When people demand anger instead of acknowledgment, they’re not really asking for truth. They’re asking for emotional conformity and performance, or a sign that you’ll join the chorus instead of standing silently at the edge. Outrage has become a kind of social currency. A way of proving you belong, and showing that you care the “right” way.
The cycle feeds on itself. Each burst of anger brings dopamine, applause, and the soothing illusion of moral certainty. The more you shout, the more you’re rewarded, and before long, the noise starts to feel like purpose. But over time, it drains something essential. People burn out. Empathy fades. What’s left is the ritual itself, a kind of addiction, which is a contest of purity that mistakes reaction for depth and sincerity.
Anarchists have a tendency to see that pattern for what it is. It mirrors the same hierarchy and systemic dependency that run through politics and social media alike. They’re systems that keep replicating themselves by feeding on emotion and validation.
For the sake of clarity, let’s call it “the outrage economy”, which, like the old political spectrum it energizes, is a kind of theater that divides people into camps so the structures can keep standing. Nothing about it is organic. It’s pure manufactured self-perpetuating gimmickry. It feeds on itself. Year after year, protestors still cry about ending conflicts that any sane system, if there is such a thing, would have ended decades or centuries ago, or at least not participated in at all.
Authentic attention, grief, or steady compassion cuts straight across that artificial system and can’t be gamed by algorithms or turned into moral performance. That’s why I personally don’t participate like most do, which consumers of the outrage economy are addicted to calling “apathy”. To feel without broadcasting, care without turning it into spectacle, have a hobby without providing a play-by-play for an audience, is to step outside the scripts *all* “sides” in every direction keep replaying.
Nonperformance is an authentic form of resistance, not indifference. So yes, it’s completely valid to say: I see what’s happening and I care deeply, but I’m not joining the performance. Choosing autonomy doesn’t mean apathy. It means refusing to be captured by a cycle that feeds on sincerity until it becomes noise.
Has your protest become repetitive and habitual and turned into noise, or are you still “in it to win it?” Why does nothing significant within the system ever change except the players who game it once every four to eight years?
#Anarchy #Anarchist #Anarchism #Activism #PoliticalTheatre #Apathy #OutrageLoop