After losing his mother to cancer as a young boy and his right eye to a homemade bomb in Afghanistan, Congressman and ex-Navy Seal Dan Crenshaw has learned some things about rolling with the punches and meeting difficulties well. He offers an antidote and alternative practices for a society that’s begun thriving on indignation and blame. 

Outrage has become a virtue in our culture. Plenty of op-eds have encouraged people to get angry and stay angry.  Many act like there’s a positive correlation between moral rage and moral righteousness, that the angrier you are, the more virtuous you become.

Rage has become a sign of virtue and awareness. If you suggest things aren’t horrible, that some problems have been blown out of proportion, then you are closed-minded and avoiding the facts. If you point out that the United States is the wealthiest country on earth and offers freedoms that have been historically rare, you just don’t get it.

Obviously, there are times when outrage is righteous and justified. But to promote it as a cultural ideal is a mistake. Outrage tells us far more about what an individual or group hates rather than what it loves. This gets away from the archetypal hero who is calm, steady, and aware in the face of adversity and danger. A true hero stands for something rather than standing against something—or everything. 

If you find yourself getting angry or triggered by another person’s comments, you’ve already lost this round. You’ve allowed yourself to get hooked. That’s your problem, and you can step into the pain and learn to fortify yourself against similar remarks in the future.

In the era of outrage culture, society is reaching a crossroads. Our choices are to succumb to the rule of emotions and try to build a culture on victimization and rage, or to build a culture based on self-restraint, perseverance and self-assurance. The latter society will survive; the former will implode. We cannot build or sustain a strong nation while everyone is trying to throttle (or “cancel”) each other.

The Kandahar Valley in Afghanistan is one of the most contested geographical regions in the world, and it has been for millennia. The Persians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Russians, warring Afghani tribes, and various European and North American forces all have spilled blood in those hills.

The locals from Afghanistan assisting the United States in fending off the Taliban are some of the toughest people around. Even in the dead of winter, you can see some of them fighting in sandals with a blanket thrown over their shoulders, not so much as flinching at the cold. Surviving long enough to die old and in your sleep is not taken for granted in those parts. Most of the men there will fix you with a cold, unflinching look. Given what their ancestors have been through over the ages, this only makes sense. The toughness and readiness to defend themselves has almost become part of their makeup.

Good perspective is a helpful remedy against rage and entitlement. Growing up in war-torn parts of the world will give you that. So would living in any of the centuries preceding the twenty-first. But it doesn’t take surviving a war or growing up in the Dark Ages to learn from adversity. What it does require, minimally, is a willingness to learn and receive the lessons perspective has to teach—through your own experiences or  the experiences of others. Discovering how brutal life can be in other places and for most of our history can shed light on our own lives and on what matters. It can make you think twice before having a meltdown because your dinner was slightly over-cooked. 

Perspective makes hard choices easier. The author had an intense lesson in this when a home-brewed bomb cost him his eye. He could have become resentful. Bitterness would seem understandable—if not justifiable—to most people. But the author realized that living in anger is its own kind of demise. His experiences in war taught him the importance of pressing forward to make the most of radically altered circumstances, instead of succumbing to self-pity and rage. There was only choice. Existentially speaking, it was a choice between life and death. 

Answering the question of who we want to be requires thought about the qualities worth having. These qualities don’t come out of a vacuum, though. We all have some idea—even if it’s just a hazy, unspoken idea—of the traits we want to emulate.

To have heroes is a willingness to be different; it creates a standard higher than what you believe you possess, or for which you want to strive. Heroes don’t need to be actual people, either. Actual people make mistakes all the time. If you try to be just like someone else, you might end up hurt and disillusioned. It’s better to idolize an archetype of a hero, an ideal. For most of us, the ideal heroes are some amalgamation of the stories we know and the people in our own lives. Some of them are even less than exemplary.

Hollywood leans heavily on the hero motif to draw in audiences. Some of the characters they create are inspiring. If they seem unrealistically “good”—that’s because they are not real—but the qualities that pluck our heart strings and make us want to be better versions of ourselves certainly are real.

Throughout our lives, we find people in stories and in our everyday existence whom we respect, who get after the heart of life. We watch them and find ourselves saying, “They’re doing life better than I am; they keep their cool under pressure; they are selfless, smart, and dependable.” Whatever they are doing is working. When we recognize this, we are discerning heroic qualities in others and wondering how to integrate those patterns of living into our own.

Being able to take a joke, stay even-keeled, and take responsibility are a handful of admirable, hero-grade qualities, but they are plummeting down the list of society’s most popular conceptions of heroism. Authenticity is considered a high virtue, but its most common manifestations are extreme emotions. Anger spreads quickly, whereas keeping an even temper and grace under pressure don’t make the news. People are practically scanning the news and internet in search of reasons to be offended. Taking responsibility has been replaced with the more popular idea of broadcasting hurt and demanding reparation.

These qualities are considered heroic. Not only are they ethically problematic, they simply do not work. They harm people who practice them— harm their relationships and their aspirations to make life better. These traits twist us, rather than strengthen us. Getting more likes on social media is not a reliable metric for growth toward virtue, nor is it a heroic ideal worth aspiring to.

Civilizations have always had figures that they admire and seek to emulate. If our civilization hopes to survive, it must find more resilient moral exemplars. A culture that hopes to withstand onslaughts should reserve its adulation for the resilient—not the indignant.

Put the thought of quitting out of your mind. Perseverance is a decision to stick with Plan A and look for a solution. Plan B is the choice to stop looking for a solution when Plan A is still viable. 

Refusal to give up sounds nice and simple on paper, but life often shows us just how difficult the simplest things are to carry out. One practical way to build resilience in your life is to purge your mind and mouth of the phrase “I quit.”

To be clear, quitting is different than failure. You can do your best in a sports competition or an election and still lose. The player or candidate didn’t settle for Plan B, but played out Plan A until loss had become an incontestable fact. That’s fine and respectable. Quitting is also different from reprioritizing. When a parent puts a career on hold to take care of kids, that’s not a concession, that’s not choosing Plan B; that’s the good sense to realize that there’s a new baby who needs care and attention.  

People are quitters when they entertain Plan B (quitting) while they still have viable options to keep Plan A going. Quitting may not always be evident to the onlooker or it may be euphemistically called “a new direction,” but internally, each person has a voice that lets them know if they are a quitter or if they’ve taken Plan A as far as they could.

Again, failure is not the issue. Failure is often instructive and constructive. Failure becomes problematic when you opt for Plan B while Plan A is still live, and then justify your choice. Refusing to consider Plan B is not about digging in your heels, but orienting your movement constantly toward a goal. Choosing Plan B cuts that movement short. It’s resignation to failure.

In 2018, the author woke up to a barrage of texts about a less-than-honorable mention in the previous night’s SNL skit. Comedian Pete Davidson was running a mock-news segment called the weekly update. With mid-term elections only days away, Davidson gave his thoughts on some of the “gross” candidates in the running.

“You might be surprised to hear that he’s a congressional candidate from Texas and not a hitman in a porno.” Perhaps prompted by a chastening co-host, Davidson added,  “I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in war…or whatever.”

Roasts are one thing. Plenty of politicians deserve one now and again. To call people “gross” isn’t good comedy though. Neither is a blithe dismissal of a veteran’s military service.

In our culture’s popular narrative, this is the part where the injured party makes noise on social media and points the spotlight of shame on the guilty party. There were plenty of supporters who wanted to see Pete Davidson and SNL defamed for what happened. But the author decided not to demand an apology as many people expected. Why? For one, the author wasn’t offended. Military life thickens a person’s skin. For another, it would have deprived the guilty party of the opportunity to do the right thing.

Shame has been weaponized in our current culture. It’s been used to get people fired and besmirch reputations. The desire to shame is no longer confined to the domain of politicians—it’s common practice. The mob is quick to pile on. Dredging up old tweets and ripping them from important contexts harms not just individuals but society. The accused are left in a position of offering pseudo apologies to placate an angry mob or refusing to apologize and bearing the backlash until it dies down. In either case, divisions are deepened rather than lessened.

Shame has its place. It is good to allow people to feel the prick of conscience. It encourages personal responsibility, a realistic appraisal of self, an aspiration to be better and resilient.

Many people wanted the author to demand an apology from Pete Davidson and SNL. He didn’t. By choosing restraint, the producers at SNL felt an appropriate level of shame and the right kind—the kind that leads to making things right. SNL producers reached out to the author and gave him an opportunity to join them on next week’s show. The author was going to decline, but the show falling on Veteran’s Day provided the perfect opportunity to say a few words on behalf of veterans. On the next show, Pete Davidson mentioned what he’d said in the previous show, and apologized on live television. The apology was accepted, and Davidson gave the author an opportunity to roast him back. 

During rehearsals, the author and his wife got to meet the talent at SNL, and the author got to know Pete Davidson. The conversations leading up to the show were full of respect rather than bitterness. Davidson and the author each walked away with a much stronger relationship than a Twitter war would have provided.