Nuanced.
Where real conversations happen — with host Aaron Pete.
Nuanced.
207. Outrage vs. Responsibility: Why Our Institutions Feel Broken
Western culture isn’t struggling with money or freedom—it’s struggling with maturity. In this talk, Aaron Pete explores how comfort made us fragile, how politics turned into therapy, how media became performance, and how leaders lost their courage. This is a call to grow up again—choosing responsibility, honesty, and seriousness over outrage and convenience.
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There is something hollow at the core of Western culture today. You can feel it. It's in the way we speak cautious, curated, afraid to offend. It's in the way we argue not to understand but to offend. It's in the way we argue not to understand but to dominate. It's in the way we lead performatively, opportunistically, with little courage and even less consequence. We've become a culture addicted to convenience, allergic to discomfort and hostile to truth, the kind of culture that prefers slogans to substance and outrage to introspection. The kind of culture that shames complexity and rewards conformity and, worst of all, the kind of culture that congratulates itself for doing so.
Aaron Pete:The West is not facing a crisis of wealth, freedom or knowledge. It is facing a crisis of maturity. That word maturity has all but vanished from public discourse, but it's something precisely that we need right now. It's what's missing, not just because in our politics or institutions, but in our homes, schools and civic conversations, we've mistaken adulthood for age, wisdom for credentials and responsibility for branding. We've become a people who have forgotten how to be serious, and the cracks are showing. How did we get here? Some point to the reduction and decline of religion, others blame the rise of social media, some say it's the universities, others billionaires. But none of these forces exist in a vacuum. They flourished in a culture already drifting soft, complacent and seduced by comfort.
Aaron Pete:This series is not an attack. It's a reckoning, an attempt to chart how we lost our cultural gravity and what we might need to reclaim it, a reflection on the long descent from the resilience of the World War II generation to the fragility of the Instagram age generation, to the fragility of the Instagram age, from the Normandy landings to Netflix burnout, from uncomfortable truths to uncomfortable lies. There will be four parts, four pillars of our cultural regression Comfort po litics, media government Politics, media government. This isn't left versus right, it's serious versus unserious. And until we choose to grow up again, nothing gets better. Generations spoiled by comfort.
Aaron Pete:Between 1960 and 2001, the West experienced the most expansive period of economic growth in human history Post-World War II. Reconstruction, industrial boom, suburban development and globalization brought rising GDP, falling poverty and a sense of unstoppable momentum, of unstoppable momentum. There were no world wars, no existential enemies, no conscription, just highways, fridges, pensions and the illusion that progress was going to be permanent. It worked. Materially, the West flourished, but culturally we softened. And it wasn't just wealth, it was the absence of adversity For the first time in human history, generations came of age without knowing war, famine or economic collapse, and instead of using that privilege to strengthen society, we used it to shield ourselves from the very idea of suffering. This is the paradox of modern comfort. It gave us more than any civilization before us, and it also hollowed us out.
Aaron Pete:In 2021, pew Research found that 59% of Americans believe too many people are easily offended these days over the language others use. That number cuts across party lines. It's not just a generational divide. It's a cultural reckoning. We've equated discomfort with harm, inconvenience with oppression. The shift didn't happen by accident. It's the result of an over-parenting, over-protection and the rise of the safety-first mentality.
Aaron Pete:Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in the Coddling of the American Mind, describe how children raised in affluent societies were taught that emotional discomfort is dangerous, that words can be violence and that avoiding conflict is a virtue. The result An epidemic of fragility. College campuses, once arenas of debates, now counsel speakers for making people feel unsafe. Words like harm, trauma and violence are applied to ideas, not actions, and resilience is no longer a goal. It's considered a threat to vulnerable minds.
Aaron Pete:This coddling extends far beyond academia. Consider life skills. A 2022 YouGov poll found that only 35% of Americans aged 18 to 29 feel very confident performing basic mechanical repairs. Another survey from AutoMD found that nearly three in four millennials don't know how to change a tire. These aren't just mechanical failures. They're symbolic failures a lack of agency competence and self-reliance. A generation raised on digital technology and instant gratification is less likely to take risk, solve physical problems or develop the resilience that comes from trial and error. What was once common knowledge how to use tools, fix a faucet, build a treehouse is now outsourced to YouTube or avoided altogether. Even risk-taking has declined. Haidt and others have documented how children today have less unsupervised outdoor time than any generation before them. Free play, which used to be a foundation of childhood development, has been replaced by scheduled activities, screen times and surveillance.
