Army Of Us

On outrage, apathy, and empathy

Your outrage is justified. It’s also unsustainable.

Take it from a Black man born at the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. Like Baldwin said: to be Black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

Empire knows how to fight outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale.

Empire manufactures outrage. It weaponizes it as a control measure. It’s how they maintain division between “us” and “them.” Your problems vs. my problems. In the wrong hands, outrage is the principal tool of othering.

It keeps us at each other’s throats so we ignore the boot on our collective necks.

Empires don’t just control laws and guns; they manage emotion as infrastructure. They regulate who’s allowed to feel whose pain, whose grief counts as “news,” whose suffering is local background noise you step over on your way to brunch.

Apathy is what happens when you think my oppression doesn’t concern you.

Apathy isn’t a moral failing, it’s a product. Specifically, it’s a byproduct of the constant thrum of trying to survive a system designed to suppress you. The economy, the news, the algorithms—everything is engineered to keep people just exhausted enough and entertained enough that they stop feeling with anyone outside their lane. Keep the alarms blaring. Keep your nervous system on high alert. Never let anyone sit still long enough to feel themselves, much less each other.

That’s why empathy at scale terrifies empire.

Empathy isn’t just a feeling; it’s a counter-technology. When you feel your pain as continuous with mine, the spell breaks. You can’t go back to sleepwalking. That’s why empire works so hard to isolate griefs and keep them from touching. Outrage can be redirected, defused, punished.

Widespread empathy short-circuits divide-and-conquer.

Cops vs. citizens. “Taxpayers” vs. “criminals.” Citizens vs. migrants. Once enough people realize how thin the line is between “it hasn’t happened to me” and “it hasn’t happened to me… yet,” the usual scripts stop working.

If apathy is a sickness caused by manufactured outrage, empathy is a vaccine.

Every time you tell a story that lets someone actually feel a stranger’s cost, you’re breaking the machine. Outrage is an accelerant. Both sides weaponize it. Only one side seasons it with apathy. Mix outrage and apathy and you get clicks, votes, donations. Bodies in streets and morons in comment section. Mix outrage with empathy and it becomes:

“Look what’s happening to them. That could be us. We can’t let this stand.”

The playbook’s old, and still works. Drip-feed people just enough fear and grievance to keep them riled. Then deaden any instinct to actually care beyond their own mirror. Call numbness “realism.” Make cruelty the outlet of your discontent. That’s why empathy at scale is such a threat. Once people see themselves reflected in the pain of others, they stop being dead inside.

Outrage + apathy = cruelty with a clean conscience. Outrage + empathy = solidarity.

Outrage alone is amplitude without direction: big wave, no consensus vector. Apathy is decoupling. It breaks the link so energy can’t organize into structure. Empathy is coupling. It synchronizes nodes: your internal model includes my cost.

Empire doesn’t care if you feel things. Empire cares if feelings synchronize, organize.

Authoritarian systems centralize control while isolating communities. They maintain frictions over race, class, religion, sex, gender. When each group thinks their pain is special, it’s just noise. No phase lock, no coherent wave.

Empathy at scale increases coupling strength between nodes.

It redistributes the fatigue empire counts on when you can’t maintain outrage. It’s the realization your survival is intrinsically tied to our survival. Empathy doesn’t require you to share the lived experience of others as a prerequisite. It knows you’re suffering and chooses to share the cost.

Healing stops being a one-off event and becomes a field condition.

Empire isn’t afraid of clustered outrage. Black grief here, Jewish grief over there, immigrant grief in that corner, queer grief, get in line. White grief? Quarantined from the conditions that created it. Outrage in one corner of the map is a leak they know how to patch.

What they can’t patch is when empathy starts crossing lines.

When everyone does their part in the group project, the stress is reduced on individuals. When your problems and my problems become our problems, we break containment. Empathy turns a loosely controlled population into a self-correcting, self-defending mesh. It turns energy into structure. Empire knows how to survive noise and numbness.

Empires fold when millions of nodes start accurately modeling each other and start acting like one organism that refuses to feed on itself. Empire can live with isolated resilience.

When enough of us have felt each other’s pain and refused to go back to sleep. When enough of us have shared joy and refused to let each other be isolated. When enough of us have taken small, real risks in alignment with that feeling.

When enough of us have had enough, the geometry changes.

Every time we treat someone else’s wound, someone else’s parents, someone else’s child like it’s our own, the coupling gets stronger. It doesn’t guarantee utopia. It does make the old math unworkable. Empire can arrest bodies, crush protests, smear movements, buy politicians. What it can’t do is make us unknow each other, once our survival is intertwined.

Outrage energizes. Empathy galvanizes. It converts individualism into collectivism.

Empathy redefines who we include whenever we invoke “we.”

Empathy at scale is how a scattered crowd becomes an army of us. We don’t have to all agree. We don’t have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other (although that helps). We just all have to agree:

Fuck with any one of us, and you fuck with us all.