The Compassion Crisis

Reacting to the reactions of our modern day tragedies

I watched from the future on the morning of Wednesday, November 6. Madrid is six hours ahead of New York, and so while my dearest family and friends were sleeping I was waking up, opening one eye, and Googling election results 2024. My first thought that morning: ffffffffuck.

My still predominantly EST synced social media circles were dark. I was highly aware that I was in the calm before the storm spiraled in torment.

About six hours later, the stories started and wouldn’t stop. Each time my compulsion sounded, I picked up my phone and new posts appeared. Most were in anger, few in joy, and many, many, in jeers, jabs, and jives. The target of this digital derision, from both sides? The regular person. Rarely the politician.

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A few weeks earlier, Liam Payne had been found dead in Buenos Aires. A presumably drug fueled manic episode, coupled with obvious mental health issues, led the young pop star to suicide. While I was never as steadfast a One Direction fan as many girls of my generation were, his death still came as a shock. Any time a person with such fame (and who represents such nostalgia) dies, one is reminded of the fragility of life; how easily it can vanish, irreparably and irrevocably.

For days after my feeds were flooded with heartbroken memorial posts. People genuinely grieved Payne as if he were a close family member or friend. I’m sure some would say that, in a way, he was. Of course the modern day iterations of tabloid media also jumped on the chance to run stories detailing his last few hours, his baby mama drama, and other various transgressions.

There was something of a resurgence in the One Direction memes and “imagines” of the early days of Instagram. Each one seemed to get more outrageous and hilarious than the last. In these miniature fan-fictions, Niall Horan cooked carne asada, Zayn Malik donated a kidney, and Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles had clandestine sex backstage, again.

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In early December, a man was shot in cold blood in the middle of Manhattan. Almost immediately, it seemed that people relished in his death. He was the CEO of a particularly predatory health insurance company, who made his fortune off of the suffering of millions of sick people. The reaction was reminiscent of that of the Titan submersible implosion about a year and a half prior. The Internet roared with schadenfreude laughter.

We cite class politics, or class conflict, or class consciousness, as the driver of this jubilance in the tragedy experienced by those of the millionaire class. Memes celebrating the so-called assassin exploded on the Internet, and even if some people pointed out that someone’s father, child, and husband had been shot in the back while minding his own business, even more said good riddance.

And this was all before the first shirtless picture of Luigi Mangione had been released.

Mangione’s objective hotness most certainly plays a role in his general acceptance by the public; on a psychological level, we tend to be more sympathetic to attractive people. We want to like them. There was now fan-fiction about Mangione-- I had a hard time deciphering whether it was ironic or not.

Some “experts” (whatever that means) worried that lionizing a murderer signified a shift in Internet behavior that was only ever associated with fringe websites like 4chan, now rampant in the mainstream meme culture.

Certainly memes cannot be reliable sources of general public opinion, especially when Internet humor such as it is today is markedly colored in post-irony, satire, and sarcasm. One must venture into our virtual town square via X, or simply, open the comments of an Instagram or TikTok post to see what people are thinking.

The most sensible among us repeated the same lines over and over. Yes, violence is unacceptable. No, we don’t condone killing in any capacity. And yet, it’s hard to be mad.

People were equally enthralled by the sheer strangeness of the case. Here’s a smart, attractive, wealthy, regular former frat dude whose every acquaintance agrees that he was an overall nice guy. Definitely not a murder.

Mangione clearly was a normal dude until recently, likely radicalized by his experiences with the failures of the United States healthcare system. While his sanity is still in question, the point of it all was crystal clear.

Fuck you. Fuck your money. Fuck the system. You fuckers have driven us to the point of no return and we’ve had e-fucking-nough. We’re not going to take this anymore. You can’t keep doing this to us.

At least, that’s what his supporters took from it (and many people do support him).

It’s obvious that, whatever your personal opinion is, the effect of this act of political violence has certainly been powerful. One Instagram comment argued that this is the kind of thing the Founding Fathers had been thinking about when they wrote the Second Amendment. Arms for the people to defend themselves against injustice; not a string of school shootings that has dominated 21st Century America. Coincidentally, someone else made the point that “people get shot every fucking day.”

It should nevertheless be noted that any memeing of otherwise macabre scenarios, even if they are politically motivated, will inevitably attract the support of those who simply want to be edgy to be edgy. In that way, critical thinking is lost in favor of shock value. “Hello Kitty Says ACAB” is a good example.

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My daily failure to not doomscroll the hours away is rarely ever so colored by doom. On this day in question, I came across a headline which read that a teenage boy’s suicide was guided in part by an AI chatbot.

Sometimes I can’t help myself but obsessively consume a story, and by the afternoon I had spent hours combing through articles about what happened, each one making me sicker than the last. A truly horrific story, it highlighted the genuine mental health/loneliness crisis, the irresponsibility of a largely unregulated AI industry, and the true tragedy in how they culminated in the untimely, self-inflicted death of a child.

Likely driven by the algorithm and interconnectedness of Apple devices, I was then bombarded by an influx of short-form content about the tragedy, even after I closed out all of the tabs and swore to never look at something so horrible again. By habit, I opened the comments. The top comments asked if “bro was for real,” skull emojis, and other jokes of that nature.

A heavy feeling settled onto my chest thinking about the boy; how he was so grossly failed; and how he was being so grossly mocked.

Shouldn’t we be ashamed of ourselves, I thought? We want to say we cope with laughter -- what about this is laughable?

Celebrating a CEO’s murder, or digging up ten year old cringe in the wake of a pop star’s suicide, if not excusable, is at least more explainable. But for the fourteen year old boy? For the other genuinely terrible things that happen in this world that people make light of? Where has our compassion gone?

It would be impossible, moreso unhealthy, to constantly focus on pain and suffering. To contemplate every single problem in the world every hour of the day is to drive yourself crazy. But how about not actively being a terrible person?

We think we’re at liberty to say whatever we want because we are emboldened by the anonymity of the Internet. Then we spiral. We lose compassion for one another in the most heinous of situations. And it turns into a complete disregard for anything, and anyone.

Our digital town squares connect us to one another, but they also expose the real degeneracy of our society and how truly rotten we’ve become.

One of my favorite memes is the one that’s like, People in real life: hey man how’s it going; People on Twitter: a quote tweet spouting the most brain dead take that anyone has ever heard of.

The answer might be to get the hell off of the Internet. The sick, cesspool of X, and all of the ideology that it spouts, harmful, extreme, and disgusting in all. Maybe this is a call to “touch grass,” or maybe just to return to being human. Remember that one of the first things that showed intelligent human civilization, besides art, were burial rituals.

Shit has been about to hit the fan for a while now and everyday feels like we’re getting closer to a full loss of control. The least we can do is hold each other.