Aaron Pete:Reality doesn't come with trigger warnings, but our institutions do. Schools, workplaces and even social media platforms now preemptively warn us that content may cause discomfort. While originally well-intended, this trend is increasingly criticized by psychologists as counterproductive, particularly in the treatment of anxiety and trauma. Dr Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist, has found that trigger warnings can increase anxiety, especially among those with PTSD. In other words, shielding people from difficult material may make them more sensitive, not less. Exposure, not avoidance builds resilience, but that's the opposite of what Western institutions are doing. From HR policies to curriculum design, we're creating systems that coddle emotion instead of cultivating strength.
Aaron Pete:This isn't about romanticizing the past. It's about recognizing a dangerous pattern. When comfort becomes a worldview, not just a condition, we begin to expect the world to bend to us. We assume we deserve ease, we mistake every obstacle for an injustice and we demand that our institutions, leaders and systems never make us uncomfortable, even when discomfort is necessary. That mindset doesn't stay contained in our homes or classrooms. It bleeds into how we vote, how we protest, how we engage with the truth and power. It shapes how we frame disagreement not as difference but as danger. It teaches us not just to seek safety but to weaponize it. And that brings us to the second fault line in our cultural immaturity politics. Because when a fragile culture encounters complex problems, it doesn't look for solutions, it looks for enemies. Material progress without cultural maturity doesn't make us wise, it makes us complacent. And when crisis hits, as it did during COVID-19, with lockdowns, mandates and institutional failure, we saw just how unprepared the comfortable classes really were. We panicked, we blamed and we melted Politics, how partisanship infantilized the West.
Aaron Pete:Politics is supposed to be the arena where adults hash out difficult trade-offs in public, but today it feels more like a therapy session for the chronically offended, where ideology is a personality, disagreement is betrayal and nuance is dead on arrival. The modern political landscape isn't just polarized, it's childish. We don't debate policies anymore, we trade memes. We don't challenge ideas. We shame each other into silence and in that vacuum, the loudest, angriest and most emotionally reactive voices win. We've turned democracy, once the domain of stoic statesmen and principled dissidents, into a theater of tantrums, and the result isn't activism, it's regression.
Aaron Pete:Once upon a time, you could be a liberal and still believe in free speech. You could be a conservative and still criticize corporate power, but in the current climate, what you believe matters far less than who you're aligned with. Partisanship has morphed into tribalism. A 2022 Pew study found that 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats say they have very unfavorable views of the other party Levels not seen since the Civil War. These aren't just political disagreements, they're moral condemnations.
Aaron Pete:In Canada, we are moving slowly in the same direction. The Centre for Media Technology and Democracy found that Canadians were increasingly feeling negative emotions to those who didn't share their view. We don't ask what's the best way to fix this. We ask whose side are you on? This is what Haidt calls moral polarization of public life. People no longer hold positions based on reason or evidence. They inherit them from their social group, then treat any contradiction as a personal attack.
Aaron Pete:Today's political discourse runs on vibes, not values. Policy analysis has been replaced with the emotional venting, especially on platforms like X, where outrage is rewarded and complexity is punished In the Righteous Mind. Jonathan Haidt explains how people tend to form emotional judgments first, then rationalize them after the fact. This means that most political debate isn't about truth. It's about affirmation, and politicians know it, which is why so many of them campaign not on detailed plans but on outrage now dabbles in emotional manipulation because it works. Rhetoric like build the wall or believe all women isn't meant to be debated. It's meant to be repeated. It's meme politics, not policy politics.
Aaron Pete:But here's the darker side. The system treats us like children because we started to act like them. We demand the government fix every problem instantly, painlessly and perfectly, no matter the financial cost. We punish politicians for honesty and reward them for saying what we want to hear. We ask for security, not liberty. Entitlement not responsibility. In a healthy democracy, voters are expected to wrestle with trade-offs Freedom vs safety, growth vs equity, rights vs responsibilities but in our current culture, trade-offs are offensive. Any attempt at compromise is treated as betrayal.
