How stories won’t save us.
In recent years, activism has become an integrated device. A polished accessory for institutions eager to appear progressive without ever becoming uncomfortable. A checkbox for conferences, brands, and cultural events. The more inequalities deepen, the more we see the rise of the professional activist: featured on talk shows, invited to high-profile panels, quoted in glossy magazines. They write books, give TED-style lectures, and attend curated debates with selective audiences and ticket prices that silently exclude the very people whose lives are most at stake.
They speak of crisis in smooth, reassuring tones. Of conflict, but never too sharply. They know how to speak “inclusively”—but only in the sense approved by HR departments and corporate communications teams. Their dissent is well-behaved. Legible. Predictable.
It’s a figure that exposes itself—cautiously. Their visibility is carefully controlled. The boundaries of their outrage are algorithmically sound. They might speak of justice on social media, but never in ways that risk censorship, loss of sponsorships, or an uncomfortable silence in a boardroom. They don’t shout. They don’t march. They don’t occupy. At most, they’ll sign a petition. Maybe share a carousel post. They don’t know the language of bodies in the street, of sleepless nights spent organizing, of fear during a protest, of solidarity forged through shared vulnerability.
They’ve never had to lose anything for a cause—not a job, not a platform, not the comfort of their curated persona. Their militancy is a posture. It costs nothing.
Often, they don’t even know the meaning of the word intersectionality—not because they haven’t heard it, but because they’ve never needed it. Their activism is linear: focused on one axis, one issue, often the one closest to their lived experience. They might speak against climate change, but never link it to land theft or neocolonial extraction. They might support LGBTQ+ rights, but remain silent on anti-Black violence or refugee detentions. They choose battles like brands choose slogans: marketable, digestible, stripped of context.
But every struggle that ignores the others ends up cannibalizing itself. An environmentalism that doesn’t confront racism is just a softer mask for control. A feminism that doesn’t address class is just another privilege parade. A human rights discourse that ignores the violence of borders is not radical, it’s managerial.
If you can’t see a common cause in the oppressions that plague this world, it’s likely because in at least one of them, you’re on the side of the oppressor. Maybe you didn’t choose it. Maybe it’s the result of where you were born, how you look, what you inherited. But one complicity is enough to dull your clarity on all the rest. Because when you haven’t risked your position, the pain of others remains theoretical. And in the face of systemic violence, theory is not enough.
It’s easy to defend rights that don’t threaten your own status. Much harder is to question that status itself. To ask: what am I willing to lose so that others may win? Because solidarity that doesn’t cost you anything isn’t solidarity. It’s optics.
The problem today isn’t just those who oppress. It’s also those who speak of justice while keeping power intact. Those who repackage dissent into digestible narratives. Those who talk about change while building careers out of its deferral. Those who write stories of resistance that always leave the system intact—narratives with protagonists, arcs, and happy endings, but no rupture, no risk, no real shift in power.
This is not to say stories don’t matter. But the time for stories alone has passed. Narrative without confrontation is just content. And content, in a collapsing world, is anesthesia.
Because if activism doesn’t disturb anyone, it’s no longer activism. It’s performance. It’s ambient rebellion. It soothes, but it doesn’t change. And in a world that’s falling apart, stories are no longer enough.
We need truth. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.
