Moral indignation is structurally built into the system it opposes

Evidence

In psychological terms, these managers may experience neurosis, even psychopathy, but those who are not susceptible to fragmented consciousness are frequently identified as sociopaths, said to pervade the corporate world, and with increasing numbers, to boot. More generally, corporate personnel, including the sociopaths among them, are typically able to segregate their experiences in the corporation, thus leading, in effect, a dual existence. The world of the corporation, business, and money is one of fact; the world of children, of sisters and brothers and mothers, is one of value. … The indignation is thus indispensably built into the very system whose atrocities and destruction the indignation itself is intended to obviate, or at least disavow. This is what it means to be a subject of a discursive formation. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 373

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that indignation itself is a necessary component of the discursive formation — an unconscious coping mechanism that reproduces the system — is a dense, paradigm-shifting reversal of the usual assumption that critique opposes its object.
• XREF: Connects to the law-merchant/corporate readings on how institutions shape moral agency, and to We by Zamyatin on how the collective psyche operates. — connects to: Opposing capital on its own moral-rational terms serves it. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 57; The system neutralizes opposition by absorbing critique into indifference — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 539; Accusing the rich of immorality only serves the machinery of political repression