Outrage Is Not Power: Making Sense of a World on the Brink

 

We live in a strange moment in history where outrage feels like the background radiation of daily life. It hums constantly. It leaks through headlines, timelines, comment sections, and conversations that once might have been about weather, work, or books. Hate has become normalized not because most people are hateful, but because anger is louder than thought, faster than reflection, and easier to monetize than calm. What’s exhausting is not just the noise itself, but the growing sense that none of it changes anything.

We watch leaders posture, blunder, threaten, and occasionally burn things down, and we’re told this is “politics,” as though recklessness were a natural law rather than a choice. For most people, the dominant feeling is impotence. We vote, we argue, we march, we shout into the void, and still the same personalities cycle through power, seemingly immune to consequence. That sense of powerlessness seeps into everyday life. It teaches people to disengage, to numb out, or to retreat into tribal identities where outrage feels like action even when it isn’t.

So where do the people stand?

Mostly, they stand tired. Conflicted. Suspicious. Still decent, but worn thin.

The uncomfortable truth is that most people do not want chaos. They want stability, fairness, safety, and some sense that tomorrow won’t be worse than today. The idea that humanity is collectively self-destructive is seductive, but misleading. What we actually see is a small number of individuals with disproportionate power behaving in ways that amplify fear, conflict, and division. Psychopathic traits rise more easily to the top of certain systems. That doesn’t mean humanity is broken. It means our systems reward the wrong qualities too often.

The deeper problem is structural. Our political systems were designed for a slower world. They assumed time for deliberation, space for compromise, and a shared reality. None of those assumptions hold anymore. Decisions now unfold in real time under the pressure of instant media, financial markets, and online mobs. Leaders are incentivized to react, not reflect. To perform certainty rather than practice wisdom. The result is a constant low-grade crisis that keeps everyone off balance.

Should we do anything?

Yes. But not in the ways we’re currently encouraged to.

Endless outrage is not resistance. It’s fuel. It keeps attention locked onto the very figures who thrive on it. Constant emotional engagement without structural change drains people while leaving power untouched. It’s a feature of the system.

One possible response is to rethink where decision-making authority lives. This is where the idea of AI enters the conversation, and where things get uncomfortable very quickly.

The knee-jerk reaction is fear. Handing decisions to machines sounds like surrender. Like abdication of human responsibility. Like the final step in a long slide toward dehumanization. Those fears aren’t irrational. Any system that concentrates power, whether human or artificial, carries risk. History makes that clear.

But it’s also worth asking a harder question. Are we really defending human judgment at its best, or are we defending systems that repeatedly elevate the least stable among us?

AI, at least in theory, does not crave power, glory, revenge, or legacy. It doesn’t feel humiliated, doesn’t need to dominate, doesn’t confuse criticism with attack. Properly designed, it can be slow where humans are impulsive, consistent where humans are erratic, and boring where humans are dangerous. That boredom may be its greatest strength.

The idea is not that AI should rule us, but that it could act as a governor. A constraint. A brake. A system that flags patterns of escalation, deception, and warmongering long before they turn into catastrophe. Not a tyrant, but a referee.

Imagine a future where certain decisions simply cannot be made by a single individual in a fit of ego or rage. Where declarations of war, mass surveillance, or catastrophic environmental damage require passing through layers of analysis that are immune to charisma and fear-mongering. AI could model outcomes without ideological bias, highlight second- and third-order consequences, and expose the gap between rhetoric and reality.

The question then becomes ethical rather than technological. Who designs such systems? Who oversees them? Who audits them? And how do we prevent the very people we fear from gaming or corrupting them?

Any serious proposal to involve AI in governance would need radical transparency, distributed oversight, and strict limitations. AI should not decide what is “right.” It should illuminate what is likely. It should not replace moral judgment, but challenge it when it becomes unmoored from evidence and consequence.

There is also a danger in framing AI as savior. That simply repeats an old mistake. We keep hoping some external force will rescue us from ourselves. First it was religion. Then reason. Then technology. None of them failed entirely, but none of them absolved us of responsibility either.

The real work is cultural. It lies in refusing to accept outrage as normal. In withdrawing attention from those who profit from division. In rebuilding local trust where global trust has eroded. In remembering that most people are not enemies, even when they disagree sharply. Systems shape behavior, but culture determines which systems survive.

AI may become part of the solution, but only if we approach it with humility rather than desperation. As a tool, not a god. As a mirror that shows us the consequences of our choices, not a substitute for making them.

What feels most dangerous right now is not technology, but despair. The belief that everything good we’ve built over thousands of years is inevitably doomed. That belief paralyzes people. It makes cruelty feel inevitable and resistance feel pointless. History tells a different story. Progress has never been linear. Every advance has been followed by backlash. Every expansion of rights by attempts to claw them back. Yet over long arcs, the trend has been toward broader inclusion, longer lives, and less arbitrary violence.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because enough people, quietly and persistently, refuse to give up on the idea that reason can temper power.

So where do the people stand?

They stand at a crossroads between constant reaction and deliberate response. Between surrendering agency and redesigning how it’s exercised. Between letting the loudest voices define reality and choosing to think more slowly, more carefully, and more humanely.

The world is not bent on destroying everything good we’ve achieved. But some systems are perfectly capable of doing so if left unchecked. Whether AI becomes a guardrail or a weapon depends less on the code than on the values we embed into it.

The future will not be saved by outrage, by strong men and women, or by machines alone.

It will be shaped by whether we are finally willing to admit that unchecked human power is as dangerous as any technology we’ve ever invented, and whether we have the courage to build systems that reflect that truth.

Keep Writing.

Rob Parnell