Good morning. Did you just wake up?
Do things seem different?
People living inside an imperial center do not wake up one morning to tanks in the streets. They wake up to erosion. To wages that no longer sustain life. To institutions that no longer serve public need. To promises that grow thinner with every repetition.
They are told this is temporary. That sacrifice now will bring stability later.
But later never comes.
What people begin to notice is not ideology but contradiction.
They did what they were told. They worked harder. They complied. They adapted. And still the ground beneath them keeps shifting. New day, still fucked.
This moment is unsettling because it forces a question the system works very hard to suppress. What if this is not a failure of the system, but its normal operation?
At first, people struggle to protect their own position. They chase credentials. They attempt to outrun decline. This is understandable.
That's precisely the response power depends on.
A population fighting for individual survival is a population that does not organize.
The real shift occurs when the realization moves beyond the individual.
Frantz Fanon understood this well. Writing about colonial societies, he showed how domination survives by persuading people that their suffering is personal, cultural, or deserved. What appears as individual failure is in fact a rational response to imposed conditions. Liberation begins not with outrage alone, but with recognition that what is experienced privately is produced collectively.
Paulo Freire made the same point in the realm of education and consciousness. Oppression, he argued, persists when people internalize it as personal inadequacy.
Transformation begins when people see their condition as a common reality shaped by political and economic forces. Without that recognition, outrage becomes noise.
With it, solidarity becomes possible.
Hannah Arendt approached the problem from the perspective of power and obedience. Systems of domination rely on isolation.
When people experience vulnerability alone, they are easier to manage.
Atrocities do not require monsters.
They require ordinary people who stop thinking relationally, who no longer ask how their lives are connected to the lives of others.
Separation, not cruelty, is the enabling condition.
James Baldwin spoke to this from inside the imperial center itself. He warned that refusing to recognize oneself in the suffering of others was not innocence, but self deception. A society that defines itself through domination cannot remain psychologically or morally intact.
Recognition, Baldwin insisted, was not charity. It was survival.
bell hooks rejected politics rooted in moral superiority or permanent outrage. Domination continues, she argued, when people cling to individual status instead of collective liberation.
People do not come together because they are shamed into caring. They come together when they understand that their futures are bound together.
Do you see what I'm getting at?
The most powerful move is not outrage. Outrage can be absorbed. It can be redirected. It can be exhausted.
It's not Trump. It's the system in which Trump works. It's been there since long before he arrived.
If you are only outraged at Trump, the same system will continue long after he's gone.
Criticizing Trump is not a power move.
The real power move is recognition.
Recognition that the people who have borne the costs all along are not alien, defective, or lesser, but subject to the same human constraints with fewer protections.
This is where politics changes.
Fighting for the individual self reinforces competition. Fighting for the collective self undermines it. One response fragments. The other creates cohesion grounded in shared exposure to the same system of power.
It's not ideology. It's seeing reality.
And today, this recognition is becoming harder to contain.
The scale of current events has grown too extreme to be safely managed as background tragedy. Violence is no longer distant. Suffering is no longer abstract. It unfolds continuously, in plain view.
This creates a problem for the establishment, because suffering at this scale threatens legitimacy.
It takes only a single moment of empathy for the logic to break. One moment when someone recognizes that the people of Palestine, Venezuela, Sudan, Yemen, the former Yugoslavia, and countless others are not suffering because of ancient hatreds or inevitable chaos, but because their suffering serves profit.
Not the public good. Not universal security. Profit.
Their dispossession stabilizes markets.
Their poverty maintains leverage.
Their deaths are treated as unfortunate but necessary costs in a system organized around return on investment rather than human need.
Once this connection is seen, even briefly, the moral narrative collapses.
This is why language becomes evasive. Why suffering is framed as tragic but unavoidable. Why entire populations are reduced to abstractions or threats. This is why dehumanization is manufactured.
The objective is not simply to justify violence, but to prevent identification. To keep the line between them and us intact.
Because the moment that line breaks, the system is revealed for what it is. Not a moral order. A transfer mechanism.
And this is when unraveling begins.
Not because people suddenly become virtuous, but because they recognize that the machinery grinding others down is now grinding toward them. That there is no permanent inside. No protected class immune from the consequences of endless accumulation.
At that point, outrage is no longer the danger to the system.
Recognition is.
Because recognition turns spectators into participants. It transforms isolated anxiety into shared understanding. It makes collective action a matter of necessity, not altruism.
That is the real power move in dark times.
Not outrage.
Not purity.
Recognition.
Understanding that dehumanization is fake - it's a tool designed to keep you afraid and compliant.
Seeing that the people who have been paying the price all along are not alien, defective, or lesser, but operating under the same human constraints with fewer buffers.
That is how movements stop being symbolic and start becoming dangerous to entrenched power.
Not because they are loud, but because they are hard to divide.
Once people see it clearly, the story cannot be restored.
And power understands this very well.