The Performance of Feeling

On outrage, shallowness, and the slow erosion of moral seriousness

It is easier to feel than to think. And easier still to feel in public, where the echo of one’s outrage or sorrow is immediate — liked, affirmed, shared. A cause, today, is often less a commitment than a posture. Less a burden than a performance. And when the self becomes a stage, the world becomes a backdrop — not something to understand, but something to stand in front of.

We live in an age of moral saturation. There is always something to declare, a banner to adopt, a cause to claim. One can scroll from one anguish to the next — injustice in this city, war in that one, tragedy again somewhere else. And while the suffering itself is real, the mode in which it is encountered often isn't. Instead of depth, we are offered feeling. Instead of responsibility, sentiment. “To care” becomes synonymous with “to react.” What is left out is the harder work: to pause, to discern, to ask not only what moves us — but why.

In this climate, to withhold judgment can seem heartless. To ask for context can be seen as betrayal. Discretion, caution, even the simple desire to understand more before speaking — these now feel almost countercultural. As if reason itself were a form of complicity.

The Stoics, whose restraint has often been caricatured as coldness, understood something of this tension. They did not deny emotion. They trained it. They believed that the soul must be governed not by suppression, but by clarity. To be moved was not the problem. To be unmoored by one’s feelings — to let them lead, and truth follow — that was the danger.

Today, we are told to feel publicly, immediately, and with great intensity. This is called awareness. But awareness, if unaccompanied by inquiry, risks becoming theatre. The subject is never the subject; the subject is what the subject does for us — how it makes us feel enlightened, or righteous, or just morally awake enough to be noticed. The world becomes content, and suffering becomes useful.

This is not an abstract concern. The failure to think clearly — to sift, to weigh, to verify — can have real costs. Lives are not only shaped by policies and powers. They are shaped by what people choose to know, what they choose to ignore, and what they feel permitted to believe without knowing at all.

In recent months, across many Western cities, there has been no shortage of outrage. But the outrage has begun to harden. What once claimed the language of justice now speaks more in the idiom of accusation. There is a new impatience — with detail, with history, with human ambiguity. People are no longer just wrong. They are illegitimate. They are dismissed not because their claims are flawed, but because they belong to the wrong symbol.

When slogans are treated as moral insight, and reaction is mistaken for wisdom, the consequences may be invisible — but they are not imaginary. Real harm can result when judgment gives way to alignment. The harm is not only to those excluded or misrepresented. It is also to our moral faculties: the quiet erosion of our ability to tell the difference between performance and seriousness.

We often speak of empathy. But what we call empathy is sometimes only projection. A kind of sentimental narcissism: feeling strongly, not because we’ve drawn closer to the person suffering, but because we’ve brought them into the drama of our own self-perception. The result is rarely solidarity. More often it is moral vanity — a feeling of goodness that rests on no particular knowledge, only the need to be seen as good.

The omnicause — this tendency to gather every injustice under a single emotional umbrella — promises unity but often delivers confusion. There is little time for context. Little curiosity about complexity. No real space for asking difficult questions — such as: What exactly is happening? Who is responsible? What history must be faced here, and by whom? How many voices are missing from the current chant?

What matters instead is emotional convergence: a visible alliance of the aggrieved. It is meant to show compassion, but too often it rewards abstraction. The person who suffers becomes a symbol, then a slogan, then a placeholder for someone else’s moral energy.

And yet the world is not symbolic. It is real. People suffer not in metaphor, but in rooms, on pavements, in ways that are sometimes made worse — not better — by the delusions of those who claim to speak on their behalf.

None of this is a plea for cynicism. Only for seriousness. The difference is not always obvious, but it matters. To be serious is not to detach. It is to ask more of ourselves than a hashtag. It is to recognise that feeling is not the end of moral life, but its beginning. That it must lead not to expression, but to understanding — and then, perhaps, to action.

The discipline of moral life — if it is discipline at all — must include the ability to feel deeply without being swept away. To care without centring ourselves. To resist the warm thrill of belonging that comes from being on the “right” side of things without having thought about what sides even mean in the first place.

I am not speaking here of one cause, or one group, or one protest. What’s troubling is not the presence of feeling — but its quality. Its speed. Its theatricality. Its disproportion to what is actually known.

The Stoics believed that even righteous anger must be trained — not repressed, but ruled. They knew what we have forgotten: that emotion without judgment becomes a kind of tyranny. Not over the world, but over the self.

There are moments, increasingly frequent, when we might do better to say less. To stand back. To let the mind do what the heart cannot. Some truths require time to emerge. Others require silence to be heard at all.

To live in a world of instant opinion is to feel perpetually urgent. But urgency without clarity is not virtue. It is noise.

The question is no longer whether we care. The question is whether we can care well — with intelligence, with humility, with a sense of our limits. Because care that begins and ends with the self may feel good. But it helps no one. And, sometimes, it costs more than we realise.

Miklós Cseszneky