Outrage Fatigue - and Why They Underestimate Us

 

There was a time when outrage was a renewable resource. You could drop a scandal into the morning news cycle, sprinkle it with ominous music, and by lunchtime the public would be foaming nicely. By dinner, we’d be divided, distracted, and arguing with strangers online about things we hadn’t looked up. It was efficient. Elegant, even. A marvel of modern control.

That era is ending.

Not because people have become apathetic – that’s the lazy diagnosis – but because we’ve become better informed, more pattern-savvy, and frankly harder to manipulate than those in authority seem willing to admit.

The future, we are endlessly told, belongs to “the narrative.” Control the narrative and you control the world. This explains why governments, corporations, and various shadowy committees with impressive PowerPoint slideshows are pouring time, mega-millions, and all their  nervous energy into social media dominance. The theory is simple: if you own the message, you own the people.

But theory has a problem. Reality keeps interrupting.

Watch a protester being interviewed on the street these days. Not a hand-picked spokesperson with a megaphone and a slogan, but a random person who just stepped out of the crowd. What you’ll often hear is not blind rage, or a single rehearsed talking point, but something far more unsettling to authority – nuance.

They’ll say things like, “I agree with this part, but not that part,” or “I understand the argument on the other side, but I think it ignores this,” or the truly terrifying sentence: “It’s complicated.”

That is not the voice of a dumb public.

Talking to friends, I’ve noticed the same thing. Unlike the old days, people can now hold three or four opinions on the same subject without their heads exploding. They can say, “Yes, that’s a problem,” while also saying, “No, that solution is nonsense,” and even, “I’m not convinced anyone involved is being entirely honest.”

This alone should set off alarms in the halls of power, because the entire outrage economy depends on simplicity. It needs villains and heroes, good guys and bad teams, red pills and blue buttons. Complexity is poison to control.

We are also drowning in misinformation – and here’s the twist no one seems to have planned for – too much misinformation eventually teaches people how to spot it.

When everything is exaggerated, nothing feels urgent. When every story is “the most shocking development yet,” we stop flinching. When outrage becomes the default setting, the emotional circuitry burns out. We don’t become passive; we become selective.

Outrage fatigue is not indifference. It’s discernment with a practiced sideswipe.

People start asking dull but dangerous questions. Who benefits from this story? Why is it everywhere at once? Why is this being framed as a moral emergency instead of a practical problem? Why am I being told how to feel before I’m shown what actually happened?

These are not revolutionary thoughts. They’re basic literacy skills applied to media. And once a population develops them, the old levers don’t work so well.

Authority tends to underestimate this shift because it still imagines the public as a single emotional organism. Push here, it reacts there. But the public is now a network, not a blob. Information doesn’t just flow downward anymore; it ricochets sideways, gets dissected in group chats, tested against lived experience, mocked, memed, and often times merely dismissed.

And that quiet dismissal is the most dangerous response of all.

Governments are very good at responding to anger. They think they know how to contain protests, redirect fury, arrest the agitators, issue gaslighting statements, form useless committees, and wait it out. What they are far less prepared for is a public that stops reacting on cue.

A public that says, “We’ve seen this bollocks before.”

That doesn’t mean people don’t care. It means they're beginning to care differently. They care in ways that don’t fit neatly into hashtags or thirty-second clips. They care while being skeptical. They care while laughing (thank God) at the absurdity of it all. Humor, after all, is another sign that control is slipping. You don’t joke about things you’re hypnotized by. Comedy is a great weapon. 

The great miscalculation of our leaders is in assuming division is easy to manufacture forever. Yes, people disagree. Yes, they argue. But disagreement is not the same as fragmentation. In fact, the ability to disagree without surrendering your capacity to think is a sign of maturity, wisdom, definitely not the chaos desired.

I'd very much like to think we are not as easily divided as they think. We are stubborn, noisier, messier, and less obedient than all the models predicted.

Outrage fatigue is not the end of engagement, it is the end of predictable engagement. It’s the moment people stop dancing every time the music swells and start asking who’s controlling the playlist. And that, understandably, makes those in charge very nervous.

Because a public that can tolerate ambiguity, spot manipulation, and laugh at manufactured hysteria is a public that cannot be easily led by the nose.

They may still try, of course. Old habits die hard. But more and more, the crowd is yawning, folding its arms, and saying, “Go on then. Convince us.”

And that’s a much harder job than simply pressing the outrage button.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell