You can see it happening in real time. Someone posts:
“Please, explain to me like I’m four years old. Why is Luigi Mangione being tried as a terrorist while the guy who shot the lawmakers in Minnesota isn’t?”
The internet answers, of course. Reddit, Threads, Instagram, Facebook. Each comment piles up like cheap insulation, trying to muffle the real noise.
It’s a ritual, not a question. You know the ritual because you’ve done it. If you haven’t done it, you’ve witnessed it. The public bathing in ignorance. The cleansing power of “I don’t get it.” The performance of helplessness. Not confusion, exactly. Not humility, not really. Something closer to affective laundering. Wash your hands of responsibility before you even touch the argument.
Here’s the secret: everyone already knows why.
The reason Luigi gets called a terrorist while the shooter in Minnesota doesn’t is so obvious it hurts to say it out loud. It’s about who was killed. It’s about power. It’s about money, race, status, narrative. Pick your poison. Systemic classism (or racism, sexism, etc. as applicable), late-stage capitalism, MAGA, cop brain, culture war, the unkillable conviction that some lives are worth more than others and some violence counts as justice, the rest as disorder.
But we keep pretending while we play dumb, together.
Maybe you want to keep the peace.
Maybe you’re scared of what happens if you actually say it.
Maybe you’re so exhausted by the machinery of outrage that feigned innocence feels like a vacation.
Or maybe it’s just easier. Easier to imagine you live in a world of mysteries and not a world of organized, comprehensible rot.
I want to call this what it is: cowardice, most days. But on other days, maybe it’s grief, or boredom, or the slow-motion self-humiliation of knowing and not naming, wanting and not willing, scrolling and not seeing. Maybe it’s just the way everyone learned to stay safe, post-2016, post-pandemic, post-truth, post-everything. No one wants to be called shrill. No one wants to be the one who breaks the mood.
(I admit, some days I’d settle for a juice box and a simplified chart myself.)
Let’s not pretend this is a simple matter of evasion or a conscious grab for immunity. The simpleton stance is often less about individual cowardice than about a collective desire to preserve the gentle architecture of group comfort, to stave off the disruption that comes when someone finally says what everyone already suspects. When you say, “I’m just asking,” what you are really asking is for the rest of us to join you in the performance of not-knowing, to conspire in maintaining the illusion that the question is still open, that the mystery is unsolved, that we are all equally innocent of insight and equally insulated from the consequences of naming it.
This is not merely a refusal to do the work of understanding or a refusal to enter the argument on its actual terms; it is a softer, more pervasive form of self-preservation, one that seeks not just to protect the individual from the cost of clarity, but to hold the group together by keeping things comfortably unresolved.
If you genuinely lack comprehension, you have wandered into the wrong room. There are places for that: introductory lectures, private journals, therapy sessions, the company of those who have not yet learned to read the world as it is.
But in these spaces, the ones where power is actually at stake, the truth is rarely as opaque as the questioner would like to believe. Most of the time, you know perfectly well what’s happening; the ache comes not from confusion but from the recognition that naming the pattern (calling it racism, or class discipline, or the slow machinery of capitalist violence) will cost you something irreplaceable. You risk losing not just the comfort of ambiguity, but your place in the unspoken agreement that we will all, together, keep our objections provisional, our outrage deniable, our knowledge suspended in the safety of group uncertainty.
So we settle for the mood of bewilderment, cultivate a communal ignorance that allows outrage to circulate as spectacle rather than as threat, a posture of resistance that has already agreed to stop short of rupture.
Meanwhile, the machinery endures. The system, whatever you choose to call it, remains perfectly legible to itself. The categories hold. The scripts are reissued.
The boundaries of who gets tried as a terrorist and who gets framed as a troubled soul are drawn and redrawn, headline after headline, policy after policy, nervous glance after nervous glance. We pretend at not knowing because the alternative is to step outside the circle and say what the room would rather not hear.
This is how we keep the temperature comfortable: we sustain each other’s not-knowing by letting the room remain soft, the questions harmless, the stakes safely ambiguous. It’s easier for everyone if we never quite say what we suspect, if we allow confusion to stand in for recognition. Nothing moves until someone is willing to say what the silence keeps circling.
If clarity costs too much, then comfort becomes the currency of the crowd.
But let’s not confuse this safety with virtue, or group quiet with any kind of truth. The real price is paid in everything that goes unsaid. This is not a call for cruelty, but for the restoration of consequence. If you cannot name what is happening, step aside for those who will. The price of clarity is high, but the cost of its absence is higher.
I write about topics like this because they both fascinate and concern me. I’m curious how other people feel about this phenomenon. Leave a comment below.