Quote of the Day

I’m seeing a lot of us vs them rhetoric right now.

A man was shot and the timelines lit up with tribal chest beating.

There’s a sort of engineered frenzy that tells millions of strangers to feel attacked on cue and to answer with collective blame.

People graft their sense of self onto a mass identity because it is easier than standing alone. I get it. The group supplies ready-made meaning, ready-made enemies, and ready-made scripts for grief and anger.

When something happens to a figure near that group, the borrowed self experiences it as a personal wound. The nervous system fires as if family was hit. The algorithm notices, pours gasoline, and a person forgets they are a person.

They become a role. They perform the role loudly because the role rewards them with belonging. This is how the individual dissolves.

Parasocial attachment finishes the job. A commentator speaks into your head for years and your mind, built for villages, mistakes proximity for kinship. Suddenly the stranger is “ours,” and the event is “about me,” and the most primitive circuitry takes the wheel.

Outrage feels like virtue. Blanket blame feels like clarity. Calls for payback feel like strength. None of that is agency.

Power feeds on exactly this. Political machines live on attention, emotion, and fear. They need you sorted into blocs, preferably angry ones, because angry blocs are easy to mobilize and easy to tax.

The chant writes itself: “This proves everything I already believed!”

Notice how perfect that is. One incident becomes a voucher for every preloaded narrative. Nothing new is learned, but the leash is tightened.

The class that benefits is the same class that always benefits, and it is not you.

Dylan Allman @dylanmallman
Posted on X, September 10, 2025

I’ve always liked psychology and sociology.

This seems plausible.