Aaron Pete:Look at how leaders are now punished for even modest nuance. Justin Trudeau said he wouldn't bring in vaccine mandates and then reversed course, triggering mass protests and the invocation of the Emergencies Act. He didn't just lose trust, he exposed how reactive and binary our politics have become. In the US, anthony Fauci was hailed as a saint by one half of the country and a tyrant by the other, regardless of his actual record. People didn't evaluate what he said. They evaluated what he represented. We want our leaders to be perfect symbols, not flawed humans, and that is a deeply childish demand. When a culture becomes fragile, it stops taking responsibility. Instead, it searches for villains, and modern politics is awash with scapegoats the unvaccinated, the woke, the Trumpers, the elites, the truckers, the media, the immigrants, the billionaires Pick your enemy. What matters isn't whether they caused your problem. What matters is whether they're convenient to blame.
Aaron Pete:As Yuval Levin writes, in A Time to Build institutions used to form people. Now they perform for people. Politicians don't lead. They brand Parties, don't offer platforms. They offer slogans and voters don't deliberate. They perform outrage, usually online, and call it democracy. They perform outrage, usually online, and call it democracy.
Aaron Pete:When comfort eroded our resilience, politics became the first casualty Because once a population expects ease, safety and affirmation, politics stops being a civic duty and starts being a therapy session. We don't want leaders, we want emotional surrogates. We don't want leaders, we want emotional surrogates. We don't want arguments, we want echo chambers. And when we finally do face a real crisis geopolitical, economic or environmental we won't know how to argue or build correlations or change course, because we won't trust anyone who disagrees with us. Which leads us into the third fracture in Western maturity Media, because if politics is broken, it's not all alone. The fourth state broke with it Media. How journalism became performance. If politics is where public immaturity is most visible, then media is where it is most amplified.
Aaron Pete:Once, journalism was a tool to hold power accountable, a sober civic institution, but today it is a stage. Performance has replaced reporting, sensation has replaced scrutiny and narratives have replaced reporting. Sensation has replaced scrutiny and narratives have replaced nuance. Journalism was once blue-collar, gritty, grounded. The journalist used to be the outsider, the inconvenient voice, the one who poked holes in the official story. Think of Seymour Hersh uncovering my Lie, bob Woodwardward and Carl Bernstein tracking Watergate. Even Peter Mansbridge calmly narrating the world into Canadian living rooms. But that class of journalist has been replaced by something entirely different the celebrity pundit. They don't investigate. They perform Not for truth but for tribes.
Aaron Pete:Let's start with the numbers. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media, down from 72% in 1976. That's not a dip, that's a free fall. Why? Because people aren't stupid. They see the game. They see journalists parroting the same language as politicians. They see coverage that cherry picks facts to fit the narrative, whether it's on immigration, covid, war or gender. And they see corporate sponsors big pharma, big tech, defense contractors shaping what's reported and what isn't.
Aaron Pete:This is something Holly Doan, publisher of Blacklock's Reporter and a past guest on the show, laid out bluntly. She is one of the few reporters still reading government reports word for word. She described how most journalists don't attend committee hearings or analyze budgets. They wait for press releases and then rewrite them. She also noted a critical truth Many Canadian news outlets are subsidized by the very government they're supposed to scrutinize.
Aaron Pete:According to a report from the Hub as of 2023, over $595 million has been spent, committed to support Canadian news organizations under various government programs. That creates a chilling effect, not through censorship but through dependency. How can a media outlet investigate the hand that feeds them? We used to ask what's true. Now we ask what does my side say? This is the death of journalism and the birth of infotainment content tailored not to inform but to reinforce identity.
Aaron Pete:If you're left wing, you watch MSNBC. If you're right-wing, you watch Fox News. If you're young and disillusioned, maybe it's Breaking Points or the Young Turks, but regardless of the platform, the formula is the same Find a story that activates outrage, flatten the complexity and deliver it with certainty. This is not journalism, it's emotional affirmation. And it's dangerous because complex problems like inflation, climate change or housing don't fit neatly into soundbites, but our media system demands that they do, and when journalists prioritize virality over veracity, we all become dumber. There's also a generational shift.
