarely a day goes by without Twitter, Facebook or some other social media platform exploding in outrage at some perceived injustice or offence.

It could be aimed at a politician, celebrity or just some hapless individual who happened to make an off-colour joke or wear the wrong dress to their school formal.

These outbursts of outrage are not without cost for everyone involved. Many people, especially women and people from minority backgrounds, have received death threats for simply expressing themselves online. Many more people have chosen to censor themselves for fear of a backlash from an online mob. And when the mob does go after a perceived wrongdoer, all too often the punishment far exceeds the crime. Targeted individuals have been ostracised from their communities, sacked from their jobs, and in some cases taken their own lives.

How did we get here?

Social media was supposed to unite us. It was supposed to forge stronger social connections. It was meant to bridge conventional barriers like wealth, class, ethnicity or geography. It was supposed to be a platform where we could express ourselves freely. Where did it all go so horribly wrong?

It’s tempting to say that something must be broken, either the social media platforms or ourselves. But in fact, both are working as intended.

When it comes to the social media platforms, they and their owners thrive on the traffic generated by viral outrage. The feedback mechanisms – ‘like’ buttons, comments and sharing – only serve to amplify it. Studies have shown that posts expressing anger or outrage are shared at a significantly higher rate than more measured posts.

In short, outrage generates engagement, and for social media companies, engagement equals profit.

When it comes to us, it turns out that our minds are working as intended too. At least, working as evolution intended.

Our minds are wired for outrage.

It was one of the moral emotions that evolution furnished us with to keep people behaving nicely tens of thousands of years ago, along with other emotions like empathy, guilt and disgust.

We may not think of outrage as being a ‘moral’ emotion, but that’s just what it is. Outrage is effectively a special kind of anger that we feel when someone does something wrong to us or someone else, and it motivates us to punish the wrongdoer. It’s what we feel when someone pushes in front of us in a queue or defrauds an elderly couple of their life savings. It’s also what we feel just about any time we log on to Twitter and look at the hashtags that are doing the rounds.

Well before the advent of social media, outrage served our ancestors well. It helped to keep the peace in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies. When someone stole, cheated or bullied other members of their band, outrage inspired the victims and onlookers to respond. Its contagious nature spread word of the wrongdoing throughout the band, creating a coalition of the outraged that could confront the miscreant and punish them if necessary.

Outrage wasn’t just something that individuals experienced. It was built to be shared. It inspired ‘strategic action’, where a number of people – possibly the whole band – would threaten or punish the wrongdoer. A common punishment was social isolation or ostracism, which was often tantamount to a death sentence in a world where everyone depended on everyone else for their survival. The modern equivalent would be ‘cancelling’.

But take this tendency to get fired up at wrongdoing and drop it on social media, and you have a recipe for misery.

All our minds needed was a platform that could feed them a steady stream of injustice and offence and they quickly became addicted to it.

Another problem with social media is that many of the injustices we witness are far removed from us, and we have little or no power to prevent them or to reform the wrongdoers directly. But that doesn’t stop us trying. Because we are rarely able to engage with the wrongdoer face-to-face, we resort to more indirect means of punishment, such as getting them fired or cancelling them.

In small-scale societies, the intense interdependence of each individual on everyone else in the band meant there were good reasons to limit punishment to only what was necessary to keep people in line. Actually, following through with ostracism could remove a valuable member of the community. Often just the threat of ostracism was enough to prevent harmful behaviour.

Not so on social media. The online target is usually so far removed from the outraged mob that there is little or no cost for the mob if the target is extricated from their lives. The cost is low for the punishers but not necessarily for the punished.

Social media outrage isn’t only bad for the targets of the mob’s ire – it’s bad for the mob too. Unlike ancestral times, we now have access to an entire world of injustice about which to get outraged. We even have a word for the new tendency to seek out and overconsume bad news: doomscrolling. This can leave us with an impression that the world is filled with evil, corrupt and bad actors when, in fact, most people are genuinely decent.

And the mismatch between the unlimited scope of our perception, and the limited ability for us to genuinely effect change, can inspire despondency. This, in turn, can motivate us to seek out some way for us to recapture a sense of agency, even if that is limited to calling someone out on Twitter or sharing a dumb quote from a despised politician on Facebook. But what have we actually achieved, except to spread the outrage further?

The good news is that while we’re wired for outrage, and social media is built to exploit it, we are not slaves to our nature. We also evolved the ability to unshackle ourselves from the psychological baggage of our ancestors. That makes it possible for us to avoid the outrage trap.

If we care about making the world a better place – and saving ourselves and others from being constantly tired, angry and miserable – we can change the way we use social media. And this means we must change some of our habits.

It’s hard to resist outrage when we see it, like it’s hard to resist that cookie that you left on the kitchen counter. So put the cookie away. This doesn’t mean getting off social media entirely. But it does mean being careful about whom you follow. If the people you follow are only posting outrage porn, then you can choose to unfollow them. Follow people who share genuinely new or useful information instead. Replace the cookie with a piece of fruit.

And if you do come across something outrageous, you can decide what to do about it. Think about whether sharing it is going to actually fix the problem or whether you’re just seeking validation for your own feelings of fury.

Sometimes there are things we can share that will do good – there’s a role for increasing awareness of certain systemic injustices, as we’ve seen with the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements. But if it’s just a tasteless joke, a political columnist trolling the opposition or someone who refuses to wear a mask at Bunnings, you can decide whether spreading it further is going to actually make things better. If not, don’t share it.

It’s not easy to inoculate ourselves against viral outrage. Our evolved moral minds have a powerful grip on our hearts. But if we want to genuinely combat injustice and harm, we need to take ownership of our behaviour and push back against outrage.