Outrage Feels Like Orientation (It Isn’t Repair)

Most people want a story where the guilty are elsewhere.

Most people also want a story where the system can be changed without costing their stability.

That desire is human. It is also one of the ways the machine keeps running.

Because the machine doesn’t require anyone to be a monster. It only requires the bargain to keep getting renewed: comfort in exchange for costs you do not have to witness.

I’m not writing this to absolve anyone. I’m writing because I’m tired of the adult fantasies.

The fantasies that let you keep the same life, the same insulation, the same rhythm of comfort, and the same sense of being “one of the good ones”… while believing you are doing justice.

They usually sound like this:

If we remove the villain, the story resolves.

If we overthrow the right people, the machine stops.

If we abolish the right ideology, humans become fair.

Those fantasies are not only naïve. They are narcotic. They reduce complexity until the nervous system can breathe again. They give you a clean target. They give you orientation. They give you innocence.

But innocence is not available at industrial scale.

So here is the deal I’m making with myself in this piece: I’m going to stay warm, because contempt is a cognitive toxin. I’m going to stay blunt, because vagueness is how we keep pretending. And I’m going to stay careful, because overreach is how we become propaganda.

This is an attempt to keep contact with reality without turning into a preacher, a monster, or a detached spectator.

Part 1: Outrage Feels Like Orientation (It Isn’t Repair)

There’s a quiet fantasy inside a lot of moral and political speech: that there is a clean place to stand outside the system, point inward, and locate guilt.

But if you benefit from a supply chain you don’t see, you are not outside.

If the costs of your stability are outsourced to places you will never visit, you are not outside.

If your life is scaffolded by energy abundance, bureaucratic abstraction, and distance from consequence, you are not outside.

This isn’t a confession ritual. It’s a boundary condition. If you don’t include yourself in the system, you will do what humans reliably do under threat: locate evil elsewhere, feel oriented, and call it repair.

What I mean by “mechanisms first” is simple. A mechanism isn’t a slogan. It’s the causal structure that keeps producing the same pattern.

If you want to understand exploitation, you don’t start with “Who is evil?” You start with the questions that don’t flatter anyone.

What is scarce?

Who controls access?

What gets rewarded?

What gets punished?

Where do the costs go?

And then the questions that matter most, and that many moral stories carefully avoid:

Who can refuse?

Who can leave?

Who can survive refusal?

That last cluster is the spine, because exploitation is not mostly about hatred. It is mostly about constraint asymmetry. The powerful can refuse. The vulnerable cannot.

When a person cannot refuse without losing food, shelter, safety, community, or legal status, “choice” becomes a story we tell to keep the interface clean.

That is why mechanistic thinking is inherently anti-propaganda. Propaganda asks you to locate guilt. Mechanisms ask you to locate leverage.

Now to outrage.

Outrage can be sane. It can also be a nervous-system move.

When people are overloaded, the mind does what minds do under threat: it narrows. It looks for a single explanatory object that can hold the whole chaos.

A villain is metabolically cheap. A villain collapses the world into an aim. A villain gives the nervous system a lever: attack or avoid.

This is why outrage can feel like moral clarity. It is also why outrage is so easy to monetize.

A population stuck in chronic arousal becomes vulnerable to anyone who offers a clean enemy, a clean identity, and a clean future.

And here’s the trap: orientation is not the same thing as repair. You can feel oriented inside a lie. You can feel righteous inside a machine. You can feel “awake” while your ability to think has been hijacked by threat physiology.

That isn’t a moral failing. It’s a predictable pattern in stressed social organisms.

One more piece matters here: capacity.

No civilization gets to claim innocence. Some civilizations get to claim capacity, the ability to scale harm through bureaucracy, industry, legal abstraction, and distance.

Humans have always been capable of cruelty. What changes across history is the throughput of cruelty: the energy, organization, and technology that lets harm become systematic.

A raid is not an empire. An empire is not an industrial extermination system. The mechanisms rhyme. The capacities differ.

This matters because people tend to anesthetize themselves in one of two ways.

One is the innocence sedative: “Only those people did this.”

The other is the flattening sedative: “Everyone did it, so nothing matters.”

Both reduce pain. Both destroy accuracy.

Reality is messier. Responsibility exists. Scale also exists.

So if the villain story dies, if there is no final boss, no clean overthrow, and no system that guarantees justice, what remains?

A harder question: what would you still be willing to do?

Not because you expect salvation.

Because harm is real.

Because care is real.

Because you live here.

Part 2: Selective Outrage, Fixation, and the Attention Machine

If Part 1 is about the physiology of outrage, Part 2 is about where outrage lands.

Fixation isn’t proof of moral accuracy. It’s a signal: attention allocating itself under constraint.

