Repentance once meant transformation.
At least in theory, a man was supposed to confront what he had done, feel the weight of it, and become someone less capable of repeating it.
Then everyone discovered shortcuts.
Confess.
Acquire absolution.
Return to ordinary life.
The internet has perfected the shortcut by removing even the priest.
Now you the people can administer forgiveness.
But something darker becomes possible when symbolic goodness grows nearly costless.
Everyone can afford it.
Including cruel people.
Especially cruel people.
Post the quote.
Say, "Be kind, you never know what someone is going through."
The post was never necessarily intended to change conduct.
It was intended to settle identity.
People do those things. Announce that people should be kinder. Repost it. Then condemn bullying, and then talk about other issues.
The social verdict appears immediately: "good person."
Nothing else needs to change.
Public compassion now requires almost no contact with another human being. One can support “mental health” in the abstract with a thumbnail, a caption, a ribbon, a hashtag, a carefully worded story, and a sentence about how nobody should suffer alone.
Then someone actually suffers nearby.
He becomes repetitive.
Withdraws. Stops being funny.
Answers messages strangely.
You'll then see for yourself how the private character be exactly what the public gesture condemns.
The internet speaks constantly about accepting broken people while insisting that brokenness remain presentable.
You may be depressed, but you must remain poetic.
You may be traumatized, but you must narrate it coherently.
You may suffer, but do not disturb the atmosphere.
The acceptable sufferer continues functioning well enough to preserve everyone else's comfort. He is self-aware, apologetic, visually intelligible, and capable of presenting his pain in language that flatters the everyone else's compassion.
The unacceptable sufferer does not know the script.
He is paranoid.
He smells.
He repeats himself.
He becomes abrasive, frightened, inappropriate, suspicious, embarrassing, or exhausting.
Nothing about him is inspirational.
That is when the philosophy changes.
Empathy becomes dangerous when possession of it is treated as proof of being superior.
The public declaration/ "I care about weak people" can become something closer to, "I am qualified to decide who counts as weak."
Once status becomes competitive, kindness ceases to be a virtue and becomes a position. People announce compassion not only to comfort others, but to establish themselves as the kind of people whose judgments should carry weight.
Then somebody becomes socially undesirable.
The conversion is immediate.
Yesterday's language of nuance becomes certainty. Context becomes excuse-making. Mercy becomes complicity. The condemned person is reduced from a complicated human being into a symbolic object upon which the group can demonstrate its goodness.
I wish I could create a video on this.
The socially approved moralist begins deciding who is wounded enough to deserve care and who is offensive enough to forfeit it. Once someone crosses the symbolic boundary, the same language once used to defend the weak becomes justification for punishment.
Dostoevsky understood the distinction that people keep rediscovering in every new book: humanity is easy to love because humanity never asks to borrow your car, wake you at three in the morning, repeat the same mistake for the seventh time, smell unpleasant, become jealous, contradict you, disappoint you, or require anything precisely when you have nothing left to give.
Humanity is an idea. But a person is an interruption.
This is why online compassion flourishes so easily. The screen offers suffering after removing weight from it. One can care about depression, trauma, grief, loneliness, suicide, burnout, or abandonment while remaining physically untouched by any of them. The thumb moves. The sentiment appears. The conscience experiences motion without the body sacrificing anything.
Then the concrete person arrives.
He is not a category. He is late again. Saying the wrong thing, needing reassurance after you already gave it. Someone's illness has made them repetitive, suspicious, exhausting, needy, bitter, withdrawn, or impossible to solve.
Now compassion acquires a price.
You must surrender sleep. Cancel something. Listen after you have already understood the story. Allow another person's crisis to become inconveniently real inside your life.
This is where universal love so often dies. We are connected to thousands yet capable of carrying almost nobody.
The same screen that makes compassion cheap has made aggression efficient.
Human predation no longer requires physical superiority.
A weak body can command a crowd.
A private accusation can become searchable punishment.
A moment of embarrassment can be extracted, clipped, circulated, archived, and handed to strangers who experience another person's humiliation as participation.
Naked cruelty creates discomfort in the aggressor. Righteous cruelty removes it.
The target is no longer a person.
He is harm.
She is toxic.
They are unsafe.
Once the noun changes, appetite receives permission.
Again, sometimes people genuinely deserve consequences. Sometimes warnings are necessary. Sometimes exclusion protects others.
But there is a profound difference between proportionate consequence and the ecstatic appetite to watch someone collapse.
The latter is much, much, much older than the internet.
The answer is not to advertise better ethics.
It is to shrink the distance between what you claim and what the nearest difficult person experiences from you.
That philosophy is harder to enact.
— Marcus | Stern Stoic
P.S. If these emails are useful, the longer work is in Notes on Maladaptation—55 essays on human fracture, grief, obligation, judgment, and survival under irreparable conditions.
Read the complete collection — 👉 Notes on Maladaptation
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For shorter observations between emails: @sternstoic