I agree with the general point but I don’t think it’s best to contrast getting offended with staying calm. The way I imagine offense happens is that we classify somebody’s actions or beliefs as harmful to us or our group and that makes us annoyed, we then automatically decide that the best way of fixing the situation is to destroy the other person’s ability to cause us harm and if we lack any other option of doing that we default to politics as our means of attack.
And then that switch gets flipped in our heads that puts us in a mode of thinking more adapted to lowering someone’s social standing. This last step specifically is what I think of when I hear about ‘getting offended’. If you resist flipping the switch your unfavorable assessment of the situation will remain. You will still be annoyed at the fact that there’s someone who seems to be a social threat (but at least you won’t feel compelled to exaggerate the threat for the sake of better drama). It seems like dealing with annoyance should be a separate skill from not going off into narratives about how you are inherently more virtuous than the enemy. So rather than trying to stay completely calm as an alternative to getting offended, maybe it’s better to focus on the minimal change that would stop us from turning into raging monkeys while still possibly leaving us annoyed humans. This might also be more palatable to people who get offended upon hearing advice not to.
I agree with the general point but I don’t think it’s best to contrast getting offended with staying calm. The way I imagine offense happens is that we classify somebody’s actions or beliefs as harmful to us or our group and that makes us annoyed, we then automatically decide that the best way of fixing the situation is to destroy the other person’s ability to cause us harm and if we lack any other option of doing that we default to politics as our means of attack.
And then that switch gets flipped in our heads that puts us in a mode of thinking more adapted to lowering someone’s social standing. This last step specifically is what I think of when I hear about ‘getting offended’. If you resist flipping the switch your unfavorable assessment of the situation will remain. You will still be annoyed at the fact that there’s someone who seems to be a social threat (but at least you won’t feel compelled to exaggerate the threat for the sake of better drama). It seems like dealing with annoyance should be a separate skill from not going off into narratives about how you are inherently more virtuous than the enemy. So rather than trying to stay completely calm as an alternative to getting offended, maybe it’s better to focus on the minimal change that would stop us from turning into raging monkeys while still possibly leaving us annoyed humans. This might also be more palatable to people who get offended upon hearing advice not to.