And to keep the system boundary explicit: this is mostly about how attention allocates in Western, online media ecosystems under overload.

Here’s the clean, unromantic thing that’s uncomfortable to admit.

Outrage does not distribute itself according to suffering. It distributes itself according to amplifiers.

Some conflicts are dense with story. They’re compact. They’re symbolic. They’re historically layered. They can be rendered as a binary without too much effort. A person can know “enough” in an afternoon to feel morally positioned.

Other harms are diffuse, multi-actor, resource-driven, post-colonial, or bureaucratically slow. They resist a neat villain. They require context. They don’t condense into a single image. They don’t produce a clean identity.

Human attention prefers what can be narrated.

Western media infrastructure also matters. Attention flows through channels that are tightly coupled to U.S. foreign policy, European historical guilt, Cold War inheritance, and religious-cultural symbolism. Many harms in Africa, Asia, and South America happen outside those feedback loops. They remain real, and brutal, and ongoing. They just do not become identity-signaling issues at scale.

Then there is identity leverage.

People engage hardest where outrage can be used to signal moral identity, affiliate with a group, perform righteousness, or metabolize inherited guilt. That doesn’t automatically make the outrage fake. It just makes it structurally vulnerable to becoming a low-cost ritual.

And finally there is the simplest constraint: cognitive load.

Humans cannot hold “global injustice” coherently. Not in the body, not in the mind, not in daily life. So attention collapses onto a few emotionally salient nodes.

This is not evil. It is neurological constraint.

If outrage tracked suffering more closely, a lot of what stays peripheral would become central. The Democratic Republic of the Congo would be far harder to ignore. Yemen would sit in the foreground. Sudan would be treated as a defining political emergency. Child labor supply chains would be named as mass violence rather than treated as an unfortunate side effect of “development.” Structural debt extraction would be seen for what it often is: slow violence.

But outrage is not proportional to suffering. It is proportional to visibility, symbolism, narrative simplicity, and identity payoff.

Once you see that, a certain moral binary starts to disintegrate.

Every empire has committed atrocities. Every civilization has exploited. Every surplus economy has stratified. Every population has tolerated violence when it benefitted them indirectly.

That does not excuse harm. It explains why harm recurs.

The pattern isn’t “these people are bad.” The pattern is “humans under surplus plus hierarchy plus abstraction behave this way.”

This also helps explain why America becomes such a common screen.

America is loud. It is filmed. It is archived. It is legible. Oppression elsewhere can be censored, normalized, internalized, or shielded.

So America becomes the screen because it can be seen.

Criticizing America can also function as moral outsourcing: it can feel like radical dissent while keeping personal comfort intact. You can condemn the empire while using its platforms, wearing its products, and benefiting from its supply chains.

That doesn’t make the critique wrong. It makes the critique vulnerable to turning into cleansing rather than contact.

In many spaces, critique becomes identity sorting rather than analysis. It says: I know who the villain is. And it isn’t me.

This is why the distinction matters.

Fixation is not the same as care.

Selective outrage can obscure systemic causes. It can give people a false sense of moral clarity. It can prevent honest reckoning with participation.

You can protest one conflict and still acknowledge that global comfort is subsidized by invisible labor, that no region is morally pure, and that no system collapses without collateral damage.

That isn’t apathy.

That’s adult perception.

And the hard line is this.

When someone claims deep moral clarity while ignoring other enormous theaters of harm, and while refusing to look at how their own life is scaffolded by extraction, they may not be responding to injustice.

They may be responding to a story that lets them feel positioned correctly.

If that recognition destabilizes you, it makes sense. It feels like losing empathy.

But it might be something else.

It might be the loss of illusion.

You might be seeing how attention works, how narratives distort scale, how morality gets applied unevenly, and how reality does not organize itself around outrage.

That isn’t cold.

That’s clear.

And clarity is rarer, and more unsettling, than anger.

Responsibility without salvation (still)

Once you drop salvation narratives, you aren’t left with nothing. You’re left with work that is smaller, slower, and real.

Not heroism. Not villainy. Lucidity.

The most non-theatrical justice work often looks like expanding exit options, because coercion thrives when people cannot leave. It looks like making safety nets real. It looks like housing security. It looks like healthcare that actually functions. It looks like legal protection that is enforced.

It also looks like shortening the distance between benefit and cost. The machine stays violent by keeping distance. So the interventions that matter make cost legible: local production where possible, transparent supply chains, honest pricing of externalities, constraints on anonymity in corporate structures.

And it looks like building institutions that assume humans are patterned. The design error is building systems that require angels. The design goal is systems that distribute power, make abuse visible, make auditing normal, and make exit possible.

Finally: do not confuse winning with repair.

Winning changes the power map.

Repair changes the incentive landscape.

Repair is slower.

Less romantic.

More embodied.