Aaron Pete:Journalism used to attract curious, skeptical people. Today it increasingly attracts social climbers and activists. They don't want to be invisible note-takers. They want to be voices, and not in the old Edward R Murrow sense. They want to be invisible note takers. They want to be voices, and not in the old Edward R Murrow sense. They want to be seen. They build brands, grow platforms and trade journalists to credibility. For Twitter clout. They chase virality like influencers do, and in many ways they are influencers, just with press credentials.
Aaron Pete:Even the tone of reporting has changed. Compare how journalists covered the Cuban Missile Crisis to how they covered Joe Rogan interviewing Robert Malone. One was grave, disciplined, restrained, the other breathless, reactive and moralizing. And while traditional outlets are bleeding readers, alternative media is rising. Some of it is excellent Long-form interviews, data journalism, deep reporting but much of it is just the other side of the same coin Performance in a different jersey.
Aaron Pete:Covid exposed just how performative journalism has become. Instead of asking hard questions about the origin of the virus, lockdown, trade-offs or vaccine mandates, many outlets simply repeated what government and pharmaceutical spokespersons said, word for word. Dissenting voices weren't debated, they were discredited or deplatformed. Dr Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology, platformed. Dr Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology, warned that this style of coverage undermined trust and turned journalism into stenography. But few listened. Why? Because performance was safer, easier and more profitable. And again people noticed. Even those who complied began to feel uneasy about how little scrutiny the press applied to public health policy, and once trust is lost, it's nearly impossible to regain.
Aaron Pete:When journalism becomes performance, democracy becomes a stage play. We're not engaging with reality. We're reacting to a script, and that script is written by algorithms funded by corporations and performed by people too scared or too dependent to challenge power. We need a media culture that's brave, skeptical and humble, one that doesn't just report what's popular but investigate what matters, one that serves the public, not the brand, because without serious press, we become a serious threat to ourselves. And nowhere is that more obvious than in how governments now behave, knowing they're rarely held accountable.
Aaron Pete:Government when leadership lost its spine Once upon a time, public office came with expectations of seriousness. Leaders were expected to be adults in the room. They had to make hard decisions, tell uncomfortable truths and, when they got things wrong, step down. But that era is gone. What we have now are brand managers in suits, figures, who campaign on authenticity and govern by calculation. They pose, they pivot, they rarely admit failure and they almost never pay a price for it. We don't elect leaders anymore, we elect marketers. And when things go sideways, their instinct isn't to lead, it's to perform damage control. In a mature democracy, failure means consequences, but not today, failure means nothing.
Aaron Pete:Take Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau In 2021, he insisted that vaccine mandates were not on the table. He introduced one, helped divide the country by rhetoric. They don't believe in science. They're often misogynists and racists and invoked the Emergencies Act against the convoy protest, a tool never before used in Canadian history. Was there accountability? Not really. In fact, mainstream media largely ran cover. No apology, no reflection, just a continuation of a brand Empathy on the surface and coercion underneath.
Aaron Pete:In the United States, anthony Fauci told Americans in early 2020 that masks weren't necessary, only to later reverse course and defend the lie by saying he didn't want a mask shortage. To reverse course and defend the lie by saying he didn't want a mask shortage. When the lab leak theory gained traction, he dismissed it publicly, even though internal emails showed that it was a possibility. He acknowledged privately. Again, no accountability. He was hailed as a hero by half the country and demonized by the other. Truth was secondary. What mattered was which side you thought he was on.
Aaron Pete:When leadership loses its spine, it begins to behave like public relations. The goal is no longer to tell the truth or make things better. It's to manage perception and in the end, we get politics that feels like advertising, not governance. We now live in an era of symbolic governance. It's not what politicians do that matters, it's what they signal. They kneel, they wear flags, they tweet, but when it comes time to legislate or lead through a crisis, but their instincts are to deflect, delay or delegate. Consider the housing crisis in Canada Minister after minister, report after report, and yet affordability continues to worsen. Why? Because serious reform like zoning overhauls or municipal accountability. It's politically risky. It alienates mayors and voters. So sometimes politicians posture, hold summits, make big announcements but avoid the structural change we're required to fix anything.
