Alarmism — News Without a Place to Act

Alarmism isn’t the bad news itself, but news without a place to act — and that’s exactly where its peculiar effect comes from: it sedates the very capacity for action it claims to awaken. You probably know the state. You read a lot, you’re well informed, you could brief someone on the state of half a dozen crises. And you do less than you did three years ago. Not out of indifference, but because something in you has closed that used to be open.

The obvious explanation is that you’re oversaturated and need to consume less. I think that falls short. It isn’t the quantity that paralyzes. It’s a particular form in which information arrives, and that form has a name.

#What Is Alarmism — and How Does It Differ from Information?

Alarmism differs from information not in its topic and not in its facts, but in whether a decision follows from it. Both can address the same state of affairs, use the same numbers, carry the same gravity. The difference sits at a single point: does the account name a place where you appear in it?

If you learn that a particular substance in household products is harmful, you clear those products out of your home, and the matter is settled at that point. You wanted to be informed, you made a purchasing decision, the fear had a job and it finished the job. That’s information. It ends in a single act.

The other form ends nowhere. Gwendolin Kirchhoff pins the distinction on the person responsible for the account:

This question is the most useful handle there is in this field, because you can apply it to any single report in seconds. A piece of news that lays a decision at your feet shrinks the unease, even when its content is bad. A piece of news that spreads out a scenario and names no place where you appear in it enlarges the unease, even when its content is accurate.

Which means alarmism isn’t an especially forceful form of informing — it’s the opposite, dressed in informing’s clothes. It leaves behind a feeling of powerlessness, and powerlessness isn’t a state of knowledge. It’s a paralysis that mistakes itself for knowing.

#Why Does Alarmism Meet a Need?

Alarmism doesn’t persist because people fall for it. It persists because it delivers something people need. As long as you don’t see what it delivers, you won’t understand why explaining alarmism to people does so little against it.

It creates community: people worry together, they share a situation. It gives their own life meaning, because it stands inside a great unfolding event instead of a small everyday one. And it supplies an explanation for a paralysis that actually has other causes — because once everything is too big, inaction is no longer a decision, it’s a condition. Which means alarm isn’t the opposite of reassurance. It’s one of reassurance’s most effective forms.

Baruch Spinoza described this mechanism in 1670, in the preface to the Theologisch-politische Abhandlung (Theological-Political Treatise), at exactly the point where it becomes uncomfortable. People who waver between fear and hope don’t lose their capacity to think — they lose their standard of measurement. In his words, they begin to “waver back and forth between fear and hope, and their soul therefore stands ready to believe anything” (Spinoza, 1670, Preface). The conclusion he draws from this is unambiguous:

That names the economy of alarm. Fear makes believing cheap. Whoever is alarmed no longer checks, because checking costs time, and the situation supposedly has none to spare. Attention flows to wherever the warning is loudest, and whoever warns loudest gets the attention. That isn’t a conspiracy — it’s a cycle in which everyone involved does the obvious next thing. It’s just that nothing gets decided inside this cycle.

#Why Do the Announced Catastrophes So Often Fail to Arrive?

The announced catastrophes so often fail to arrive because a scenario assumes a plan will play out completely — and reality almost never plays out that way. This observation stands at the start of the conversation this text draws on: look back at panic forecasts from the past, and a large share of them never happened, at least not on a global scale (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Failed Dystopias,” 00:15). Reality resists. It has too many participants, too many technical limits, too many accidents — and that’s exactly why it’s as unreachable by total catastrophe as by total salvation.

Add to this a distortion that doesn’t sit in the news, but in the observer. Arthur Schopenhauer described it in the second volume of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1844), as a falsification of thinking by one’s own inclinations:

Fear enlarges its object before anyone exaggerates it. When a perception that already enlarges meets an account that enlarges in turn, the resulting picture shares nothing with the actual situation but the keyword. And a considerable share of what circulates in this field was never a description of the situation to begin with:

What it looks like from the inside when you actually break down an announcement like this, I’ve worked through in the most prominent case there is: Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is not a research program, but an expectation of salvation with a timetable, and its much-cited hit rate shrinks the moment you separate industry knowledge from prophecy. What generalizes from this isn’t the result, but the obligation: whoever takes an announcement seriously has to check it. How much actually stands behind it is decided by the check, not by the guess. “Even the powerful can’t do everything — they never could” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Failed Dystopias,” 31:54).

Failed dystopias, then, aren’t a reassurance. They’re a body of data. A forecast that has failed to happen three times and gets repeated unchanged a fourth time has stopped being a forecast.

#Isn’t Alarmism Sometimes Useful?

