When noise poses as light, people disappear

This moment carries a thickened moral atmosphere. Noise poses as insight. Certainty poses as truth. And when light is reduced to volume or confidence, it no longer illumines. It blinds. It is hard to write that sentence while keeping real names and real bodies in view.

On Dec. 13, 2025, a gunman opened fire at Brown University during what students thought was a study session, killing two students and injuring nine others. The search for the shooter has continued as families and classmates try to make sense of a ripped open ordinary day.ⁱ 

Zoom out and the scale of the wound gets worse. Education Week’s tracker reports that in 2025 there were 17 shootings on school property in the United States, kindergarten through 12th grade, that resulted in injuries or deaths. Their most recent update notes a student shot and injured on Dec. 12 in the parking lot of Stewartville High School in Minnesota.ⁱⁱ 

Then, on Dec. 14, filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were found dead in their home, and police arrested their son on suspicion of murder.ⁱⁱⁱ 

Even if the facts stopped there, they would be enough to put a culture on its knees. But the facts do not stop there, because the public reaction becomes part of the story.

Before a family has buried its dead, strangers turn tragedy into a weapon. Before a campus has finished accounting for its wounded, online tribes turn pain into proof. Reuters reported that the Reiners’ deaths were followed immediately by public mockery and political point scoring at the highest levels.^iv That is not just bad taste. It is a sign of something decaying in the civic soul.

Hannah Arendt warned of a society in which people can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, true from false. In such a fog, reality becomes easy to bend, and human beings easy to use. But for Arendt, the danger isn't only that we lose our grip on the facts. It's that we lose our grip on one another. When accusations become monstrous yet internally consistent, when the lie is repeated so often it begins to feel possible, even the innocent start to wonder if they might somehow be guilty. What saves us, Arendt suggests, is not just personal resolve but something more fragile: the faith that someone out there, a friend, a neighbor, a relative, will refuse to believe the story.

In a situation where the dividing line between fiction and reality is blurred by the monstrosity and the inner consistency of the accusation, not only the strength of character to resist constant threats but great confidence in the existence of fellow human beings—relatives or friends or neighbors—who will never believe “the story” are required to resist the temptation to yield to the mere abstract possibility of guilt.^v

That loss of humanness shows up in small ways before it becomes systemic. Speech hardens. Curiosity shrinks. Compassion is treated as weakness. Suffering becomes content.

And the system rewards it.

Herbert Simon named the trade long ago: in an information rich world, information consumes attention, and abundance produces scarcity, a poverty of attention.^vi  When attention is scarce, the loudest voices win bids for it. Outrage buys reach. Mockery buys applause. Certainty buys clicks.

Neil Postman saw the drift even earlier: the problem is not that media entertains, but that entertainment becomes the default format for presenting everything, including what should sober us. When everything must perform, even grief must perform. Even funerals become arguments.

But Postman noticed something darker still. It's not just that we want our news entertaining; it's that we've quietly revised what we mean by true. In the ancient world, messengers bearing bad news were sometimes killed or exiled, punished not for lying but for the unbearable fact of their presence. Television, Postman suggested, may have revived this instinct in subtler form. We no longer ask whether the reporter's claim survives contact with reality. We ask whether the reporter's face survives contact with our feelings. Truth becomes a matter of performance: not what holds up, but who looks like they're holding it together.

Does the screen countermand the warnings we once received about the fallacy of the ad hominem argument? ... Stated in its simplest form, it is that the screens we watch provide a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth: The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. "Credibility" here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter.^vii

Psychology explains how easily that happens inside the mind. Daniel Kahneman described how quickly people form judgments from limited evidence, and how readily the mind treats what is visible as the whole story.^viii Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral judgment makes the same point from a different angle: moral judgments often arise from fast intuitions, and reasoning frequently shows up afterward as justification.^ix In other words, the heart reacts, the mind recruits talking points, and the whole person calls it truth.

Then the online world takes that inner pattern and scales it.

Research on moral contagion shows that moral emotional language helps ideas spread in social networks, accelerating the very kinds of messages that inflame rather than clarify.^x Other work in Science Advances has documented how social learning online can amplify the expression of moral outrage, teaching users what “works” in front of an audience.^xi

So, a young person bleeds, and within minutes the algorithms begin to distribute not just the news, but the most aggressive interpretations of the news. And soon, “they” and “those people” and “animals” and “monsters” start trending.

