I Fight for My Feelings
There was a young woman standing in the street, holding a sign that read: I fight fascism. She was not shouting. She was not theatrical. She looked fragile, almost transparent with emotion. When someone asked her a simple question, What is fascism?, she began to cry.
She tried to answer. She said fascism meant the breakdown of society, that when there is fascism there is no society anymore. The sentence did not quite settle. It gestured toward collapse but did not describe a structure.
Then she said something far more revealing than any definition could have been.
“I fight for how I feel.”
“And I fight for others, of course.”
When she was asked what she felt, she replied, “Can’t you hear it in my voice?”
She could not name it.
It is tempting to laugh at such a moment. But I think that would be a mistake. Nothing about it is trivial. Scenes like this are diagnostic. They tell us something about the psychological climate we inhabit.
For most of modern history, political conviction rested on frameworks that could be articulated. People spoke of labor and capital, church and state, sovereignty and class, markets and redistribution. They argued fiercely, often wrongly, sometimes catastrophically, but they could usually explain what they believed.
Today one increasingly encounters a different posture. The conviction remains, sometimes with enormous intensity, but the conceptual scaffolding has thinned. Emotion arrives untranslated. The feeling becomes the ideology.
In this case, even the feeling resists articulation. It is not only that the word cannot be defined. The emotion itself cannot be named. It must be inferred from tone. It exists as intensity before it exists as language.
This is not simply a matter of education or intelligence. It is something more atmospheric. Many people experience the present as unstable. Institutions feel less solid. Technological change accelerates faster than comprehension. Cultural ground shifts beneath their feet. When the environment grows unpredictable, the human nervous system searches for orientation. Moral emotion provides it quickly. It is faster than analysis. It does not require footnotes.
To hold a sign is already to answer a silent question: Where do I stand? The gesture establishes moral location before intellectual clarity has time to catch up.
Words begin to drift under these conditions. Terms that once described precise historical structures become floating signals of unease. “Fascism,” once anchored to a particular configuration of power such as centralized authority, suppression of opposition, and mythic nationalism, expands until it points less to a system than to a sensation. Collapse, breakdown, disappearance of society. The word no longer names something clearly bounded. It names a fear of disintegration.
When language inflates, precision evaporates. Conversation becomes difficult, because the participants are no longer pointing at the same object. One speaks in concepts, the other in experience. One analyzes structures; the other defends an atmosphere.
Yet the young woman’s tears matter. They tell us that the emotion is real, even if the vocabulary is not. Humans are not reasoning machines occasionally interrupted by feeling. We are feeling organisms who sometimes manage to reason. Political life has always contained this tension. Civilization depends on keeping the two in conversation.
Feeling without thinking becomes hysteria.
Thinking without feeling becomes cold abstraction.
Healthy societies require both. Sensitivity to emerging danger and the capacity to name it accurately.
What we may be witnessing now is not simply the triumph of emotion over reason, but a deeper imbalance. The bridge that once translated moral intuition into conceptual language has weakened. In some cases, even the intuition itself remains pre-verbal. It announces itself as urgency, as tremor, as tears, but not as description.
Schools teach many things, but increasingly fewer citizens are trained to define the words they wield. Meanwhile, digital culture accelerates reaction. Emotion travels faster than reflection, and speed favors the visceral.
Hysteria, when it spreads, is rarely planned. It propagates through imitation. One person’s alarm becomes another’s orientation. Soon the atmosphere thickens with urgency, even when the object of that urgency remains indistinct.
And yet it would be naive to believe that only the emotional are dangerous. Pure abstraction carries its own risk. A society governed only by detached analysis grows brittle. It loses the capacity for empathy, for early warning, for moral imagination. History offers enough examples of that failure as well.
The problem begins when feeling and thinking stop correcting one another.
The young woman crying in the street is not the end of reason. She is a signal, perhaps even a reminder, that beneath every political vocabulary lies a nervous system trying to regain equilibrium in a world that feels less predictable than before.
Societies have passed through such atmospheres many times. Emotional waves rise, crest, and eventually recede. Language stabilizes again. Concepts are rebuilt. The temperature lowers. It always has. Human communities cannot remain in a state of permanent emotional escalation. The organism itself resists it.
What matters is whether, during these heated intervals, enough people continue the slower work of definition. Words must point to something stable, or they become instruments of confusion rather than tools of orientation.
The scene on that street corner was not merely about one protester who could not define the word on her sign. It was about a broader cultural drift, from argument toward declaration, from analysis toward identification, until thought itself collapses into immediate moral sensation.
But it also revealed something quietly hopeful.
The tears suggested that politics, for her, was not a game. It mattered. The task before any mature society is not to extinguish such feeling, but to teach it how to speak, to give emotion the language that allows it to enter dialogue rather than dissolve into noise.
Because when feelings learn to think, they turn into judgment.
When thinking remembers how to feel, it turns into wisdom.
Civilization survives in the narrow space where the two meet.