Aaron Pete:As Brad Viz, a conservative MP and a recent guest on the podcast, pointed out, most politicians are too tightly bound by party discipline to think independently, let alone act with courage. They fear their leaders more than they fear the public. Failure, that's not leadership, that's obedience. Another hallmark of our immaturity is the bureaucratization of governance. Decisions aren't made by elected leaders anymore, they're made by sprawling, unaccountable agencies. You saw it during COVID, where provincial health officers, not premiers, shaped public life. You see it with federal climate policy, where departments issuing sweeping regulations with minimal parliamentary debate, regulations with minimal parliamentary debate. You see it in education, housing, health, where bureaucracies manage complexity that politicians don't even understand. David Eby, premier of British Columbia, spoke to this on the podcast how governments function more like landlords or giant systems than active stewards. The complexity is so vast, the files so technical, that most politicians simply rubber stamp what senior bureaucrats or consultants hand them. That's not inherently evil, but it's not democratic either. And when things go wrong, when housing collapses, healthcare buckles or students fall behind, no one takes responsibility. Everyone points sideways. That's immaturity at the highest level.
Aaron Pete:There was a time when resignation was an act of honor. It meant I failed and I'll step aside so others can lead better. That idea is nearly extinct. The UK, oddly enough, still has some tradition of it. Matt Hancock, the UK health secretary, resigned in 2021 after breaking lockdown rules he helped impose. But in Canada and the US, you can lie, break laws, violate ethics and stay in office so long as your base is loyal and your comms team is competent. That's not strength, that's rot. And when leaders don't model integrity, why would citizens? Conclusion None of this exists in a vacuum.
Aaron Pete:Our leaders reflect us. We tolerated these leaders because we stopped demanding more. We wanted comfort, not courage, performance not principle. We mocked anyone who admitted doubt. We punished anyone who stood alone and we rewarded whoever could act confident while doing nothing. Government has become a theater and we, the audience, are complicit. If our leaders are weak, maybe it's because we're no longer serious enough to choose better ones. Maybe, just maybe, leadership won't grow a spine until the public does.
Aaron Pete:We've built a civilization that can put a satellite into orbit but falls apart when Twitter goes down for an hour. We conquered disease, poverty and war in ways our ancestors could have never imagined, and yet we seem unable to hold a conversation without melting down. We are more prosperous, more connected, more educated than any society in history and less serious than ever. In this conversation, we've looked at four pillars of that collapse In comfort which softened us. We raised generations in unprecedented safety and affluence and forgot how to teach them how to suffer, how to persevere, how to endure discomfort without falling apart.
Aaron Pete:In politics, it infantilizes us. We traded dialogue for division, traded civic duty for tribal identity and replaced the adult task of negotiation with the childlike demand to be agreed with In our media sphere. It betrayed us. Once a tool to challenge power, it became a performance industry, more interested in clicks than in truth, more loyal to narratives than to facts and more complicit than courageous. Our government, which lost its spine. We stopped asking for wisdom and started asking for branding. We stopped rewarding integrity and started rewarding theater. And when leaders no longer fear accountability, they stop acting like leaders at all.
Aaron Pete:But this isn't just about institutions, it's about us. The media didn't become shallow because of some external conspiracy. It did because we clicked on the shallow stuff. Politicians didn't become cowardly in a vacuum. They did because we rewarded cowardice over complexity and fragility didn't rise out of nowhere. It rose because we chose ease over depth every single time. We are not victims of this cultural immaturity. We are its authors. But that also means we can choose differently. We can choose depth over dopamine debate, over dismissal principle, over performance. We can stop asking for safety and start asking for the truth. We can stop demanding comfort and start cultivating courage. We can choose to grow up, because we don't just need better leaders. We need better citizens, we need better parents. We need better students, better men, better women. We need better parents. We need better students, better men, better women. We need seriousness again.
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