When Feeling Replaced Fact

At 6:29 a.m. on October 7, 2023, time seemed to halt. The images that followed were so stark, so unmistakable in their cruelty, that for a moment the world saw evil in its raw form. Yet almost as quickly, clarity blurred into confusion. What should have united decent people in horror became a competition of sympathies. By evening, the question was no longer what happened but how to feel about it.

Australia was no exception. In the hours after the massacres, the public conversation turned, not to truth, but to tone. Statements from universities and cultural bodies spoke of “complex circumstances” and “the need for empathy on all sides,” as if moral judgment itself were a dangerous extremism. Outrage became a posture, compassion, a performance. The instinct to feel right eclipsed the duty to be right.

This new moral style, egoic empathy, is not compassion in the old sense. It is empathy used as a mirror, not a bridge. Like ego, it is formless, it must attach itself to something, anything, in order to exist. The cause becomes an accessory of the self, an item in the moral wardrobe. Social media amplifies the pattern, and the curated feed supplies identity in real time. Each post is a declaration of personal virtue, less about the victims than about the poster’s need to feel whole.

The change is subtle but profound. Where earlier generations sought to understand tragedy, many now seek to express themselves through it. A century ago, conscience demanded discipline, today it demands visibility. The emotional life of the nation is streamed in public, where sympathy competes with outrage for attention. The result is a flattening of the moral field, every event becomes another canvas for self-display.

Compassion unmoored from truth, however, curdles quickly. It can transform cruelty into “context,” and barbarity into grievance. When empathy is detached from fact, it becomes indulgence, and indulgence in the moral sphere is deadly. A society that refuses to distinguish between aggressor and victim eventually forgets why it should defend either.

Australia’s institutions have absorbed this timidity. The modern university, once devoted to argument, now fears disagreement. The arts world, once a sanctuary for dissent, has become a factory of slogans. Even corporations issue moral communiqués written in the antiseptic language of risk management. Bureaucratic caution has replaced moral courage. It is not that leaders no longer know what is right, it is that they have learned it is safer not to say so.

The same disease afflicts Britain and France. Each faces its own history and demographics, but both share a deeper anxiety, a terror of moral clarity. In Britain, the great universities that once produced statesmen now produce statements, long paragraphs assuring every constituency that no judgment will be made. In France, a republic founded on universalism struggles to speak plainly about Islamist violence without apologising for its own identity. Everywhere, the fear is the same, to name evil is to be accused of simplification.

Behind this lies a wider civilisational weariness. The West has forgotten that feelings are not a substitute for thought. Our ancestors, for all their faults, understood that civilisation rests on restraint, the ability to think before reacting, to judge before emoting. We, by contrast, have elevated immediacy into virtue. The timeline moves too fast for reflection, sincerity has replaced seriousness. We congratulate ourselves on our sensitivity while losing our capacity for discernment.

The irony is that this culture of constant empathy breeds its opposite. When every tragedy is filtered through self-expression, genuine compassion withers. People exhaust their emotional bandwidth on performance, leaving little for action. The moral muscles atrophy. Outrage becomes entertainment, pity, a pastime. The self that sought wholeness through causes ends up hollowed out by them.

If Australia wishes to resist the wider Western decline, it must recover an older understanding of conscience, one that values truth above comfort and principle above popularity. To feel deeply is human, to think clearly is civilised. When the two diverge, the latter must lead. Otherwise empathy turns to vanity, and the public square becomes a hall of mirrors.

October 7 was a reminder that evil still exists in the world. The more troubling discovery is that, faced with it, the West no longer knows how to respond. We emote, we posture, we seek meaning in our own reflections. But civilisation survives only when compassion is anchored to fact, and when the courage to judge outweighs the fear of being judged. That is the moral work now before us, work that begins the moment we stop asking how to feel about the truth and start insisting on it.