The Spectacle of Outrage: What Our Empires Forget When We Cling to Noise
Why manufactured outrage isn’t moral awakening — and how natural law still whispers beneath the clamor.
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We hit send. We share. We like, comment, and debate. We believe we’re raising awareness, calling out injustice, demanding accountability. But something ancient pulses beneath our modern rituals — something Rome would recognize. The spectacle. The distraction. The moral theater.
If we are not careful, our performance of outrage becomes a substitute for justice. Beneath every scandal, every fight, every headline flaring up is a pattern. One I see clearly as an autistic observer: the spiral of moral shock, followed by attention, then forgetting. And while the world applauds outrage, the real law — natural law, the sovereign law — remains unheeded.
The Manufactured Outrage Loop
Manufactured outrage has become our default setting. Scandals like Epstein’s — while horrifying — are not anomalies. They reverberate in the countless lesser-known assaults, the domestic abuses hushed behind closed doors, the femicides barely reported, the sexual violence survivors who are doubted. These are not surprises. They are repeating fractals of human cruelty.
Yet every time one of these stories breaks, society acts as though we’ve discovered something new. As though the moral ledger has shifted. The outrage becomes performance. We clamor for unsealed files, for justice through exposure, yet we ignore the victims’ words, further entrenching misogyny by sidelining the very people these crimes were committed against.
And now, once again, the cycle repeats. The internet hums with demands to “see the Epstein files,” as though the truth still requires proof. As though revelation itself will redeem us. But what is it we are really asking for? The names are less a mystery than our refusal to act on what we already know.
The same people shouting for disclosure pretend that misogyny requires documentation — that systemic abuse only becomes real once it’s printed and leaked. When I see people insisting they need the files to know whether Trump raped young girls, I can’t help but feel the absurdity of it all. He has already been convicted of rape. The record exists. The harm exists. What we are witnessing is not a quest for truth but a refusal to bear it.
Society has been told, time and again, what patriarchy looks like in practice — and yet it demands a new headline every time before it will believe. Teenage girls, in this system, are never treated as children. They are absorbed into the collective myth of male entitlement, marked as public property the moment they are perceived as desirable.
Everyone knows this, whether they admit it or not. It is the unspoken social law beneath colonialism, capitalism, and religion alike: the subjugation of women as both spectacle and resource. We raise daughters with whispered warnings, tell them how to stay safe, how to be small, how to be good — but what we never tell them is that the danger is not individual. It is structural. It is inherited. It is systemic.
Every empire has rewritten the boundaries of innocence to accommodate the appetites of its men. Under Rome, under Britain, under America — the same myth persists: that girls become women the moment men desire them, and that men become powerful the moment they take. That belief is the quiet engine of empire. And the collective denial of it is the glue that holds the illusion together.
Outrage as Entertainment
We claim that by hitting send or share, we are spreading awareness. But is this not the same spectacle the Romans used to pacify the masses as their empire rotted beneath the noise of the coliseum? The same hunger for blood, conflict, and moral superiority — only digitized, aestheticized, and fed to us in algorithmic doses.
We call it activism, discourse, or awareness, but so much of it feels indistinguishable from entertainment. The outrage, the retweets, the debates — they fill the same role the gladiators once did: keeping the people occupied while the empire crumbles.
The parallels are almost too clear. As ancient Rome normalized brutality as sport, we have rebranded it as culture. The rise of UFC and the fetishization of “grit,” “dominance,” and “violence as discipline” mirror our obsession with conflict as virtue. Even politics has become its own octagon — where the point is not progress but performance, not truth but victory. And like the cheering crowds of old, we are transfixed. The violence is not only external but psychological, moral, and spiritual. It numbs us to our own capacity for peace.
Empire, Patriarchy, and Denial
History repeats itself in patterns that are moral before they are political. The fall of empires — Roman, Ottoman, British, or American — always follows a similar spiral: wealth concentrates, empathy diminishes, spectacle replaces substance, and citizens are taught to worship strength over wisdom.
Gender relations follow suit. The more fragile an empire becomes, the more violently it tries to control women, queer people, and anyone whose existence threatens its illusion of order. Misogyny becomes both symptom and strategy — a way to reassert dominance as power begins to slip.
Look at the geopolitical landscape today: nations teetering between authoritarian nostalgia and democratic fatigue, leaders weaponizing gender politics to maintain control, and entire populations taught to fear difference rather than question hierarchy. The same scripts replay across continents — whether through state violence in Iran, reproductive repression in the United States, or the algorithmic amplification of male-supremacist ideologies worldwide. Each serves the same purpose: to keep the collective gaze fixed downward, inward, and divided.
Natural Law as Countercurrent
Still, beneath the noise, natural law persists — the quiet moral architecture that every civilization forgets at its peril. It is not man-made law, nor religious decree, but the intuitive sense of rightness that lives in the conscience of all beings.
Natural law reminds us that exploitation violates the order of existence itself. Harm against the vulnerable ruptures the spiritual balance that sustains both society and self.
“Law is nothing else than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.”
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 90, Art. 4
“The natural law is the origin and principle of all virtues and their acts, therefore we must first speak about natural law.”
— William of Auxerre
These voices echo across centuries to remind us: morality is not born of consensus but of conscience. To follow natural law is to resist the spectacle, to remember that the human spirit is ordered toward truth, not toward power.
Remembering What Empires Forget
As an autistic observer, I see it like a fractal: every outrage, every scandal, every war is a smaller echo of a larger spiritual imbalance. The same loop, repeating until we learn to interrupt it. We have mistaken awareness for awakening, progress for distraction, power for peace.
If there is hope — and I believe there is — it will not come from louder outrage but quieter observation. From stepping outside the cycle long enough to see it. From refusing to consume pain as spectacle. From listening — not just to victims, but to the deeper moral laws that still hum beneath all the noise.
Empires fall when they forget how to listen. People rise when they remember how to feel.
Reader Reflection
Where have you noticed outrage masquerading as truth?
How do we resist the lure of spectacle while still standing for justice?
If this piece resonates, share it — not as performance, but as practice. Let it linger. Let it trouble you. Let it return you to stillness, to conscience, to the laws that no empire can rewrite.