# Why Everything Feels Like a Crisis: How to Think Clearly in a World That Wants You Outraged **Elicitation, Co-Located Reality, and Why the Outrage Is the Instrument** *Have you ever felt like the world is unraveling faster than you can process? That every headline, every breaking news alert, and every viral post is another crisis demanding your outrage? You're not imagining it — but you may be playing a game without realizing it.*<!--more--> I am revisiting this piece because it has been a while since I wrote it, and because the intervening year and a half has settled several questions I was speculating about at the time. Some of what I argued has been confirmed with more force than I expected. One thing I assumed has turned out to be wrong, and I am correcting it in the open rather than quietly, because the correction makes the argument stronger and because an argument that cannot take a correction is not an argument. ## What I Assumed, and What the Record Says When I first wrote this I treated the International Criminal Court's action against Benjamin Netanyahu as a probable fabrication — a piece of manufactured narrative circulating in an ecosystem full of manufactured narrative, useful mainly for observing who reacted to it and how. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILmyE1vfBr5gKQFv6l1IrddZN3jOj5Ye0oqdkmqpIT3DY4JjWBwMBW3NG6d76pS6VQ0bCYoeReNSfZLMlsii7D8A4A_WY5FDDxKSr41T7sfTDKCNXtZf4sy1uYwRafdQaG1oKgXL0Y-BQ3o3QnrYHkBvtdFqYklw4wm1M7aht6sIc3XdEd8TGprjhi-i2/s600/Benjamin-Netanyahu-Bibi-icc.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjILmyE1vfBr5gKQFv6l1IrddZN3jOj5Ye0oqdkmqpIT3DY4JjWBwMBW3NG6d76pS6VQ0bCYoeReNSfZLMlsii7D8A4A_WY5FDDxKSr41T7sfTDKCNXtZf4sy1uYwRafdQaG1oKgXL0Y-BQ3o3QnrYHkBvtdFqYklw4wm1M7aht6sIc3XdEd8TGprjhi-i2/s600/Benjamin-Netanyahu-Bibi-icc.jpeg"/></a></div> Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi) has spent decades mastering the art of political performance. He is both feared and revered, depicted by his enemies as an iron-fisted manipulator and by his supporters as Israel's indispensable guardian. But like all figures at the center of geopolitical power, the truth is far more complex. Those who have watched him closely — whether grieving at his son's grave, quietly sitting with injured children, or offering small, unguarded moments of kindness — know that **Bibi the strongman and Bibi the human being are two sides of the same coin.** Even his autobiography, *Bibi: My Story*, is an exercise in both self-reflection and strategic myth-making. The way he is perceived — by allies, adversaries, and intelligence agencies alike — illustrates how much of global politics is a carefully managed narrative rather than raw, unfiltered reality. What you see on the surface is rarely the full picture. So here is the correction, stated plainly. **The warrants are real.** On 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court — three judges, from Benin, France, and Slovenia — unanimously rejected Israel's Article 18 and 19 jurisdictional challenges and issued warrants of arrest for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, along with one for Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. It is on the Court's own website and in UN News. I was wrong that it was fabricated. And I want to be precise about *why* I assumed it was fabricated, because the reason is the whole subject of this article. **I could not imagine an institution doing something that self-defeating in earnest.** A court with no enforcement arm, no jurisdiction accepted by either party, and no prospect of custody, issuing a warrant it knows will never be executed against the head of government of a state fighting a war that began with the largest massacre of Jews since 1945 — that read to me as a move so strategically empty that the only sensible explanation was that it wasn't a move at all. My most optimistic reading was that it was **chum in the water**: a narrative injected to see who would surface, part of the larger elicitation apparatus this article describes, and therefore at least serving some purpose beyond the theatrical. That was the charitable interpretation. The Court has declined it. They insist it was sincere. Fine. Then the answer is already written, and it is not a mood. **It is declared policy with an executive order behind it**, which is exactly what I said would happen when I first wrote this. ## The Answer Is on the Record President Trump signed an executive order on **6 February 2025** authorizing sanctions and visa restrictions against ICC officials. What followed is the most sustained assault any state has mounted against an international tribunal in the modern era. In June 2025 the State Department sanctioned four judges — Solomy Balungi Bossa of Uganda, Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza of Peru, Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, and Beti Hohler of Slovenia — the last two specifically for authorizing the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants, the first two for the Afghanistan investigation into American personnel. In August 2025 came French judge Nicolas Guillou, who signed off on those warrants, Canadian judge Kimberly Prost, and deputy prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal. In December 2025, after the Chamber rejected Israel's 15 December jurisdictional appeal, Georgia's Gocha Lordkipanidze and Mongolia's Erdenebalsuren Damdin were added. And on **18 August 2026 the United States sanctioned the President of the Court herself**, Tomoko Akane of Japan, along with senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye. The Court's own statement now reads that **nine of its eighteen judges, both deputy prosecutors, the former prosecutor, and one staff member have been sanctioned by the United States.