970x125
Reflecting on the dramatic shifts in public opinion, political leanings, and social norms, a friend recently asked how it’s possible that so many people seem to have changed their values so quickly. The more unsettling answer is that many haven’t changed their values at all; they’ve changed how much attention they can afford to give. Increasingly, people aren’t asking what they believe, but how much they can still carry.
We like to believe that obedience is a matter of belief. That people comply because they agree, because they’re persuaded, or at least because they’re afraid. But most of the time, obedience and even fear have very little to do with belief at all. People often obey systems they know are wrong not because they’re convinced, but because resistance is exhausting. Many Americans recognize this feeling now, even if they wouldn’t name it this way. The constant churn of dramatic news. The unending cycle of crisis, outrage, reversal, and escalation. The sense that everything’s urgent and nothing’s resolvable. Over time, this does something subtle to the psyche. It doesn’t make people careless.
It makes them tired. I, for one, feel tired.
Tired of the sense that every moment demands a reaction, a position, a performance of concern. Tired of being told that everything is catastrophic and urgent, while being offered no clear path toward repair. Over time, this kind of saturation doesn’t sharpen moral clarity. It dulls it. When exhaustion reaches this level, something subtle starts to shift.
Research on cognitive scarcity shows that when mental bandwidth is taxed, attention narrows and higher-order judgment suffers. Tolerance for ambiguity increases because there’s not enough energy to contest it. Standards for what feels acceptable quietly lower; we’re just too depleted to argue again. And things that once provoked questioning start to pass without comment, because challenging them feels too costly.
Psychologically, this isn’t apathy. It’s conservation of our nervous system, which when flooded by constant stimulation and unresolved threat starts prioritizing stability over scrutiny. Attention narrows, engagement becomes increasingly selective, and the mind starts looking for ways to reduce friction and preserve equilibrium, even when that means accommodating conditions it would otherwise resist. In practice, this can look like skimming headlines without reading past the first paragraph, not because the issue doesn’t matter, but because fully taking it in feels overwhelming. It can look like avoiding conversations that once felt important because the emotional cost of disagreement now outweighs the hope of resolution. It can look like accepting procedural decisions or institutional norms that feel vaguely wrong, simply because challenging them would require energy that no longer feels available.
In these moments when psychological exhaustion sets into us and continuing to pay attention itself starts to feel unsustainable, people aren’t agreeing so much as adapting. Their attention has narrowed because of the collective fatigue. We avoid conversations we once entered willingly and let troubling decisions pass without comment simply because responding would require more energy than we can spare. Over time, ignoring becomes an act of self-preservation, and emotional distance turns into a practical way to protect oneself when sustained engagement carries too high a psychological cost. This is the quiet terrain in which obedience takes root.
After all, while psychology has long focused on fear as the engine of compliance, punishment (or the threat of it) doesn’t fully explain the passive acceptance we see in everyday life, especially in societies where people still imagine themselves as free. This is moral outsourcing. Responsibility doesn’t vanish, but it migrates. The individual doesn’t ask, “Is this right?” The more manageable question becomes, “Is this required of me?” or even, “Can I afford to think about this right now?”
Calm plays a powerful role here. Humans associate calm with safety and order, so many people today carry private unease alongside public silence. We may sense that something’s wrong but knowing that isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it. And when no clear action seems available, withdrawal feels safer than engagement. In patterns like these, we see a deepening of learned helplessness. We’ve been outraged dozens of times in recent months, but change didn’t come, so our nervous system adapts to the outrage and just stops mobilizing. We still care—it stands repeating that it’s not apathy at work. We’re just very, very tired.
Does this mean individuals who are silent bystanders bear no responsibility for their inaction?
No.
But the facts are that courage requires energy, attention, and a sense of agency, which means moral courage can’t be separated from psychological capacity. Perhaps the more unsettling question, then, isn’t why people obey systems they know are wrong. It’s why so many systems are structured in ways that depend on exhaustion rather than persuasion.
Attention Essential Reads
If we want to understand obedience in our current moment, we need to look not only at what people believe, but at what they’re managing and what it would cost them to have sustained attention. Ethics doesn’t disappear in these systems, it’s simply crowded out. And until we reckon with how exhaustion shapes moral behavior, we’ll continue to misunderstand compliance. We’ll keep searching for villains where there are often just overwhelmed humans, doing what they can to get through another day without falling apart. Thus, ultimately, what keeps many systems standing isn’t belief or cruelty.
Rather, it’s the slow erosion of our capacity to keep paying attention.