Social psychologist Nick Haslam described dehumanization as the denial of full humanness, and he emphasized that it is not confined to wartime propaganda. It shows up in ordinary social and cognitive processes.^xii That line matters because it means dehumanization is not only a crisis “out there.” It is a habit that forms “in here,” in speech patterns, in captions, in jokes, in the casual way a neighbor becomes a symbol.

That is why even religious language becomes dangerous in a culture like this. Words meant to heal get used to dominate. Convictions meant to steady the soul get used to erase the other. Darkness learns to speak fluently in the language of light.

Philosophy gives older names to this same fracture. Martin Buber described a world where people relate in two basic ways: I-It, where the other becomes an object to be used, measured, or explained; and I-Thou, where the other is encountered as a living presence, irreducible and whole. But Buber's insight cuts deeper than a simple ethics of respect. He's making a claim about what words do, and, by extension, what we become when we bring them to speech.

For Buber, the words I-Thou and I-It are not labels we attach to relationships already underway. They are not descriptions of a world that exists before we open our mouths. They are constitutive. To say Thou is to call a world into being, a world in which encounter is possible, in which the other appears not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be met. And here is the uncanny part: the I that speaks is also made in the speaking. The self that says Thou is not the same self that says It. One self holds back, calculating, instrumental, safe. The other risks everything, because Thou can only be said with the whole being. There is no partial encounter. You cannot meet another person with half of yourself and call it presence.

This is what the I-It world cannot abide: the demand for wholeness. When the other becomes content, something to be processed, scrolled past, or performed for, we are not only diminished in our capacity to see them. We are diminished, period. The fracture is not just ethical. It is ontological. We become the selves our words make us.

Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations. Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them but being spoken they bring about existence. ... The primary word I–Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I–It can never be spoken with the whole being.^xiii

Emmanuel Levinas presses even further. If Buber shows us that the I is made in the act of relation, Levinas insists that the self was never ours to begin with. We tend to imagine subjectivity as something interior, a private room, a walled-off center from which we venture out to meet the world. Levinas dismantles this image. The self, when it is true to itself, is not a sealed chamber but an exposure. It is what happens when the other person breaks through our complacency, our routines of sameness and self-sufficiency, and demands a response we did not plan.

This is not ethics as an afterthought, first I exist, then I decide how to treat you. For Levinas, the other's demand is what constitutes me. Before I am a thinker, a performer, a consumer of content, I am a being addressed. The face of the other, vulnerable, commanding, unignorable, calls me into existence as someone responsible. And there is nowhere to hide. Levinas speaks of the self as a face without any rear area, no backstage, no private refuge from the claim. Complete exposure.

What follows is a strange reversal of everything we assume about objectivity and subjectivity. We think objectivity means stepping back, becoming neutral, shedding the personal. But Levinas suggests that real attention, total attention to what is outside, especially to the other human being, requires total subjectivity. Not the subjectivity of preference and bias, but the subjectivity of one who has been addressed and cannot look away. The self most fully given over is the self most fully present to the real.

When the self is true to itself it is nothing but that which is established by its response to the Other. It is the other person who disrupts our complacency, our sameness, our self-sufficiency, and, in the attention he or she commands, establishes the self that we are in reality, a face without any rear area, an occiput, to conceal itself, a complete exposure. ... The primary sense of subjectivity is not a private universe, a sealed interiority, but an unparalleled attention, a response to what is outside, the most outside of which is the other human being. ... A total subjectivity is at the same time a total attention to the object.^xiv

Not avatars. Not stereotypes. Not enemies. Faces; which is to say, claims we did not choose and cannot refuse.

And the violence is not only random. It is often targeted, aimed at people not for what they have done but for who they are. In 2024, law enforcement agencies reported 11,679 hate crime incidents in the United States, involving 14,243 victims.^xv The FBI's own summary places the numbers in the same range, while acknowledging the limits of reporting and the complexity of the data.^xvi

But the numbers, however imprecise, gesture toward something the statistics cannot capture: the texture of fear that settles over communities who know they have been marked.

Targeted violence is not an abstraction when a synagogue, mosque, or church gathers on a holy day and someone has to stand at the door, watching. It is not an abstraction when a person is followed, threatened, or beaten because of the language they speak, the name they carry, the country their parents fled, or the face they cannot change. It is not an abstraction when children learn, earlier than they should, that some people will hate them on sight.