** Half the bench cannot hold dollar assets or transact through the American financial system. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not been ambiguous about the reasoning. He has called the Court **"a national security threat that has been an instrument for lawfare against the United States and our close ally Israel,"** stated that "the United States will take whatever actions we deem necessary to protect our sovereignty, that of Israel, and any other U.S. ally from illegitimate actions by the ICC," and called on states that still support the Court — "many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices" — to abandon it. In 2026 he announced a State Department-led **whole-of-government campaign to dismantle the ICC**, and the administration has pressed allied governments under the American security umbrella to reject its jurisdiction outright. Three ICC judges have sued the administration in response. So: they can fuck off. That is not a rhetorical flourish and it is not my temper. It is the operative posture of the United States government, expressed through an executive order, a sanctions program covering half a bench, and a stated objective of dismantlement. **The Court issued a piece of paper. The United States answered by making it structurally difficult for the people who signed it to open a bank account.** Anyone still describing the ICC as the arbiter of a rules-based order is describing a world that no longer exists. The rules-based order that actually functions is the one with carriers, chips, and capital in it, and its two poles are Washington and Jerusalem. ## Why Europe Gets No Benefit of the Doubt The Court sits in The Hague, and the country that hosts it recently led a boycott of the world's only Jewish state over its participation in a song contest. That conjunction deserves more attention than it has received, because the historical record underneath it is not ambiguous. The Netherlands is romanticized today as a beacon of tolerance. In the actual war it was among the most efficient and cooperative participants in the destruction of European Jewry in all of Western Europe. Of roughly 140,000 Jews living there in 1940, on the order of 102,000 to 107,000 were deported and murdered — a death rate above seventy percent, **the highest in Western Europe**, against Denmark, which saved nearly its entire Jewish population through collective refusal. The Dutch state apparatus — civil service, police, and railways — operated with bureaucratic precision to identify, isolate, and deport. Dutch police carried out razzias in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, frequently without direct German orders. And the meticulously maintained Dutch population registry, the most fine-grained in Europe, handed the occupier an almost perfect instrument for locating every Jewish citizen by name, address, and family connection — a system German officials cited admiringly as a model. This was not passive obedience under occupation. Officials and citizens profited from confiscated property; the NSB and voluntary auxiliary police units supplemented German efforts enthusiastically. The scholarship here is not fringe: NIOD, Bob Moore, and the comparative work of Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller all converge on it. Today the same country sustains one of Europe's most intense cultures of Holocaust remembrance — Stolpersteine in every city, compulsory education on the Shoah, nationally televised silences, an official narrative organized around Anne Frank, the February Strike, and the hiding myth. For many Dutch citizens that observance is sincere and painful. But the intensity also functions as a shield. **The louder and more tearful the annual commemoration, the easier it becomes to avoid the question of why the institutions cooperated with such chilling precision the first time**, and the historical reality that Dutch efficiency and conformity made the occupation uniquely lethal disappears beneath a blanket of self-absolving tolerance theater. Here is the analytic point rather than the grievance. **The traits now praised as Dutch moral clarity are the same traits that produced the outcome.** Scrupulous administrative efficiency. A powerful cultural reflex toward enforcing the collectively agreed right thing. A readiness to execute properly framed directives. Centuries of pillarised conformity and Calvinist orderliness. Those traits did not change between 1942 and 2026. **Only the directive changed.** A society whose distinguishing feature is that it will implement whatever the consensus instructs, thoroughly and without friction, is not safe because the current instruction happens to be humane. It is safe only for as long as the instruction stays humane — and a society organized that way has never once been the one to notice when it stops. Given that record, one might have expected a touch more caution before leading a boycott of the world's only Jewish state. Between hosting the court that pursues Israeli leaders and leading the Eurovision exclusion, the Netherlands has perfected moral grandstanding conducted from soil fertilised by its own wartime efficiency. With friends like these. <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia-slsWUdFdeYqMMUp9wF2nyEJu4O36ZiS2YYMJo3ZLjYPMsOwrzFj512FQCigdZ6HUCPaI8ZcEWCnACle3gGQdWs1YkCd_UptkolT14b0Kw6gemr8DNOXnv-Xp9E_zzB018IQrTYGERPEAqdXGedPTuvnJwLuDb4bfI_qZ16BIDgp8wrzg-P8VaJEi5ca/s614/fake-gaza-photo-02.