The Anatomy of Moral Outrage

Why Kony 2012, Save Darfur, and Free Palestine became movements and other atrocities didn’t.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. —Ecclesiastes 1:2

Above: Proof that outrage has a supply chain.

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Before anything else, an unambiguous disclaimer: This writing is neither judgment nor condemnation. Not on the causes, not on the tragedies, and not on the people who champion them.

I’m not questioning anyone’s sincerity, grief, or solidarity. I’m not moralizing scale or implying insincerity, bad faith, ignorance, hypocrisy, or malice.

What follows is just an attempt to understand why, in a world on fire, some flames become bonfires while others fade away into embers.

Why do certain atrocities become hashtags, encampments, profile frames, and moral litmus tests…while others, often larger, longer, and objectively more brutal, hover at the margins as statistics and footnotes? Why do some horrors become cultural identity while others remain all but invisible?

I. The Attention Market

When tragedy competes with entertainment, breaking news, memes, celebrity deaths, and TikTok trends, only a few events make it to the top of the feed.

The internet has certain rules; not moral ones, mind you, but more mechanical ones:

• Simplify

• Amplify

• Polarize

• Repeat

A tragedy becomes viral when it can be encoded into a symbol, a slogan, a color palette, a hashtag, a profile frame, a chant.

If it requires nuance?

Context?

History?

Uncomfortable ambiguity?

It struggles to cross the threshold from “I read about that once” to “this is who I am now.” Or, it’s simply DOA.

For better or worse, outrage is not distributed proportionally to suffering, but to clarity.

The stories that spread best tend to share three properties:

• A clear victim

• A clear villain

• A clear role for the observer

And so suffering, sadly, becomes a market not of morality but of clarity and simplicity.

II. Outrage as Identity (Luxury Beliefs)

Author Rob Henderson coined the term luxury beliefs: beliefs that “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”

Once, wealth signaled itself through mink coats, imported marble, and towering mansions.

Now we indicate moral largesse with well-held positions that cater to the masses.

Worse still, comprehension is not a prerequisite for credibility.

Put simply, you need not understand or even agree with the ideology to enforce it or chant a few monosyllabic words. You just need your wits in order to sense which way the wind is blowing and position yourself accordingly.

This is the entire, pathetically sad psychology of viral activism.

Belief becomes no more than a membership card or badge of honor regardless of depth of understanding.

The question subtly shifts from: “What is happening, is it right/wrong, and how do I help?” to “What does supporting this say about me?”

It’s a simple, three-step process:

• A movement offers meaning

• Meaning offers identity

• Identity offers belonging

The belief often arrives after the badge is pinned on.

First the stance, then the script, then—maybe, just maybe—the conviction.

III. A Grim List: Some Genocides Are “Seen,” Most Are Not

As of 2025, multiple organizations and researchers flag the following as active genocide emergencies or mass atrocity zones:

• Gaza (Palestinians): 70,000+ killed since late 2023, most of the population displaced, infrastructure largely destroyed.

• Myanmar (Rohingya Muslims): Systemic persecution and apartheid-like conditions since 2017; over a million refugees.

• Sudan, especially Darfur (Black non-Arab Sudanese): 150,000+ killed since 2023, over 13 million displaced; the U.S. and UN use the language of genocide.

Beyond those:

• Nigeria: thousands of Christians killed in 2025 alone amid mass abductions and church attacks, with ongoing debate over the “genocide” label.

• Syria & Iraq: ongoing persecution of Christians and Yazidis, even if at a lower intensity than the peak of ISIS.

• Burkina Faso & the Sahel: civilians targeted by armed groups; towns starved and cut off.

• Ukraine, Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Eritrea, North Korea, and more: each with its own horrifying ledger of atrocities and displaced populations.

The point of listing these is not to compare body counts or declare one movement “worthy” and another “neglected.”

It’s just to notice something simple and disturbing: Our moral attention does not line up with the severity or number of dead. (Again, not that this can be quantified or qualified. Horror is horror, no matter which way you slice it).

Some of these contexts are omnipresent in conversation, protest, and culture.

Others are barely known outside niche circles.

Others still flare briefly when a particularly gruesome image escapes the gravity well of local suffering into the global feed then vanish, ne’er to be seen again.

All because they just don’t fit the topic du jour or proper zeitgeist.

IV. Kony 2012: The First Factory-Made Viral Atrocity

Kony 2012 offers a strange but useful reference point.

It wasn’t the largest atrocity on earth at the time. It was simply the first injustice engineered to fit the distribution mechanics of an early social internet.

I was in high school when it hit. Overnight, seemingly everyone knew the name Joseph Kony.

It felt unprecedented because it brought a distant horror into high school hallways and dorm rooms via a perfectly engineered narrative.

I remember that wave:

Teachers playing the video in class.

Friends sharing it non-stop.

