“People these days are either completely apathetic or they’re so full of rage that they can’t think!”

You say this like it’s a bad thing. If you make people think, that’s uncomfortable. When you ask questions, you make them reconsider their hard-won certainties. Which in academia or politics is a good thing.

In life, it’s not.

We exist in a world that does not tolerate free thought or expression. ‘Not thinking’ is the norm. It’s actually an essential job skill. One cannot perform a function involving either mindless tedium or utter commitment to an ultimately inane or futile goal while exercising the imagination, and to attempt to do so invites insanity. ‘Considering all sides’ is a luxury, and as a society we’re mentally impoverished.

But that’s merely the practical angle.

Bear in mind too that the human psyche was not designed to handle regular exposure to repetitive trauma. If it were, PTSD wouldn’t be a D; it would be normal. Nevertheless, we persist in our compulsive engagement with 24-7 disaster porn infotainment operating in the guise of essential news. Our brains, organs consisting of three pounds of fatty bacon that mimic rationality while running on electricity and designer hormones, did not evolve (or were not designed) to tell the difference between watching women and children get beheaded on the evening news and doing so in real life.

Those who can do that and thrive are, at best, high-functioning sociopaths. Those who cannot, which is most of us, are the walking wounded.

Some few of us have adopted a sort of perpetual rage as a coping mechanism. Anger pumps enough adrenaline to provide motive force, and for endorphins we rely largely on regular injections of self-righteousness alternating with indignation. There’s no room in that mix for rationality; if it existed, it would be entirely superfluous.

Many aren’t so lucky. We who were born with the ability to empathize are irreversibly emotionally scarred by the time we attain maturity. Most of us can no longer bring ourselves to bear the burden of caring yet again for whatever the tragedy of the day happens to be this time. We turn it off not because we’re heartless but rather because we’re trying to find a way to go on in spite of all our pain.

In our situation, anger and apathy are not bad things. They merely are, and must be acknowledged as such. To behave in such a fashion is fundamentally human.

It’s a survival mechanism.

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