Farid Zaid and Daniel Heller
Charlie Kirk is dead, and the outrage machine is alive and well. In the hours and days after the shooting, familiar incentives took over, rewarding the voices that simplified, sanctified and blamed at scale.
The performance was grim and predictable. Both sides fixated on how their “allies” and “enemies” assembled the facts in fundamentally different ways, as if we are living in two entirely different realities. Across the digital public square and on cable television, left and right spoke in mirrored cadences of grief, accusation and victimhood. One side’s martyr was the other’s monster. One side’s call for justice was the other’s claim of incitement. Both camps, even while disavowing extremism, drew from the same rhetorical playbook. They were using the same tools to prosecute a moral war.
This shared playbook, amplified by a social media ecosystem that profits from conflicts, makes the ground more fertile for the next act of violence. To understand how to stop it, we must first pull back the curtain on the outrage machine itself and examine the parts that are hidden in plain sight.
When a tragedy like the Kirk killing occurs, it is immediately absorbed into an ongoing moral conflict. It ceases to be an event and becomes a weapon. The tactics used to weaponise it are consistent across the ideological spectrum — they are designed to simplify reality, heighten emotion and solidify in-group loyalty.
First, there is the move toward martyrdom. An individual’s life and death are flattened into a potent symbol. For his supporters, Charlie Kirk was instantly sanctified as a martyr for free speech, for faith, for a besieged vision of America. His complexities were erased, replaced by a heroic effigy. For his opponents, he became a different kind of martyr — not to principle but to the claimed inevitabilities of “dangerous speech”. His death was framed as proof that toxic ideas carry toxic consequences, and his character was reduced to a cautionary tale rather than a person. In this telling, a man who showed no empathy to the marginalised was owed none back.
From both perspectives, the person disappears, and the symbol takes over, serving as a vessel for a dozen different political causes.
Second, this symbolic battle is fought on the terrain of sacred values, principles framed as untouchable and non-negotiable: free speech, family values, equity, national sovereignty, social justice. Once a conflict is elevated to the sacred, compromise looks like betrayal and disagreement reads as sacrilege. These values resist cost-benefit analysis and fuel moral outrage — a uniquely powerful emotion that signals a threat to the group’s core identity. Attempts to negotiate or find middle ground are seen as corrupt, only intensifying the belief that extreme measures are warranted.
Finally, the playbook demands moral amplification and defensive framing. The deceased is cast in stark, opposing terms: either as a man of courage and conviction or as a morally corrupt and dangerous demagogue. The effect on the audience is the same regardless of the framing: a surge of moral outrage and a heightened sense of their own virtue. This provides a feeling of moral licence to act in ways — cruelty, dehumanisation, calls for retribution — that might otherwise contradict their stated values.
This is then reinforced by a posture of victimisation. Both sides use the killing to portray their own in-group as the true victims of media demonisation, systemic bias or violent threats. This defensive crouch deepens grievance and makes self-reflection impossible.
This shared rhetorical playbook does not operate in a vacuum. It is powered by the vast and intricate machinery of our shared social media ecosystem — an engine designed for conflict, not conversation.
The engine runs on a single fuel: human attention. The platforms that host our public discourse are not neutral platforms; they are attention-harvesting businesses. Their currency is not truth or justice, but engagement — clicks, shares, likes and time spent scrolling. Every action you take is tracked, creating a sophisticated psychological profile used to feed you content that will keep you hooked. And the most reliable way to capture and hold human attention is to provoke a strong emotional reaction, most often anger or fear.
This business model supercharges a long-understood psychological principle: group polarisation. Decades before social media, researchers knew that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to end up at a more extreme version of their initial position. Social media intensifies this effect exponentially. It connects us with millions who think and feel the same way, creating a sense of belonging while encouraging insularity. It removes the natural guardrails of human interaction — eye contact, tone of voice, real-time feedback — making cruelty easier and silencing the conflicted or curious. The result is that extreme views begin to look like mainstream consensus, as algorithms act as both matchmaker and megaphone.
This creates a market for outrage. Journalists, politicians and activists are incentivised to use inflammatory language because it performs better. Studies suggest that the inclusion of a single moral-emotional word in a social media post can increase its diffusion substantially. Words like attack, blame, hate and destroy are not just descriptors — they are engagement-drivers.
Our brains are not wired to withstand this constant emotional siege. The rapid-fire delivery of provocative content keeps our nervous systems on high alert, leaving us anxious, overloaded and exhausted. To cope, we revert to cognitive shortcuts and primitive thinking: us versus them, good versus evil. This chronic exposure to what feels like uncontrollable stress can lead to despair and cynicism, a form of learned helplessness. This cynicism is not a neutral position; it benefits the conflict entrepreneurs who exploit our despair to dull resistance and make extreme solutions seem not only plausible, but necessary.
How do we break free? The answer is not to disengage, but to engage differently. It requires us to adopt a set of conscious, ethical principles for navigating our public life.
