The Demon We Feed

On Resentment, Spectacle, and the Refusal to Look

Resentment craves attention. Like a demon, it does not feed on blood or belief. It feeds on your gaze. It lives in the corner of the room, whispering your wound back to you until you can’t look away.

At first, I thought the answer was to speak louder. To counter the lie. To correct the narrative. But the more I watched—of them, of myself—the clearer it became: attention is not neutral. It is currency. And resentment is a market that thrives on volume, not truth.

So I began to look away.

Not from knowledge. From the show.

There is a distinction we rarely name: the difference between seeing and being shown. The first is perception. The second is seduction. And America today—its politics, its media, its addiction to provocation—is not asking to be understood. It is asking to be watched.

This is no accident. The administration governs like a spectacle. Each day brings a new outrage, a new executive order, a new enemy to fear or mock or revere. Not for governance—but for broadcast. Not to persuade—but to remain visible.

And the media, for all its posturing, plays its part. The pundits who mock the performance are part of it. The critics who decry the lie repeat it for mass consumption. The performance depends on their attention. Without it, the demon begins to starve.

This is the cycle:

1. The administration does something outrageous.

2. The media covers it—breathlessly, angrily, obsessively.

3. The public reacts—divided, inflamed, mesmerized.

4. And the spectacle continues.

Even the chant of “fake news” is a ritual of invocation. It pretends to sever the bond, but it depends on it. The performance needs the very stage it claims to despise. The demon must be seen—even in hatred—to live.

And so I found myself in a strange place. Wanting to know, but not to watch. Wanting to stay awake, but not to be consumed. It felt like heresy.

But maybe heresy is what’s needed.

Because the real threat is not ignorance. It is saturation. The flood of daily distraction that pretends to inform but only inflames. That sells us panic in exchange for clarity. That keeps us outraged, but never free.

I do not want to be informed like that anymore.

I want to see what the country is—beneath the strobe light. I want to understand the structure, the pain, the history, the long arc. Not the puppet show. The puppeteer. Not the scandal. The strategy.

And so I fast.

Not from truth. From spectacle.

I do not watch to see what they do next. I study what they have already done. I listen not to the press secretary’s voice, but to the quiet erosion beneath the noise. The budget. The border. The betrayal of age. The redefinition of loyalty as obedience.

To look away is not to close your eyes. It is to open them elsewhere.

And here is the deeper clarity:

Resentment is not just a feeling. It is a structure. A net cast across the soul of a people. It does not want justice. It wants attention. It does not seek resolution. It seeks reanimation. It is the performance of grievance without the labor of repair.

And this administration—like so many before it, in both parties—governs not with vision but with resentment. It does not lead. It reflects. It acts as the arm of a wound that will not heal because it is profitable to keep it open.

But wounds do not close under light alone. They close under care. And care requires something that attention cannot provide: stillness, time, depth.

This is not a call to ignorance. It is a call to sanity.

Do not look away because you are weak. Look away because you are done being used. Refuse the spectacle. Study the pattern. Name the system. Speak only when you are no longer repeating their script.

The demon does not need your belief.

It needs your gaze.

And when you look away—not out of fear, but out of clarity—it evaporates.

Not because it is gone.

But because it was never real.

Only fed.

—Elias Winter
Author of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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