In principle, crises are supposed to be rare. The idea is simple enough: when a community faces an acute danger – a flood, a fire, an invasion, a pandemic – certain normal constraints on power are temporarily suspended to enable rapid, decisive action. Once the danger passes, those powers are relinquished and ordinary procedures resume. In practice, the temporary has a habit of stretching. States of exception, once normalised, are hard to roll back.
The pattern recurs across regimes and eras. Colonial administrations declared “emergency” in Kenya, Algeria, Malaya, Ireland, Palestine – legalising detention without trial, censorship, collective punishment. The “war on terror” after 9/11 spawned an archipelago of black sites, torture memos, mass surveillance programmes, and wars of choice dressed as self‑defence. Covid‑19 prompted lockdowns, tracking apps, and emergency procurement processes – some of which saved lives, and some of which became vehicles for corruption and authoritarian drift.
What interests me here is not the moral ranking of these episodes, but the common logic that underlies them. Crisis and emergency are political technologies. They concentrate decision‑making, lowering the social cost of punitive measures. They create a climate in which dissent can be painted as disloyalty, oversight as obstruction, and calls for restraint as naive indulgence.
That logic is seductive for rulers of all kinds. Emergency offers, at least in the short term, a reprieve from the messiness of democratic bargaining, judicial scrutiny, and public argument. It allows policies that would be indefensible in calmer times – mass deportations, expanded surveillance, pre‑emptive strikes, draconian sentencing – to be smuggled in under the banner of necessity.
The temptation is not limited to obviously authoritarian regimes. Liberal democracies have repeatedly declared and extended states of emergency in response to terrorism, migration, crime, and protest. Each time, the promise is that exceptional powers will be tightly targeted and time‑bound. Each time, some portion of those powers is quietly folded into the ordinary toolkit of governance.
We see this not just in law but possibly even more clearly in rhetoric. The “war on drugs”, the “war on terror”, the “war on woke”, the “border crisis”: these framings are not neutral descriptions. They are invitations to treat complex, long‑running social issues as if they were surprise attacks that justify martial responses.
In such a climate, the line between genuine danger and politically useful alarm grows thin. The distinction between what we must do to survive and what some actors wish to do to entrench their position becomes blurred. To say this is not to deny that real emergencies exist. As I have argued elsewhere, our species faces converging hazards – ecological, technological, geopolitical – that are genuinely unprecedented. The question is not whether we should ever act urgently. It is whether we can tell the difference between urgency that protects life and urgency that merely protects advantage.
That distinction becomes even harder to maintain when we consider that emergency is not only a political technology. It is also an economic opportunity.
The emergency economy
Follow the money, and the picture sharpens. Permanent emergency is not just a style of governance. It is also a business model. Arms manufacturers need credible enemies. Border‑security firms need ever more dangerous migrants. Intelligence contractors need proliferating threats. Cyber‑security vendors need an expanding universe of vulnerabilities. Media outlets and platforms need a steady stream of outrage to keep us clicking, sharing, arguing - and partitioned. None of this requires collusion. It requires only a set of incentives that reward those who can reliably turn fear and grievance into contracts, ratings, campaign donations, and political capital.
Just look at the arms trade. Global military expenditure now exceeds two trillion US dollars a year. Weapons are not simply produced; they are marketed. Trade shows display drones, missiles, cyber‑tools and “crowd‑control” technologies the way car dealers display new models. Every regional flare‑up, every fresh round of sanctions, every new designation of a “terrorist organisation” is read by some as a business opportunity and a chance to test new weapons.
Border security has become a growth industry in its own right. Private companies build and maintain detention centres, supply surveillance towers and biometric systems, patrol seas and deserts. Their revenues depend not on resolving the underlying drivers of displacement – war, inequality, climate disruption – but on persuading governments that those drivers are uncontrollable, and that the only rational response is a thicker perimeter.
The same logic applies online. Social media platforms, advertising networks and some news outlets operate on an attention‑extraction model. Their income is a function of how long we stay on the page, how often we return, how intensely we engage. Outrage, humiliation and fear are highly engaging emotions. They hold our focus and invite response; they are contagious.
Algorithms, tasked with maximising engagement, quietly learn to privilege content that provokes them. That is not because their designers are necessarily malevolent. It is because the objective function – keep people clicking – interacts with human psychology in predictable ways. In this sense, the architecture of our information spaces has become a semi‑autonomous emergency amplifier. It notices that panic and anger work, and so it gives us more.
