Charlie Munger – Feeling Like a Victim Is Perfectly Disastrous

That is a much more charitable interpretation of this idea, and when I look at my own life that's pretty much where I am at. The bar for everyone else is zero. There never seem to be any consequences for others' laziness or stupidity, and the expectation is always that I will fix it. It's not fair of me to expect them to know or care what they're doing, or to fix what they've done, and it's unseemly to complain about it.

The 'Outrage Factor' is like a measure of how strongly people feel about something and whether they will move into action because of it.

Imagine if you heard news about a big problem – how mad or upset it makes you and others is the 'Outrage Factor.' It's like when you find out someone did something really unfair, and it makes you really angry, especially if it feels unfair, arbitrary or imposed by an unpopular central power, etc.

While it’s certainly true that people in charge generally only say things that keep them in charge, a la the status quo always moves to reinforce its own existence, individuals in power vary a lot in their strategies for staying in power. Some may prioritize transparency and addressing concerns directly, while others may navigate communication or be blatantly manipulating to maintain ‘stability.’

The relationship between power, communication, and outrage factors is complex and influenced by various factors such as societal expectations, political climates, and individual leadership styles. A ‘revolution’ isn’t one thing — it’s all of those things combined and more.

I mean to raise the point that things are frequently much more complicated and simply discounting the advice doesn’t take into account the person saying it, their history of speaking the truth, and what room it was said in.

Obviously the modern world is filled with examples of what you are talking about, so please don’t think I’m trying to counterpoint you — that’s not my intention.

I’m trying to add to the discussion the idea of the ‘outrage factor’ as well as the various styles and politics of who is speaking, because its so very difficult to discern anyone speaking in your best interest (assuming they exist) from the sea of those who most certainly are not and that’s worth considering.

It is also interesting that psychology, sociology and other sciences all have this measurement concept for when people will get pissed off enough to actually take action — with the presumption being that the vast majority of the time, until the tipping point that is an ‘outrage factor,’ they will not. I wonder how well studied and engineered that factor is in modern societies, because I assume it’s very studied, and I also wonder what the impact of broadly deployed AI will be for leadership groups will look like give the obvious benefit of learning to manage this measurement.

E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.

Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.