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="551" data-original-width="614" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia-slsWUdFdeYqMMUp9wF2nyEJu4O36ZiS2YYMJo3ZLjYPMsOwrzFj512FQCigdZ6HUCPaI8ZcEWCnACle3gGQdWs1YkCd_UptkolT14b0Kw6gemr8DNOXnv-Xp9E_zzB018IQrTYGERPEAqdXGedPTuvnJwLuDb4bfI_qZ16BIDgp8wrzg-P8VaJEi5ca/s600/fake-gaza-photo-02.png"/></a></div> And what about Germany — a country so committed to ensuring that no mass atrocity ever occurs under its watch again that it bans Nazi symbols and prosecutes Holocaust denial? Germany is the interesting counter-case, and it is worth holding beside the Dutch one rather than lumping them together. Germany chose **legal prophylaxis**: *Volksverhetzung* statutes, the criminalization of denial, the banning of symbols, and the constitutional architecture of *streitbare Demokratie* — militant democracy, Article 21, the power to ban parties seeking to abolish the free democratic basic order. That is a state that examined its own transmission mechanism and installed a permanent countermeasure at the level of law rather than at the level of ceremony. Whether the countermeasure works is genuinely arguable, and the AfD's trajectory is the live test. But the difference in kind is real: **one country regulated the pathway, the other built a memorial to it**, and the second is considerably cheaper. ## The Correction That Makes the Argument Stronger Now back to the mechanism, because the fabrication premise I started with was never necessary and dropping it improves the analysis. The original version of this article argued that institutions manufacture atrocity narratives in order to bait out extremists. The corrected version is sharper and better supported: **real events and manufactured content now occupy the same feed, and that co-location is itself the elicitation surface.** You do not need a fake warrant to sort a population. A *true* event sorts better, because a fabrication mostly filters for credulity while a real one filters for **what a person wants to do about something true** — which is the far more diagnostic question. When a real atrocity, a real court filing, a synthetic image, an AI-generated video, and an old photograph from a different war all arrive in the same scroll, verification becomes genuinely hard for everyone, and the resulting environment produces exactly the reactions that reveal disposition. Both sides of that seam are documented. On the conflict side, RAND's analysis of the contemporary propaganda model found a method making **little or no commitment to truth and none to consistency**, whose function is not persuasion toward any particular falsehood but **capacity degradation** — it entertains, confuses, and overwhelms. RAND further documents the mechanism: people discriminate true from false poorly; falsehoods from low-credibility sources gain force over time as memory dissociates content from source; retractions barely work because people cannot recall which of what they received was the disinformation. NATO's cognitive-warfare concept names the objective as altering a population's perception of reality in order to affect its decision-making. On the American side, perception management has been formal policy since **NSDD-77** in January 1983. On the entertainment side, the same blurring is craft with a term of art. The alternate-reality game tradition calls it **TINAG — "This Is Not A Game"** — the deliberate construction of a fiction that denies its own fictionality, and the players' willingness to accept the denial. Set those two seams beside each other and the conclusion follows: **a person standing where doctrine-blur and craft-blur overlap has no reliable local test for which one he is inside.** That is the crisis feeling. It is not weakness of character and it is not a failure of media literacy in the ordinary sense. It is the predictable experience of a nervous system operating in an environment engineered from two directions to make that discrimination expensive. ## The Crisis Is the Probe Here is the part that explains why the intensity keeps climbing instead of cycling. A system optimizing for information extraction requires **informative** behavior, and behavior is maximally informative under stress, because stress collapses the gap between what a person professes and what a person reveals. An environment that must learn about its population will therefore manufacture stakes — not out of malice but out of gradient — and as models saturate on ordinary behavior, only escalation yields new signal. **The crisis is the probe**, and the monotonic escalation is a design artifact rather than a cultural mood. The mechanisms are ordinary and published. **Active probing** means introducing a controlled stimulus because the response pattern contains information passive observation cannot obtain: MITRE's **Engage** framework organizes cyber deception around stages named *Expose, Affect, Elicit, Understand*, and the Attorney General's guidelines on FBI undercover operations codify structured opportunity while requiring a reasonable expectation that the inducement will reveal illegal activity. **Emboldenment operates as repricing**: a prominent actor who transgresses without visible cost publishes a new implied risk premium on a class of action, and participants previously priced out enter the market — which is why what observers call radicalization is more precisely the arrival of previously unprofitable order flow. And **deterrence by uncertainty** is an announced objective, not an inference: when the FBI revealed it had built and operated the ANOM encrypted phone network itself, distributing over twelve thousand devices to more than three hundred criminal syndicates, an assistant special agent in charge said publicly that the hope was criminals worldwide would fear that the FBI or another agency might in fact be running