Yes — and this is the strongest objection there is against the whole line of argument. It doesn’t come from alarmists, but from one of their sharpest diagnosticians. In 1878, under the heading “Too Loud a Tone in Grievances,” Friedrich Nietzsche soberly worked out, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human), what exaggeration actually accomplishes:

His conclusion reads: “To that extent, it is useful to represent emergencies as exaggerated.” The words to that extent carry the entire weight. Nietzsche doesn’t recommend exaggeration in general, but precisely under one condition: that it leads, among those without insight — who are the majority, and who have the stronger appetite for action — to “investigations, punishments, promises, reorganizations.” That isn’t a straw man. That’s an argument, and it’s conceded in the conversation itself: the person Kirchhoff is speaking with notes there that a campaign, despite its alarmist accompaniment, did push a concern through politically — and that she hadn’t expected that (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Failed Dystopias,” 1:03:37).

Still, the objection misses the point. What worked in cases like this wasn’t the volume — it was the address.

A directed activation names an addressee, a goal, and a point in time. It’s loud, but it’s aimed at something, and that’s why it can end — in success or in failure, but it can end. Diffuse, permanent alarm doesn’t have this structure. It names no addressee, only an omnipotence, and against an omnipotence there’s no campaign — only watching. Nietzsche’s arithmetic works out for the directed form and not for the diffuse one, because it presupposes that the exaggeration leads into an investigation. That is precisely what never happens with permanent alarm.

#Isn’t Less Alarm Just Downplaying?

No, because downplaying denies the danger, while calling off an alarm corrects its size. That isn’t hair-splitting — it’s the difference between two opposite operations. Whoever says a development is technically far less advanced than claimed isn’t denying that it’s happening. They’re measuring more precisely.

The sentence is careful in both directions, and that carefulness is the position. Downplaying and alarmism are the same mistake pointed in two directions: both replace checking the situation with a ready-made feeling. One has decided that nothing will happen. The other has decided that everything will happen. Neither one is still looking, and that’s what connects them.

So criticizing alarmism doesn’t mean defending carelessness. It means defending the possibility of grasping a situation in its actual scope — which is uncomfortable in both directions: looking closely sometimes finds less than feared, and sometimes more.

#What Takes the Place of Alarm?

What replaces alarm isn’t a counter-feeling — it’s a restored capacity for perception. That perception is a capacity, not a passive receiving, isn’t a claim from psychology; it’s one of the oldest theses in this tradition of thought, captured as its own concept in Space Organ. The same holds for danger: what warns us announces itself before any news report and without any statistics. But a capacity can be trained, and it can be ruined. Permanent alarm ruins it, because it loads it with stimuli that never have to withstand scrutiny — they don’t want to convince, they want to impress. A smoke detector that beeps every hour warns no one anymore.

What restores this capacity isn’t reassurance, but precision. Whoever wants to know how something is actually built comes to rest, even when the result is unpleasant. Whoever wants to know how bad it could possibly get never arrives, because that question has no point at which it has to stop. Judgement is exactly this capacity, and it can be learned: it consists in separating, in every account, what is perceived from what has been added.

When this same movement turns inward, and the worry no longer concerns the world but your own tomorrow, you’ll find it described under Fear of the Future — as the private counterpart to what happens here in public.

#Alarm Knows No Where

I don’t believe we know too much. We know the wrong places too precisely, and the decisive ones not at all. Alarmism is remarkably precise in this respect: it reliably hits what unsettles us, and reliably misses what we could do. It knows the what and the how bad. It knows no where.

So the countermovement isn’t a turning away from the world, and it isn’t a retreat into the private sphere. It’s a single question, aimed at every report: what follows from this for me, concretely, this week? If nothing follows, it wasn’t information — it was a state you were put into. If something follows, do it, and the matter is settled at that point. It’s unspectacular, and that’s exactly why it works.

Where this circling no longer stops on its own, a conversation is sometimes the place where what’s perceived can be separated from what’s been added for the first time: a philosophical consultation that doesn’t clear anything away, but looks at what is correctly seen inside this unease.

#Sources

• Nietzsche, F. (1878). Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human), No. 448.
• Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2). Leipzig: Brockhaus.
• Spinoza, B. de (1670). A Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface (trans. R. H. M. Elwes, 1883).
• Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “Gescheiterte Dystopien” (Failed Dystopias) [Video]. MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48tQgnOdoa0.
• Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “MANOVA Meinungen — KI-Roboter, UFO-Unsinn, Energie-Engpässe” (MANOVA Opinions — AI Robots, UFO Nonsense, Energy Shortages) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh66rBObOSc.