First, and most fundamentally, we must condemn political violence without qualification. In the wake of assassination like Charlie Kirk’s, there can be no room for equivocation. Achieving this clarity, however, means confronting a dangerous conceptual bleed that has eroded this principle for years: the popularisation of the notion that offensive speech is a form of physical harm. This is a poisonous fallacy. As free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff recently put it:
Words are not bullets. Words can’t strike a man from 142 yards away, causing a torrent of blood to erupt from his wound, sending him first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Only bullets can do that.
The distinction between speech and violence is not a minor detail; it is the bedrock of a free and pluralistic society, painstakingly established to prevent conflicts over ideas from becoming physical conflicts. When we teach people to treat words they despise as a physical attack, we hand them a moral permission slip to respond with force, justifying their own aggression as a form of self-defence. This dangerous trope must be retired once and for all.
Second, we must reject collective blame and judge individuals. Our habit of saying “the left did this” or “the right believes that” is a lazy cognitive shortcut that is both inaccurate and destructive. This tactic is a cornerstone of propaganda because it simplifies the world into a tidy battle of good versus evil, providing a clear enemy to rally against. It dissolves personal responsibility into a fog of tribal identity, making genuine dialogue impossible. After all, one cannot reason with a monolithic entity, only fight it.
Blaming an entire, diverse group for the actions of a few is a way to avoid the hard work of understanding reality. It allows us to feel righteous while absolving us of the need to engage with the actual problems our country faces — problems that will always require negotiation and patience with individual human beings.
Third, we must learn to embrace “both/and” thinking. The outrage machine runs on the fuel of simple, binary choices: you are either with us or against us, a patriot or a traitor, a warrior for justice or a fascist. But the real world is a place of confounding complexity. A person can have said hateful things and still not deserve to be murdered. An institution can be deeply flawed and still be worth reforming. To hold two competing ideas in tension is a mark of cognitive and moral maturity. This is not a call for bland centrism, but for a courageous engagement with reality as it is. It requires a willingness to sit with the discomfort of nuance, a discipline that runs directly counter to the instant, frictionless certainties served up by our digital feeds.
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Fourth, we can cultivate a habit of critical media literacy by asking a simple, powerful question: “Who profits?” When you feel that surge of moral certainty or overwhelming anger online, pause. Ask yourself: Who profits from me feeling this way right now? The profit is not always financial; it can be political capital for a candidate, social status for an influencer, or relevance for a media outlet. This question is a circuit breaker. It pulls us out of the role of a participant in the scripted moral drama and reframes us as an observer of the system that produces it. It is an act of reclaiming our own emotional agency from the algorithms and actors who seek to manipulate our responses for their own gain, shifting us from passive consumers of emotion to active analysts of the forces shaping our world.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, we must have the courage not to retreat from disagreement, but to engage in it more constructively. The solution is not to have fewer arguments, but to have better ones. This requires us to reclaim a different understanding of politics: not as a battlefield for friends and enemies, but as a shared arena for fellow citizens who hold deeply different visions for the future. Our disagreements are profound, but no victory can be total and no solution permanent. The people we see as our political adversaries are not going away; they are a permanent part of our society and our fragile democracy. They will be part of our shared future — a future we must build together. Any politicking that denies this basic reality is not only delusional, but dangerously so. It is a path that guarantees more violence, deeper grief, and more power for the very outrage machine we must learn to dismantle.
And if all else fails, when the dark pits of moral outrage keep finding you, there is a final act of resistance: log off. This is not retreat, it is a strategic withdrawal. As we have said, the machine runs on our attention. Withholding it lets our nervous systems reset, breaks the cycle of provocation, and reminds us that the high-conflict world curated on our screens is not the whole of reality. Spend time with loved ones. Get outside. Reconnect with the quiet dignity of life beyond the glow of the screen.
None of these choices are simple or intuitive. But they do something remarkable: they make room for people, not just positions. They remind us that speaking is not just about being heard — it’s about being understood. And listening is not just about staying quiet; it’s about making space for someone else’s reality.
Polarisation tells us that compassion is weakness, that hope is naïve. But history, and our own lives, prove otherwise. Human beings are capable of astonishing cruelty, yes. But we are also capable of staggering kindness. The difference lies in which part of ourselves we choose to feed.
We will fail at this more often than not. But that’s the point of an ideal. It isn’t a finish line. It’s a direction. An orientation. To turn toward compassion, even imperfectly, is to resist despair. It is to insist that a better tomorrow is possible. And in a world that profits from division, there may be no act more radical than that.
Farid Zaid is a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at Monash University, whose work explores reasoning, metacognition and the productive role of discomfort in learning.
Daniel Heller is a Senior Lecturer in East European Jewish History at Monash University, trained in both history and psychology. His research examines East European Jewish life, Israeli–Palestinian relations and the psychology of conflict and cooperation, with a focus on identity, memory and how communities relate across difference.
Together, Farid and Daniel co-direct the Brave Conversations Project at Monash University. The program combines community outreach, industry engagement and partnerships across government and the private sector with research on discomfort, uncertainty tolerance, and constructive disagreement. It also provides practical education and training for staff and students in secondary and tertiary education, equipping participants with tools to have such conversations in classrooms, teams and public settings.
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How outrage turns grief into moral warfare: Choosing conversation over conflict – ABC Religion & Ethics – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
