You’re being exploited.
- Jan 12
- 2 min read
Not long ago I saw a poster that stopped me. "The only thing we have to fear,” it read, “is how easily I can make you afraid."
It was tongue in cheek, hanging on a PR firm’s office wall. But it brought up a very uncomfortable truth for me. Even when our disagreements with the other side are genuine and critical, we're also being manipulated into hating each other by what author Amanda Ripley calls "conflict entrepreneurs”: people who exploit all-consuming and self-perpetuating us-vs-them conflict for their own ends.
I like how my friend Manu Meel, CEO of Bridge USA, puts it: "We have an Outrage Industrial Complex that recognizes and understands that we're all pawns in a game."
These conflict entrepreneurs sell fear and outrage. They peddle in caricatures and contempt for people who disagree with them. They’ve figured out that the quickest path to our attention (and our wallets) is to make us afraid of, and angry at, millions of Americans we’ve never even met.
But we don't have to be pawns in this game. We don’t even have to play it.
Unplugging from the Outrage Industrial Complex brings us home to what’s around us and what restores us. It frees up more time and energy to be with our friends and families. It makes us less likely to just react to our problems and more likely to meaningfully respond to them.
Most important of all, though, putting down the media firehose keeps us all from becoming conflict entrepreneurs ourselves.
Take it from a former digital beat reporter who was once thoroughly convinced that unplugging from media spaces would cost me everything. (Even my job.) Now I know that taking meaningful time away isn’t just possible. It’s essential.
Concerned you might be getting too caught up in the media madness out there?
Next time you consume a piece of political media, track what you’re taking away from it. Does it make you feel hopeless, like there's nothing productive you can do? Does it seem to go out of its way to insult the other side? Do you feel a little bit grimy, like when you eat too much junk food?
If so, ask yourself if you really need to go back for more.
And let me know what you decide…
Stay curious,
