Numb to Blood, Hooked on the Outrage
This isn't just history; this is happening to you and me, right now.
My good friend and co-author, Jasper, and I are currently working on a new book, Bread, Wine, and Gains. The book, which will feature a series of essays that chart the origin, peak, and collapse of empires throughout the ages, will flow much like Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian, which drew inspiration from Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet.
An essay that I am currently in the midst of, The Printing Press Barons, dives into the realities of the industrialisation of ink and the consequent gate-keeping of knowledge by those who birthed the ‘Penny Press’. The Penny Press, for those who don’t know, is the moment in which newspaper owners realised that, through mass production, they could drop the price of each individual unit from six cents down to a single penny, making daily news affordable to the working class for the very first time.
It was a democratisation of information that, ultimately, proved to be a Trojan horse. Through the act of dropping the price below the actual cost of production, the publishers fundamentally altered the economics of truth. The revenue no longer came from the reader; instead, it came from advertising. Essentially, the working-class reader was no longer the customer. The reader was the product, and their attention was being sold in bulk.
As I wrote in the essay:
‘The sudden influx of millions of people into dense urban centres, combined with this daily, advertiser-funded bombardment of printed news, had a huge impact on human psychology. The sociologist Georg Simmel, in his seminal work on the metropolis, observed that the human being actually becomes hyper-rational after the over-exposure of information and sensory input. He concluded that the “modern mind has become more and more a calculating one.”
This is a critical, often misunderstood mechanism of societal control. We assume that flooding a population with information makes them enlightened. In reality, it forces the mind to adopt a calculating, hyper-rational coping mechanism simply to deconstruct and survive the overwhelming world around them. The citizen in the industrial metropolis is so bombarded with political updates, economic panics, and sensationalised crime that they lose the ability to process the abstract picture too deeply. They become numb, analytical, and highly susceptible to whoever controls the flow of that sensory input. And that, I suspect, was always the intention.’
I believe wholeheartedly in that idea. In fact, this very morning, I experienced that analytical numbness. Just yesterday evening, not too many roads away from my home in Liverpool, a man was shot. I woke to the news. I felt very little. But why did I feel so little? Most likely because the very same act occurred just a couple of months ago, also not so far away, and because, in the news, we see acts of violence, whether murderous, sexual, or otherwise, on an almost daily basis. And thus, I am becoming desensitised to acts that, quite rightly, should have me and all others up in arms.
But, to get to the point of this short missive…
This, let’s call it, psychological scar tissue, our collective habituation to local crime, is something that the descendants of the Penny Press barons understand perfectly. They know that a population bombarded by daily violence will eventually stop reacting to it. So, what’s the solution?
We have, by now, all heard or read about the tragic killing of Henry Nowak and the questionable actions of the police on the scene. We have heard the horrific details; I need not go further on that.
To this incident, a numb audience is an unprofitable one. And so, if the raw tragedy no longer holds our attention, the media must find a different lever to pull. They must, ultimately, switch from reporting on the grief to weaponising the outrage. And, quite clearly, we saw the mechanics of this laid bare just two evenings ago.
In the aftermath of this murder, political leaders on all sides of the spectrum rightly spoke out on the matter. One, in particular, caught a lot of media focus. Addressing the policing failures and the public unrest that followed, Nigel Farage released a video stating that the British public should respond to the tragedy with ‘pure, cold rage’.
Later that evening, on BBC Newsnight, presenter Matt Chorley addresses Farage’s comments. But Chorley did not quote Farage accurately. Instead, he altered the phrasing, stating thrice that Farage had called for ‘white cold rage’. Naturally, this discrepancy was highlighted post-viewing, and the BBC has since issued an apology, scrubbed the episode from its platforms, and waved the incident away as a simple slip of the tongue, a ‘misremembering’ of the quote.
Indeed, that might be true. It could be down to broadcaster clumsiness. Of course, it could also be a calculated, deliberate smear designed to paint a political figure as the instigator of a race war. Whichever answer stands true, the function of the misquote within our media ecosystem is exactly the same; it is a desperate, highly effective tactic to break through our analytical numbness.
By injecting a simple word, ‘white’, into the discourse, the narrative instantly shifted away from a profound institutional failure and the tragic loss of life. It bypassed the grief entirely and went straight for the cultural jugular. The media machine knows that while we may be desensitised to urban violence, we remain highly, reliably combustible when it comes to tribal division and racial provocation.
Going back to the book, it can only be said that this is the grim reality of the attention economy birthed by those early industrial publishers. When the public mind adopts a calculating coping mechanism to survive the over-exposure of information, the media need only change its formula. They stop selling us the tragedy and start selling us our own manufactured division. At the very essence, you could say that we are now numb to the things that should matter and artificially hyper-sensitised to the provocations of those who control the sensory input.
I suppose I should finish this missive by highlighting the elephant in the room. The selective curation reveals a glaring hypocrisy in how the media establishment sanctions public grief: when George Floyd gasped for air under police restraint, rage on the streets was championed as a righteous global awakening, yet when Henry Nowak died, echoing those exact same pleas, that very same public outrage was instantly smeared as an illegitimate, dangerous provocation.
I think that’s an interesting point, worth considering.