This is what it means for persons to disappear: not that bodies vanish, but that the face is no longer seen. What remains is a category, a target, a symbol onto which rage can be projected without the inconvenience of encounter. The violence does not see a life. It sees an It.

And it is not only "over there." On Sunday evening, as families gathered at Sydney's Bondi Beach to light the first candles of Hanukkah, two gunmen opened fire. Fifteen people were killed, including a ten-year-old child and an eighty-seven-year-old Holocaust survivor. Dozens more were wounded. Australian authorities declared it a terrorist attack; targeted, deliberate, designed to strike a Jewish community celebrating a festival of light.^xvii

The event was called "Chanukah by the Sea." A thousand people had gathered on the grass beside the beach, families, children, rabbis distributing food to passersby. The shooters fired from a footbridge. Among the dead was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who had helped organize the gathering and had spent eighteen years serving the Bondi community. Weeks earlier, he had issued a warning about rising antisemitism. His counsel: "In the face of darkness, the way forward is to be more Jewish, act more Jewish, and appear more Jewish."² He was killed for doing exactly that.

This is what targeted violence looks like: not an abstraction, but a shattered evening. Donuts and a petting zoo. A giant menorah. Then gunfire, and parents running with children in their arms, and a beach "associated with joy," as the Prime Minister put it, "forever tarnished by what has occurred."³

But there is another image from that night. A man named Ahmed al Ahmed, a fruit shop owner, the son of Syrian refugees, saw one of the gunmen and did not look away. He tackled the shooter and wrestled the weapon from his hands. He was shot in the process and remains hospitalized. The New South Wales Premier called him "a real-life hero" and said many people are alive because of what he did.⁴ Here was a face that refused to see only a category. Here was a Thou spoken with the whole being, in the middle of the carnage.

The massacre followed a surge in antisemitic incidents across Australia, synagogues torched, homes vandalized, Jews attacked on the street. Jewish leaders from around the world had convened in Sydney just weeks earlier to call for action.⁵ What they feared had arrived. And the fear is not confined to Australia. In New York and Los Angeles and cities across the globe, police increased security at synagogues within hours of the attack. The darkness travels fast.

Pope Leo XIV responded: "Enough with this antisemitic violence. Let us eliminate hatred from our hearts."⁶ But hatred is not eliminated by exhortation. It is eliminated, if at all, by encounter, by the willingness to see a face before seeing a target. Ahmed al Ahmed did not ask whether the people at that beach shared his religion or his politics. He saw human beings under fire and moved toward them. That is what it looks like when the I-Thou relation survives the forces arrayed against it.

Suffering has become global content. Susan Sontag, writing about images of war, named the hunger behind it: the appetite for images of bodies in pain.^xviii A society can consume suffering without honoring it. A society can share pain without sharing burdens. A society can circulate images and still fail to see a person.

Judith Butler uses the language of grievability to name another layer of the problem: some lives are treated as fully mournable, others as noise, collateral, or deserved.^xix When grief gets rationed, humanity gets rationed.

So, what is needed now?

Not better predictions. Not louder interpretations. Not more confident tribes.

The engine driving so much of public life is selling certainty. Shoshana Zuboff argues that today’s surveillance capitalism trades in prediction products, in what she calls behavioral futures markets, selling forms of certainty about what people will do.^xx When a system profits from predictability, it pressures people into patterns. It trains outrage. It trains cynicism. It trains contempt, because contempt holds attention better than patience.

Futures studies offers a necessary correction. Jim Dator’s work on alternative futures emphasizes that societies tend to imagine recurring types of futures, and that these images shape what people build and what people tolerate.^xxi Sohail Inayatullah’s causal layered analysis pushes deeper, insisting that beneath headlines and policy debates sit worldviews, and beneath worldviews sit stories, metaphors, and spiritual assumptions. Change the story, and the future changes.^xxii

Here's an expanded version that integrates the quote:

Amy Webb, working in applied foresight, emphasizes signals and patterns at the edges, not as fortune-telling, but as disciplined attention to what is emerging. That word matters: attention. The same capacity Levinas places at the heart of ethics, Webb locates at the heart of strategy. And the same failure that lets us reduce a person to a category lets us miss a future until it has already arrived.

