Offense
Offense is an immensely bourgeois emotion, only cited as justification for action by the most privileged individuals within any society. Historically, offense was used as justification for duels and blood feuds. In that historical context, offense generally entailed treatment in a manner incongruous with one’s self-image. However, the cultural supervirus has come up with a new way of using offense to homogenize society and erase cultural diversity.
No existing cultivar has a prohibition against interactions with individuals who signal offense strongly or frequently, which makes them vulnerable. Historically speaking, there was little need to evolve such protections, as offense was only “spammed” at others by obviously unstable individuals and such people were not taken seriously. The present-day cultural supervirus has weaponized offense in a manner that quickly erodes cultural values and establishes dominance over existing cultures, changing their mores, morals, and traditions.
The manner in which the supervirus uses offense to sneak through cultural backdoors is incredibly dangerous. When a culture frames offense as a literal attack, it justifies retreats to groups where offense is much less likely (i.e. groups that don’t challenge or push a person and thereby facilitate personal stagnation).
Cultural framing of offense as an attack also produces cognitive distortions: Errors in reasoning that are not based on evidence. For example, those who contextualize offense this way are more likely to perceive small negative events as disastrous.[[27]](#_ftn27) Essentially, susceptibility to concepts like “offense should be treated as personal injury” and “safe spaces and trigger warnings are positive things” can trigger a cascade of failures in logic that chip away at individuals’ sanity, making them feel constantly under attack.
The emotion known as offense is a response to a credible challenge to your worldview (either your place within the world or your understanding of how things work). If something is not credible, it does not cause offense; it just comes off as silly or worrying. If someone calls us selfish when we are doing something obviously charitable, we just chuckle and shrug—but if they call us selfish and part of us suspects they might have a point, we will feel a strong pang of offense.
The same is true ideologically: When someone challenges an aspect of our worldview around which we hold strong convictions, we just see them as delusional, but if they challenge something about which we harbor even subconscious doubts, we will feel offended.
For these reasons, we personally contextualize the emotion of offense as an uncomfortable-but-highly-valuable sign that we need to dig deeper on a subject. After all, if we are wrong about something, especially if it is something important to us, we would rather be set straight than continue to cling to an incorrect worldview or opinion. “Winning” doesn’t entail sticking to your guns when you’re wrong; “winning” involves updating your beliefs when you turn out to be wrong.
Offense is an extremely useful emotion that flags ideas warranting further investigation. Offensive ideas should be engaged rather than stifled or ignored. From our cultural perspective, a choice to not engage with offensive ideas is an obvious sign that someone has become a husk of a person. As husks are nothing but vectors of cultural rot, they should largely be avoided in one’s personal social networks and business dealings.