When a massacre occurs, when a storm hits, when a provocative law is passed, the emergency engine hums to life. Security briefings expand. Commentators assemble panels. Advertising rates spike around “breaking news”. Politicians discover new justifications for projects long on their wish‑lists: more prisons, more surveillance powers, more weapons, more walls. None of this means that every investment in security or public order is illegitimate. It does mean that once a significant portion of jobs, share prices and campaign war‑chests depend on the perception of constant threat, we create a structure in which calm, de‑escalation and long‑term resolution are, at best, under‑incentivised.
A world that lived from one genuine emergency to the next would be exhausting enough. A world in which emergency has become a profitable default risks something worse: the systematic erosion of our capacity to think and feel outside the register of alarm. In such a world, the question is no longer only “How do we respond to danger?” but “Who gets paid when we are afraid?”
Emotional extraction: turning humiliation and grief into assets
In “Beyond the Kill Zone” I argued that humiliation and grief are not just psychological states. They are currencies. They can be converted into votes, bombs and long memories. Here we need to extend the point: they can also be harvested and traded as assets in the emergency economy.
Campaign strategists test‑market slogans designed to tap into felt slights: “take back control”, “stop the boats”, “make X great again”, “defend our way of life”. Demagogues and culture‑war entrepreneurs build loyal followings by naming enemies and promising catharsis. Platform architectures feed this process by amplifying content that elicits intense emotion, regardless of whether it illuminates or distorts reality. Much of what passes for public debate in such an environment is not deliberation. It is emotional extraction. Political actors and media systems mine reservoirs of fear, resentment and grief built up over decades – sometimes centuries – of structural injustice. They then channel that energy into short‑term goals: an election cycle, a ratings bump, a fundraising target.
This is one of the reasons binaries are so persistent. They simplify the work of extraction. It is far easier to mobilise people around “us versus them” than around the more accurate, but less thrilling, story: “we are entangled in systems that harm us all in different ways, and disentangling will be slow, messy and require sacrifice from those currently protected.”
Following a massacre, for example, genuine grief and terror are available in abundance. An emergency‑literate politics could respond by creating spaces for mourning, by resisting the rush to blame, by insisting on evidence before retaliation, by asking what policy choices made such violence more likely and how they might be changed.
An emergency‑driven politics does something else. It identifies a convenient enemy, amplifies the most inflammatory interpretations, and uses the moment to pass measures that expand the security apparatus or silence critics. It takes the raw material of pain and refines it into resentment that can be stored and burned later.
In this sense, the emergency economy, fuelled by the fear industry, is not only about physical infrastructures – weapons, walls, wires. It’s about emotional infrastructures. It depends on a steady supply of unprocessed hurt. A population that had robust ways of metabolising loss, humiliation and anxiety without immediately seeking a target would be harder to govern through permanent emergency.
Which brings us back to the argument I made in “The Discipline of Love”. A civilisation that treats structural love as a design constraint would invest heavily in the mundane, unprofitable work of emotional repair: education that teaches people to sit with discomfort, institutions that model apology and restitution, media that make space for complexity, rituals of mourning that do not end in calls for blood.
From the standpoint of the current world‑system, such investments look sentimental or wasteful. From the standpoint of a threatened species trying to avoid being driven mad by its own feedback loops, they appear more like mental- health infrastructure on a civilisational scale.
Why binaries are so well funded
In this light, the persistence of simplistic oppositions – us and them, civilised and barbaric, safe and dangerous – is less mysterious. They are not merely bad habits. They are cost‑effective tools.
Binaries make it easier to sell weapons: “They hate our freedoms.” “They only understand force.” They make it easier to justify harsh domestic policies: “These people are predators.” “Those people are invaders.” They make it easier to generate content that travels: a headline that declares a side pure and an opponent monstrous will outperform any nuanced account of shared responsibility.
Cross‑cutting relationships, by contrast, do not monetise well. The nurse in Johannesburg discovering shared loss with a colleague, the Bangalore engineer collaborating with a climate modeller in São Paulo, the Jewish and Muslim teenagers in Munich falling in love over music, the Pacific Island leader sharing a room with a Russian admiral: these are the fibres that make emergency harder to manufacture. But they do not produce windfall profits for arms dealers, border‑security firms, or outrage merchants.