Webb's critique is not about prediction. It is about the paradox of the present, the way our absorption in immediate concerns blinds us to what is taking shape just beyond our field of vision. Leaders wait. They plan for one scenario. They remain tangled in the intricacies of safety and regulation and institutional caution while first-movers are already on their third and fourth iterations. By the time the future becomes undeniable, it has already passed them by.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of attention; of the willingness to look at what we would rather not see, to follow a signal before it becomes a crisis. Webb puts it bluntly: "No one should plan for a future she cannot see. Yet that is exactly what's happening every day in our boardrooms and legislative office buildings."^xxiii The technologies are emerging. The networks are forming. And most of those in positions of responsibility are not watching.

The paradox of the present is to blame: we are too fearful about the intricacies of technology, safety, and the needs of the various government agencies and equipment manufacturers to think more broadly about how technology like drones might emerge from the fringe to become our future mainstream.^xxiv

What Webb describes in the realm of technology and strategy, Arendt and Levinas describe in the realm of the human. The failure is structural: we attend to what is already legible, already formatted for our existing categories, and we miss what is arriving in unfamiliar form. A signal at the fringe. A face not yet recognized as a claim. The discipline of foresight and the discipline of encounter turn out to require the same thing: a willingness to be disrupted by what we did not expect, before it is too late to respond.

Because rehumanization begins there.

This writer’s claim is simple: the crisis is not only what is happening. The crisis is what is happening to us while it happens. A culture can survive violence and still remain human. But it cannot survive the normalization of contempt.

Light, in the ancient sense, never shouted. It revealed. It made faces visible again. It restored proportion and depth. It required patience because it respected reality rather than forcing outcomes.

So, the work in front of us is the slow, costly work of rehumanization.

It looks like attention that refuses to reduce people to labels.

It looks like speech that tells the truth without feeding contempt.

It looks like presence that does not rush past grief in order to feel powerful.

It looks like refusing to turn a murdered couple into a punchline, refusing to turn dead students into a talking point, refusing to turn targeted communities into a statistic.

Iris Murdoch arrives at the same threshold from another direction. Where Levinas speaks of the face and Buber of the Thou, Murdoch speaks of love and means by it something sterner than sentiment. Love, for Murdoch, is "the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”^xxv Not affection. Not warmth. A realization, cognitively and morally demanding, easily evaded, rarely sustained.

The difficulty is not incidental. Murdoch is pointing to what may be the deepest danger in the architecture of consciousness itself: solipsism. Not as a philosophical position anyone explicitly holds, but as a gravitational pull, the default drift of attention back toward the self, its needs, its narratives, its grievances. We do not decide to live as though others are unreal. We simply fail, again and again, to do the work that would make them real to us. The world fills with phantoms: people we have reduced to roles in our own story, extras in a film we are directing, threats or tools or symbols. What vanishes is their particularity, what Murdoch calls "the most particular and individual of all things,"^xxvi the irreducible mind of another human being.

Art and morality, she argues, share the same enemies: social convention and neurosis. Convention obscures reality by flattening it to type. We see what we have been trained to see, recognize what the algorithm surfaces, sort people into categories before they have spoken. Neurosis obscures reality by assimilating the other into fantasy. We encounter not a person but a projection, a screen onto which we throw our fears and desires. Both are failures of attention. Both leave us sealed in a chamber of our own construction, mistaking the echo for a voice.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.^xxvii

This is why Murdoch insists that art does not teach us to love by exhortation. It works deeper than that: beneath the level of conscious deliberation, beneath our "more simply social morality."^xxviii

It stuns us into recognition. And this is also why dictators mistrust it. Art, like love, like the face of the other, threatens the sealed world. It insists that something escapes our control. It breaks the frame.

The hint of solipsism here is not merely philosophical. It is political, even existential. A society in which persons have disappeared, being reduced to avatars, stereotypes, and enemies, is a society in which solipsism has won. Not because anyone declared victory, but because the difficult realization was never made. The other never became real. And once the other is not real, anything is permitted. The bullet does not strike a person. It strikes a category.

This is the light that every voice in this argument has pointed toward: the face that commands before we have decided to listen, the Thou that can only be spoken with the whole being, the attention that refuses to let the other disappear into symbol or stereotype. It does not trend well. It does not satisfy the appetite for instant conclusions. But it steadies the ground beneath us. And without that ground, no culture remains human for long.

i^ https://apnews.com/article/brown-university-shooting-victims-e5b40e867f1a349c5c9b7c4f0e866af8

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