The Calm Between Waves

Mark Stone

18 Dec 2025 — 5 min read

Why the Panic Never Ends — and Why Relief Is Always Premature

There’s a familiar sensation that settles in every few years, usually after a period of intense social pressure finally begins to loosen its grip. The headlines soften. The slogans fade. Voices that once spoke with absolute certainty quietly change the subject. The cultural temperature drops just enough that dissent no longer feels radioactive.

And many people exhale.

They tell themselves the pendulum is swinging back.
They say the culture is correcting.
They assume something fundamental has been resolved.

It almost never has.

What we experience as relief is usually nothing more than a lull—the quiet interval while the next panic assembles itself out of sight.

The Pendulum That Isn’t

Political commentary loves the pendulum metaphor. Left, right, left again—an orderly oscillation that reassures us excess is always self-correcting. That history, left alone, bends back toward balance.

The metaphor fails the moment it’s examined closely.

Culture does not move along a single axis at a single speed. It behaves more like a waveform: overlapping oscillations operating at different frequencies and amplitudes. Some are slow and structural—changes in institutions, incentives, and technology. Others are fast and volatile—media narratives, moral panics, “current things.”

When one of these high-frequency waves collapses, people mistake the sudden quiet for progress. In reality, nothing foundational has changed. The deeper mechanisms—the ones that determine how panic forms, spreads, and enforces itself—remain fully intact.

Healthy, even.

This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory

It’s important to be clear about what this argument is not.

This is not a claim that moral panics are centrally planned or coordinated by shadowy actors pulling levers behind the scenes. That explanation gives far too much credit to coordination—and far too little to human nature.

Most large-scale panics emerge without orchestration.

They arise because millions of people respond to the same incentives, fears, and ego-reinforcing shortcuts at the same time. Institutions don’t invent these reactions from whole cloth. They notice them, package them, amplify them, and eventually build policy around them.

But the raw fuel is supplied willingly.

The uncomfortable truth is that modern moral panics are not imposed on an unwilling public.
They are co-created.

To understand why these cycles repeat, it helps to stop thinking about panics as failures and start recognizing them as functional.

Modern moral panics share a familiar architecture:

They are abstract enough that most people cannot verify them directly
They are technically complex, requiring expert mediation
They attach asymmetric moral value to attitudes
They personalize blame by turning ordinary behavior into harm
They justify urgency, suspending normal deliberation

Whether the object is terrorism, a virus, the climate, misinformation, or social injustice, the structure barely changes. The slogans do. The villains do. The aesthetics do.

The machinery does not.

This is why the same language keeps resurfacing: “We can’t wait.” “The science is settled.” “Silence is violence.” “Democracy itself is at risk.” Each phrase serves the same purpose: to compress complexity into obedience.

A Brief Look Back: Panics Before the Internet

Moral panics are not new. Societies have always been prone to them.

The Red Scare.
Satanic ritual abuse.
McCarthyism.
Reefer Madness.

What distinguished earlier panics was friction.

Information traveled slowly. Narratives competed longer. Enforcement relied on institutions rather than peers. Panic still spread—but it burned unevenly, and it took time.

Today, that friction is gone.

Digital platforms allow panic to propagate instantly, globally, and continuously. Social enforcement no longer requires police, courts, or formal authority. It is handled horizontally—by coworkers, friends, family members, and strangers.

This is not because social media “brainwashed” people. It’s because it removed the cost of participation.

The System Is Real — But It Runs on People

Blaming “the system” is tempting. Systems feel abstract and impersonal. They diffuse responsibility and allow everyone to imagine themselves as downstream victims of forces beyond their control.

But systems do not operate independently of human behavior. They are enacted, reinforced, and stabilized by ordinary people making ordinary decisions.

Every panic requires participation.

It requires people to repeat slogans they haven’t interrogated.
It requires people to outsource judgment to authority while telling themselves they’re being responsible.
It requires people to mistake moral alignment for understanding.

Without this daily, voluntary reinforcement, the machinery grinds to a halt.

The system does not coerce most people into compliance.
It rewards them for it.

The Appeal of Cheap Moral Shortcuts

Moral panics flourish because they offer something deeply seductive: effortless moral clarity in a genuinely complex world.

They simplify everything. They identify a threat, assign virtue, name villains, and provide a script. All that’s required is repetition.

No deep reading.
No sustained uncertainty.
No risk of being wrong in public.

For many, this isn’t a burden—it’s a relief.

Repeating the sanctioned narrative allows people to feel informed without learning, righteous without reflection, and engaged without effort. It flatters a belief that has become nearly universal in modern culture: that one is already smarter and more perceptive than average.

This is where ego enters quietly—not as arrogance, but as epistemic certainty. The conviction that the truth is obvious, that any decent person sees this the same way, and that disagreement must therefore signal moral or intellectual deficiency.

Once that belief takes hold, panic becomes self-sustaining.

Repetition Is Not Neutral

Many participants see themselves as passive. They’re not leading movements or drafting policy. They’re “just” sharing posts, nodding along, avoiding uncomfortable questions.

But repetition is not neutral.

Every unexamined slogan reinforces moral asymmetry. Every refusal to question strengthens the boundary between acceptable thought and unspeakable doubt. Every social reward for conformity nudges the system forward.

No one is forced to do this.

People participate because it’s easy, socially safe, and psychologically flattering. Because it signals belonging to the “good” group. Because it allows them to feel morally engaged without confronting complexity.

That is not victimhood.
That is complicity.

Why Critical Thinkers Are Always Outnumbered

There is a structural asymmetry that rarely gets acknowledged.

Critical thinking is expensive.

It requires time, humility, uncertainty, and the willingness to be socially uncomfortable. It often produces qualified answers when the environment rewards absolute ones.

Slogans, by contrast, are cheap. They offer instant belonging, moral certainty, and immunity from scrutiny. They are cognitively efficient and socially rewarded.

In a system that rewards speed, clarity, and alignment, the thoughtful will always lose on volume—even when they’re right.

Narrative Exhaustion Is Not Reform

Eventually, every panic burns itself out.

Sometimes reality intrudes.
Sometimes contradictions pile up.
Sometimes people are simply exhausted.

And when that happens, a strange amnesia sets in.

The slogans quietly disappear. The authorities soften their language. No reckoning occurs. No lessons are extracted. The system does not update its error-correction mechanisms.

Instead, people draw a comforting conclusion:

“Well, that’s over.”

But nothing has been resolved. The panic didn’t fail—it completed its cycle.

The Exhaustion of Thinking in a Slogan Economy

There is a final, rarely acknowledged asymmetry in all of this: the asymmetry of effort.

During every moral panic, a minority of people expend real cognitive energy trying to slow things down. They read primary sources. They contextualize data. They add nuance where nuance is unwelcome. They attempt—often unsuccessfully—to separate concern from hysteria.

This work is exhausting, socially unrewarded, and frequently punished.

Meanwhile, the majority move effortlessly from one certainty to the next. They repeat the slogans, absorb the approved conclusions, and feel morally engaged without ever touching the underlying complexity.

When the panic collapses, they do not reflect or revise.
They simply move on.

And the same small group is left, once again, cleaning up the intellectual debris—explaining why this certainty aged badly, why that urgency was overstated, why nothing fundamental was learned.