Structural love, as I argued in the previous essay, threatens business models built on disposability. So too do identities that refuse to map neatly onto pre‑packaged antagonisms. A citizen who sees both Israelis and Palestinians as fully human; both refugees and local workers as deserving of dignity; both police and protesters as capable of harm and of courage; is a difficult customer for binary propaganda.
From the point of view of a political and economic order reliant on permanent emergency, such citizens are, at best, unreliable assets. At worst, they are obstacles. This helps explain why calls for de‑escalation, for cross‑community dialogue, for structural reforms that reduce the production of grievance, so often struggle to gain traction compared to calls for toughness and purity. It is not simply that humans enjoy anger more than complexity. It is that someone is paying for the microphone.
The issue is not only how to persuade individuals to think beyond binaries. It’s how to change the funding streams and institutional designs that keep underwriting them.
We’re unlikely to do that by lecturing from on high. You can’t change a complex and evolving narrative trope by applying rational persuasion from authority. What we know from the science of behaviour and communication is that small‑scale interactions or what I call systemic acupuncture – working obliquely to generate empathy, with feedback, at scale – can shift patterns far more effectively, and with less innate disruption, than top‑down messaging. But they only work if the wider substrate is also being addressed. Otherwise they become just another cultural imposition from the centre outwards rather than a genuine re‑weaving of relationships.
Breaking – or redirecting – the emergency engine
If permanent emergency is a political and economic technology, it can, in principle, be redesigned. The aim is not to abolish or negate genuine urgency. Faced with climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, emerging pathogens and destabilising technologies, some alarms need to be much louder, not softer. But we must distinguish between emergencies that protect life and emergencies that protect advantage – and build institutions that reward the former while constraining the latter. What might that look like in practice?
It could begin with budget lines. Many governments already spend vast sums on militaries, border controls, carceral systems and intelligence agencies, while underfunding public health, climate adaptation, education and conflict prevention. Rebalancing those expenditures is not a panacea. But it is a concrete way of signalling that we consider pandemics and heatwaves as serious as “threats to national security”.
Regulation has a role, too. Just as we have, belatedly, accepted that unregulated financial markets can manufacture crises, we may need to treat certain forms of informational and technological escalation as systemic risks. Algorithmic amplification of content that degrades identifiable groups could be treated less as “free speech” and more as the digital equivalent of dumping toxins into a shared river.
Transparency and sunset clauses could be strengthened around emergency powers. Every declaration of a state of exception – whether for terrorism, migration, disease or unrest – could be tied to automatic review mechanisms, with independent oversight bodies empowered to audit not only effectiveness but also side‑effects on rights, trust and social cohesion.
Internationally, we could begin to build norms – however fragile – against certain uses of crisis. For example, agreements that pandemics will not be used as cover for mass expulsions, or that climate disasters will not be exploited to push through land‑grabs and deregulation. Such norms would be broken, as all norms are. But they would at least provide a reference point for naming abuses.
None of this will arise from markets or bureaucracies optimised for speed and scale. It will require movements – social, professional, faith‑based, scientific – willing to challenge the automatic channelling of fear into familiar grooves. It will require leaders prepared to lose elections rather than ride the next wave of panic. It will require, in other words, a degree of structural love: a prior commitment to the non‑disposability of others that limits what we are willing to do, even under pressure.
There’s no guarantee that such re‑engineering will succeed. The emergency engine driving the fear industry has enormous momentum. It offers immediate gratification – in the form of decisive action, clear enemies, soaring ratings, rising share prices – while diffusing and delaying the costs. Against that, the work of prevention, de‑escalation and repair can look slow, uncertain, and politically thankless.
But if we are, as I have argued elsewhere, a threatened species, then continuing to feed that engine without scrutiny looks less like hard‑headed realism and more like a particular kind of madness. A civilisation that can no longer distinguish between the siren that warns of fire and the siren that sells more fire extinguishers – or more accelerant – is a civilisation that has lost control of its own nerves.
We will not escape genuine emergencies. The question is whether we can, in time, stop building our world around manufactured ones.
In “Beyond the Kill Zone” I argued that our civilisation’s addiction to binaries makes atrocity both narratively satisfying and politically useful. In “The Discipline of Love” I suggested that without some deliberate practice of structural care, we are unlikely to become a species worthy of survival.
The emergency engine is where those two logics meet: fear and division are refined into profit and power. To step off that machinery will not mean a world without danger. It will mean learning to reserve our deepest urgency for the crises that threaten life itself, rather than for the dramas that keep an exhausted civilisation entertained as it edges towards the brink.