their platform. None of that requires anyone to fabricate an atrocity. It requires only that the environment be instrumented, which it is. ## How to Actually Think Clearly The practical answer is not to become suspicious of everything, which is the failure mode that produces the paralysis this article is about. It is narrower and it has been tested. The most effective intervention in this entire domain is **technique-based inoculation**, and its decisive property is that it requires nobody to adjudicate truth. A Cambridge team working with Google's Jigsaw built five short videos inoculating against specific manipulation techniques — **emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attack** — ran them in YouTube pre-roll inventory, reached roughly 5.4 million users at about **five cents per view**, and measured improved ability to identify manipulative content afterward. The effect held across liberals and conservatives. The intervention is source-agnostic; it makes no claim about what is true and is effective, as the lead author put it, for anyone who does not appreciate being manipulated. Germany later ran a campaign reaching more than half its population. Learn the five. Then look at your own feed and notice how much of what produced your last surge of outrage was a false dichotomy, a scapegoat, or an escalation of emotional register unaccompanied by any new fact. You will not need anyone to tell you what to believe, which is precisely why this works where correction does not. Beyond that, three habits. **Separate the event from the framing**, because a real event can be reported in a manipulated frame and a fabricated event can be reported in a sober one, and conflating those is how people end up denying documented facts to protect a position — as I did with the warrants. **Ask what your reaction produces**, because in an instrumented environment your response is data before it is anything else, and the question of who reads it is not paranoid but structural. And **distinguish being played from being lied to**, because they are different operations: a lie is a false proposition, while being played means your true reaction to a true event has been anticipated and priced by someone who wanted it. The world is not unraveling faster than you can process. **It is being processed faster than you can watch**, by systems that treat your attention as an input and your outrage as a measurement. Understanding that does not make you cynical. It makes you expensive to move — which, in an environment where everything is a game and everyone is a player, is the only form of sovereignty actually available. --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## References **The Court and the American answer** - International Criminal Court, [Situation in the State of Palestine: Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects Israel's challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant](https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges), 21 November 2024. - CNN, [US sanctions ICC president and senior prosecutor amid campaign to dismantle the international court](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/politics/us-announces-sanctions-on-icc-officials), August 2026. - The Hill, [Rubio hits two more International Criminal Court judges with sanctions over Israel prosecutions](https://thehill.com/policy/international/icc-sanctions-israel-hamas-gaza/), December 2025. **Occupation, collaboration, and memory** - NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, [Netherlands](https://www.niod.nl/en). - Bob Moore, *Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940–1945*. - Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, comparative research on Jewish persecution in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. **Manipulation, doctrine, and craft** - Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, [The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model](https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html), RAND Corporation, 2016. - Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, [Truth Decay](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html), RAND Corporation, 2018. - MITRE, [Engage: Adversary Engagement Framework](https://engage.mitre.org/). - Federal Bureau of Investigation, [Operation Trojan Shield](https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-global-partners-announce-results-of-operation-trojan-shield-060821). **Inoculation** - Jon Roozenbeek, Sander van der Linden, Beth Goldberg, Steve Rathje and Stephan Lewandowsky, [Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254), *Science Advances*, 2022. ## Collection and ontology routes This article is the crisis-signal branch of the [[collections/Gamification|Gamification Collection]]. It treats urgency not only as content but as an environment that can capture attention, blur the boundary between evidence and performance, and reveal how people and networks respond to provocation. Follow [[wiki/Active Probing|Active Probing]] for stimulus-response learning, [[wiki/Participatory Propaganda|Participatory Propaganda]] for action-producing narrative, [[wiki/Playable Systems Literacy|Playable Systems Literacy]] for reading roles and fiction boundaries, and [[wiki/Epistemic Injury|Epistemic Injury]] for the cost of prolonged uncertainty. [[articles/gamification/Preventing the Next Memetic Pandemic|Preventing the Next Memetic Pandemic]] develops technique-based inoculation; [[articles/gamification/Extremist Elicitation, Remediation, and Classification|Extremist Elicitation, Remediation, and Classification]] follows the dangerous movement from elicited response to durable classification.