Hell, at the time most of us couldn’t even finger Uganda on a map.

We didn’t understand the local context or regional politics, but we didn’t need to.

The campaign handed us:

• A single, recognizable villain

• A simple victim group

• A moral mission

• A clear call to action (“Make Him Famous”)

It was atrocity simplified into a brutally effective story template.

That template has only gotten more sophisticated and streamlined to cater to our collective ADD:

• A symbol or flag

• A slogan (“this is not complicated”)

• A way to display allegiance

• A way to mark opponents or the “uninformed”

In a way, Kony 2012 became the prototype for all the Internet activism we see today.

It didn’t matter whether the movement was durable, but that it was shareable.

V. Viral Outrage v. Silent Horror

Why does one cause ignite mass encampments, brand campaigns, profile frames, and corporate statements while another, equally or more severe, remains a grim bullet point buried in a sterile UN PDF?

A rough pattern emerges. Viral outrage tends to have:

• Narrative clarity

  • A clear victim and a clear villain (No ambiguity = no homework.)

• A visual identity

  • Colors, flags, slogans, hand signs (Something you can wear.)

• A defined role for the observer

  • If I march/post/support, I am good (Participation equals virtue.)

• Cultural reward

  • Belonging, approval, status, moral prestige (Silence looks suspicious.)

• Emotional simplicity

  • Anger + righteousness in one easy to swallow dose (No guilt, no confusion, no nuance.)

• Tribal alignment

  • It maps cleanly onto existing political or cultural fault lines (You know instantly who’s “with” or “against.”)

Meanwhile, the invisible atrocities tend to share the opposite traits:

• Complicated history

• No symbol or concise brand

• No obvious call to action

• No social reward for caring

• Emotional discomfort or cognitive dissonance

• No clean tribal alignment

Unfortunately, the deciding factor is rarely scale, but coherence, social permission, and (if we’re being honest) ease. Some suffering remains unseen simply because it’s difficult: too complex to chant, too morally entangled to wear, too uncomfortable to squash into a slogan.

And, as we have seen in the attention economy, difficulty is fatal.

The real test is “storyability.”

Can this be distilled into a narrative someone can repeat, signal with, and feel righteous about?

For better or worse, in the age of moral branding, a cause is something put on and worn like an old, comfy coat. Once moral urgency becomes wearable, suffering becomes fashion. And fashion, eventually, becomes forgettable.

VI. Do People Truly Believe or Just Join to Belong?

This brings us back to the uncomfortable question we’ve been circling all along: Are people acting out of deep belief? Or does belief emerge from the act of joining due to the social rewards of luxury beliefs?

The answer is probably “yes.”

Some stumble upon a cause, study it, internalize it, and stand by it at personal cost.

Others drift in by way of friends, feeds, and the vague sense that “this is the side good people are on.”

In The True Believers and Useful Idiots of the Academic Industrial Complex, I wrote:

In a word, these protests are [likely] no more than kayfabe, put on by those usual suspects seldom looked kindly on by history.

At best, the protestors are True Believers as defined by Eric Hoffer.

In his identically-titled book, the True Believer is someone who becomes deeply committed to a movement’s ideals because it offers the potential for escape from the dissatisfaction in his/her life. He writes, “Mass movements can rise and spread without God, but never without a belief in a devil.” Hatred of another group, he argued, is the most successful and comprehensive of all unifying agents…

At worst, the protestors are Useful Idiots as (allegedly) coined by Vladimir Lenin.

The “devil” can be an oppressor, an institution, a government, a religion, a class, a race, a flag.

Once that devil is named, the movement doesn’t need every member to be a theologian of the cause. It just needs them to know who to hate and who to trust.

Belief, it seems, is rarely a prerequisite.

Sometimes:

• We signal first.

• Belong second.

• And believe third.

Or, perhaps, we never do so at all.

VII. Ending Without Resolution

Some suffering becomes a movement.

Some becomes a headline for a day.

Some becomes data.

Most never leaves the dark.

This isn’t because we have become monsters, but because human attention isn’t built to scale with global pain. Instead, its efforts are focused on tribe, story, and symbol.

Justice doesn’t trend, but narratives sure do.

And in a world on fire, we don’t rush to the largest blaze; but to the one that throws off the best light for our supportive, hashtag-laden selfies.

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I’m afraid there’s no neat, clever takeaway here. Fittingly and ironically, this ending mirrors the movements it describes; it goes off not with a bang, but with a slow, fading whimper.

Regardless, I hope to leave you the lingering awareness and deep discomfort of noticing which tragedies we can’t stop seeing and which ones we never really saw at all.

And maybe that’s the deepest tragedy of all:

Not that some lives matter more, but that only precious few are ever treated as if they really do.

And worse still: not because these lives ever really mattered to us, but because being seen purportedly caring about them did.

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom