Rejecting the Economy of Performative Rage

Rage has become a cultural economy and one of the few remaining markets where inflation is not only welcomed but rewarded. The rules are simple: visibility demands intensity, and intensity demands anger. The more angered we appear, the more morally awake we seem.

Anger is no longer merely an emotion but a credential, a public demonstration of vigilance, conviction, and belonging.

You can see it in the way small missteps by public figures — an actor’s poorly phrased comment, a politician’s off-hand remark, a celebrity posting the wrong image on Instagram — are immediately elevated to moral emergencies.

The speed at which people polarised over Depp vs. Heard, or or how instantly Will Smith became a global morality litmus test after the Oscars slap, with millions forced into binary judgement before even processing what they’d witnessed, reveals how quickly our culture converts irritation into spectacle. Imagine if the world had waited 24 hours before condemning Marcus Rashford for missing a penalty, or if audiences paused before attacking a comedian over an unpolished podcast clip.

Yet something in us knows the hollowness of this exchange. The longer we trade in performative rage, the more spiritually and relationally impoverished we become.

The Emotional Market We Didn’t Mean to Join

Most of us did not consciously sign up for it, but slowly, gradually, we were trained by the platforms we inhabit. Digital spaces reward what draws us in fastest, and that is emotion without reflection, and condemnation without conversation. Outrage became a kind of emotional short-hand as the quickest way to appear principled, courageous, or aligned with “the correct side.”

You can see this in the churn of social media storms. How one out-of-context video of a schoolteacher, a misinterpreted photo of a climate activist, or a half-true headline about a minor celebrity can ignite days of frenzied judgement. We are outraged long before we are informed.

But this shift has quietly reshaped how we understand ourselves. Where earlier generations saw emotions as teachers — fear leading toward wisdom, grief prompting solidarity, awe expanding moral imagination — we have flattened emotional life into a perpetual readiness to take offence.

Nuance, uncertainty, and humility have become liabilities. The economy of rage demands certainty, immediacy, and spectacle.

It is an economy where empathy is simply unprofitable.

What Performative Rage Extracts from Us

The tragedy is not merely interpersonal; it is profoundly intrapersonal. There is something corrosive about constantly needing to display anger to retain credibility. Even when the cause is just, something happens to a soul forced to metabolise indignation as its staple diet.

It becomes difficult to see another person as a person.
Outrage requires targets, not interlocutors. To stay angry, we must treat the other as a symbol of threat rather than a human being animated by wounds, hopes, and fears of their own. Anger becomes easier than imagination, simpler than genuine moral engagement.

Fear becomes mislabelled as fury.
Most public anger is thinly veiled anxiety; the fear of cultural displacement, of losing belonging, of being unmasked as insufficiently righteous or insufficiently informed. Fear disguised as anger, however, cannot do the deep work fear is meant to do. In the ancient world, fear was a sober doorway to wonder, humility, and discernment. Modern performative fury is its brittle impersonation.

Our identities begin to calcify around hostility.
When a person’s belonging is secured by being visibly enraged, they must keep performing it. The stakes are existential: if I cease to be angry, do I still belong here? Does my tribe still claim me? Do I still matter? Entire communities now operate on the fragile glue of shared resentment.

And the deepest cost is that anger which must never cool becomes anger that cannot heal.

A Different Emotional Imagination

Rejecting performative rage requires not the absence of anger, but the recovery of emotional maturity. In the biblical texts, “slow anger” is a virtue because it creates space for discernment. This becomes an anger that listens before speaking, that diagnoses before condemning; one that is grounded in reverence rather than adrenaline.

This older emotional imagination (found in not only in Christian scripture, but also Greek tragedy, rabbinic reflection, and many religious ethics) assumes that fear, grief, and anger each have a role in forming wisdom. They are to be engaged, interrogated, and allowed to mature. They are not meant to be broadcast as self-branding.

We need to rediscover what the ancients took for granted, that the emotional life is meant for formation, not performance.

And so, we must also begin to practise alternatives, not as a list of virtues, but as a slow and deliberate rehumanising of our social world.

Cultivate curiosity
Curiosity does not excuse harm, it simply refuses to reduce a person to the worst thing about them. It asks, “what fear or story sits beneath this surface?” This question does not weaken moral clarity, it deepens it.

Allow fear to speak honestly
To ask, “what am I afraid of here?” is emotionally braver than declaring, “this makes me angry.” Fear opens a window, whereas anger shuts a door.

Recover silence
Silence disrupts the performance rage economy. It creates space for conscience instead of performance and for humility instead of memorised tribal scripts. Silence simply makes outrage unprofitable.

Rebuild belonging
Communities held together by rage cannot outlast the energy needed to maintain the emotion. Communities formed through story, table, and vulnerability, however, can, because these things feed community like an animal, rather than use it up like fuel.

Reclaiming the Emotional Life

To reject the economy of performative rage is not to become passive or indifferent. It is to reclaim a more ancient and humane emotional grammar, one where our reactions serve our formation rather than our reputations.

It is to believe that anger has a place, but it should rarely be the first place, and certainly not the final one. Instead we should insist that emotional depth is possible in an age of emotional spectacle. Perhaps most radically, we should strive to hope that the human heart can be oriented once more toward empathy, wisdom, and courageous honesty.

Because the truth is that there are forms of fear, anger, sorrow, and awe that make us more human, not less, but we will only find them if we stop trying to perform our righteousness and instead begin to attend to our souls.

This is the rebellion our time most needs.

Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash