MAHAD HUSSEIN SALLAMThe great psychic numbness

Mahad Hussein Sallam (bio), Mediapart, 30/7/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala

In a world saturated with alerts, emergencies, and tragedies broadcast continuously, another form of crisis is taking hold, one that is more insidious: numbness. Are we losing the very ability to feel as a result of being exposed to so much? When feeling becomes an act of resistance.

From Gaza to Sudan, from climate disasters to algorithmic exhaustion, emotional collapse is no longer an individual evil: it is a symptom of a civilization in psychological decline.

Gaza on my screen. Silence in my chest.

Every evening, I scroll through the images. Gaza is bleeding. The Amazon is burning. I scroll.

A Palestinian child lies under the rubble, others fall from hunger. Sudan disappears from the headlines, while atrocious crimes are being committed far from the cameras, behind closed doors. A little girl drowns in the Aegean Sea while another dances live on TV. One after another, European democracies are falling into the hands of radical right-wing parties who, incapable of governing in any way other than through chaos, are creating an atmosphere of permanent fear. Their recipe is well known: xenophobic and identity-based propaganda that stirs up fantasies of national decline to better conceal their political vacuity. And I scroll through the images.

I scroll, not out of desire, but because I am incapable of doing otherwise. Sometimes I stop, not because I feel something, but because I don't feel anything, I no longer feel anything, and that is what terrifies me more than anything else.

We are living in a time when the world is collapsing in high definition. Violence is no longer hidden: it is on display, scripted, multiplied, projected in a loop on all our screens. And yet it is not revolt that dominates our reactions, but a deep numbness. It is neither apathy nor indifference, but something more pernicious: a gradual extinction of our ability to feel. A mental anaesthesia on a civilizational scale. What I call: the Great Psychic Numbness.

This text is not a plea. It is not a cry for help.

It is a lucid confrontation with a drift that we have insidiously come to consider inevitable.

When everything hurts, we no longer feel anything.

Shocking images, calls for solidarity, waves of hashtags—it all floods our screens at the speed of an algorithm. And yet, we have never been so untouched by what we see.

Conflicts pile up like forgotten notifications: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Congo, the Sahel countries, New Caledonia, Martinique, and so on.

The waters are rising, glaciers are collapsing, nameless bodies are floating in the Mediterranean, which is becoming the largest cemetery on the planet.

But already, a new keyword is replacing the previous one. Memory is being overtaken by speed.

A study published in 2024 by Utrecht University reveals a chilling finding: 64% of Dutch students say they feel emotionally detached from global crises, even though they follow developments every day.

This is not ignorance. It is saturation. An emotional overload that leaves no room for shock, indignation, or grief.

The body goes into standby mode. The mind switches off. It is not that we no longer feel: it is that we are overwhelmed, dissociated, exhausted by compassion.

And this nuance is anything but trivial: it is political. It is moral. It is existential. It draws the line between democratic vigilance and authoritarian drift, between responsibility and renunciation. For while emotional numbness is spreading at the grassroots level, something more sinister is brewing at the top.

The rise of emotional authoritarianism

What we are witnessing is not a simple drift. It is a profound political shift: a radicalization of power that no longer seeks to alleviate collective suffering, but to exploit it.

They no longer govern, they polarize. They do not repair, they fracture.

They do not console, they accuse. This is the new order.

Malaise becomes a resource, fear becomes a lever. In the absence of solutions, culprits are designated. Social pain is recycled into political energy that is brutal, directed, and profitable. This is no longer governance: it is emotional engineering designed to divide.

The result is before our eyes: unrestrained anti-Semitism. Rampant Islamophobia. Systemic racism. Vocal misogyny. Unapologetic transphobia. Legitimized xenophobia.

Hate is no longer hidden. It is on display.

It circulates in slogans, laws, and likes. It has become a language of power, raw, unapologetic, normalized.

This is not a political vacuum. It is politics stripped of all empathy.

Politics without a face, without tremor, without shame. Politics that no longer seeks to convince, but to subjugate.

In such a climate, feeling becomes an act of resistance. Because everything pushes us toward anaesthesia.

 Everything pushes us to retreat. Everything pushes us to close ourselves off.

And that is precisely why feeling has become subversive. Perhaps even vital.

Anaesthesia by design

Numbness is not an anomaly. It is not an accident of the system.

It is a perfectly integrated logic: thought out, optimized, monetized, and, more often than not, graciously distributed under the guise of entertainment.

Social media platforms monetize our nervous systems. Anger keeps us hooked. Tragedy fuels engagement. Every death becomes a data point. Every trauma, a clickbait.

Instagram sublimates war into an aesthetic filter.

TikTok turns trauma into a trend.

X reduces genocide to a 280-character duel.

We are no longer witnesses. We are consumers of suffering.

And in doing so, we lose what made us human: the ability to feel fully, to cry deeply, to respond ethically.

The language of cowardice

When it comes to Gaza, words falter. We avoid those that disturb: “genocide,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing.” Not because they are unfounded, but because they shake diplomatic salons and disturb comfortable narratives.

So we cover the horror with a veneer of language. We invoke “complexity” where oppression should be named. We preach ‘balance’ where justice is a strangled cry.

A child killed becomes an “innocent civilian.”. A targeted bombing becomes a “retaliatory strike,” or even a preventive war. Ethnic cleansing becomes a “security measure.” Apartheid becomes a “protracted territorial conflict,” and the massacre of peoples becomes a right of response.

This is not neutrality. It is lexical cowardice.

A deliberate strategy of linguistic anaesthesia. A semantic fog designed to neutralize indignation before it turns into action.

Citizens are taught to doubt their own moral impulses. To no longer believe their eyes. To relativize their anger.  To look away. To no longer feel.

This is how a war of words becomes a war against memory. And silence becomes complicity.

Gaza: a mirror of our collapse

Gaza is not just a geopolitical disaster.

It is an ethical shipwreck. A collective moral collapse. Not only for those who drop the bombs, but for those who watch, silently, with their arms crossed and their hearts closed.

Every missile that falls tests us. Not only as citizens, but as human beings.

How long do we stare at a pulverized school or hospitals razed to the ground before scrolling down the screen? Three seconds? Four? Five?

And what becomes of our soul when it screams the answer inside us: “No more than that”?

Gaza acts as a brutal mirror.

It reveals what we have become: saturated witnesses. Disconnected observers. Fleeing consciences.

To bear witness to Gaza today is to face an almost unbearable dissonance: between visibility and inaction. Between horror and everyday life. Between lucidity and resignation.

We are not numb because we don't know. We are numb because knowing has become an unbearable pain.

So, in order to survive, we disconnect. We cut the cord. We escape reality.

We become emotionally dead. Present without presence. Informed without memory. Touched without response.

The post-empathetic self

A new figure of our time is emerging, discreet but omnipresent: the “post-empathetic self.”

He or she knows. He knows the facts. She sees the images. He understands the power relations, the issues, the responsibilities.

But he or she no longer feels. Or if they feel, they do not act.

Or if they act, it is only out of reflex, a signature, a share, a form of indignant outrage. A gesture without weight. An act without consequence.

It's not cruelty. It's wear and tear. Moral fatigue. A slow, silent inner collapse. A fatalism that is manufactured and then imposed as an obvious truth that must not be thought about.

But this exhaustion, however human it may be, opens the door to an even greater danger: indifference.

And indifference is never neutral. It is the breeding ground where democracies rot. It is the breach through which genocide infiltrates without resistance.

It is the emotional void into which cold, cynical, methodical authoritarian regimes rush.

The “post-empathetic self” does not kill. But it allows things to happen. And sometimes that is all it takes for the worst to happen.

Where are the sanctuaries of feeling?

And yet, despite the noise, despite the widespread anaesthesia, resistance is organizing. In some places, it is emerging quietly, almost fragile, but deeply tenacious. In Utrecht, London, Paris, Washington, Beirut, Sanaa, Ramallah, Oakland, Amsterdam, pockets of emotional life are resisting the suffocating atmosphere.

Cafés of vulnerability where people talk about grief, without filters or detours. Interfaith vigils where tears flow freely, without belonging to a single faith. Artistic performances that refuse neutrality, that hurt in order to awaken. Circles of young people, sometimes lost, who are relearning to name what they feel—anger, sadness, tenderness, fear—as if relearning a forgotten language.

These are not mere emotional gestures. They are political gestures. Because in an age that rewards coldness, opening up becomes an act of defiance. In a culture where numbness is the norm, feeling is a declaration of war.

These places, these gestures, these voices are not spectacular. But they stand up to cynicism. And that, today, is already an act of dissent.

Towards a radically political emotional ecology

The Great Numbness is not an accident. It is a strategy. We are taught to keep quiet. To repress anger. To stifle empathy.

This is how technocratic systems hold sway: not through brute force, but by anesthetizing the soul, the souls. By paralyzing our ability to feel, they neutralize any desire for change. Any moral insurrection. Any meaningful disobedience.

So what can we do?

Bring emotion back into public life. Rebuild spaces where vulnerability is not ridiculed but shared. Where legitimate outrage is not stifled but honoured. This is where democratic repair begins: not with abstract reforms, but with a collective emotional truth.

We need civic assemblies of feeling. Places where we talk about what hurts, what scares us, what gives us hope. Without this, democracy is nothing but a hollow shell.

We must make schools emotionally literate. Every student should learn to name what they feel. Emotional awareness is not a luxury. It is a civic infrastructure. Understanding your emotions means understanding power, injustice, and the human condition.

We must hold algorithms accountable. Social media platforms should not be held responsible only for fake news, but also for the emotional violence they make commonplace, viral, and inevitable. Regulation can no longer be purely technical:  it must become affective.

We must strengthen those who care for our society.

Attention workers, caregivers, educators, social workers, and psychologists are not secondary actors.

They are the first responders in our wounded society. They must be protected, funded, valued, and above all encouraged to remain vigilant, to watch over, with clarity, a society that is faltering, which some already prefer to believe is dead.

We must fund collective artistic repair. Art must not only be beautiful:  it must be useful.

 It must heal. It must awaken. It must reclaim its true role. Culture is not a supplement to the soul. It is an emotional infrastructure.

Feeling is not a weakness. It is a political power. If our hearts can still break, then they can also rebuild. Another world.

Not later. Not tomorrow. Now. Before it's too late.

Because if we lose the ability to feel, we don't just lose compassion. We lose what remains of our humanity.

And what will remain then... will be silence.