Collective Storm Chasing: The Choice of Energy

I have spent enough years around media, storytelling, messaging and human behavior to understand that the story being told is rarely the whole story. I have also watched long enough to recognize when information is being presented primarily to inform us and when it is being presented to produce an emotional response. There is a difference, and once you begin to recognize the machinery behind that difference, it becomes very difficult not to see it.

Propaganda has always been one of the most powerful tools of war because populations generally have to be emotionally prepared before they will support things they might otherwise find unthinkable. Fear, anger, division is useful for that. Division is particularly useful because once people become sufficiently frightened or furious, nuance becomes irritating and anyone asking inconvenient questions becomes the enemy. The emotional response comes first, and the demand for action frequently follows.

It's not just how propaganda works, but how much power we collectively have when we stop participating in it.

We tend to imagine power as something held by governments, corporations, militaries, intelligence agencies and very wealthy people sitting in rooms most of us will never enter. Obviously those structures have enormous power, but they still require something from the rest of us. They require our attention, our emotional investment and, very often, our participation. We've been conditioned to underestimate our power. In fact, we've been programmed to not even see it. Crazy as it is, those who own their power are often admonished for it.

A narrative can be placed in front of millions of people, promoted relentlessly and supported by enormous amounts of money, but that does not guarantee that people will emotionally adopt it. The machinery can deliver the message, but it cannot completely control what happens once that message enters millions of individual human beings.

We saw an interesting example of this recently with the hantavirus story. It appeared, received attention and then seemed to disappear almost as quickly as it arrived. Frankly, I think the people hoping we would all obediently climb aboard another fear train badly underestimated how keen our collective radar has become. COVID was one hell of a teacher. After years of shifting CDC guidance, the Vax, the unreported injuries, the contradictions, censorship battles, the economic and social wreckage that began in 2020 and the seemingly endless Fauci saga, apparently someone still thought we had another round in us. Biden even issued Fauci a preemptive pardon in January 2025, and by July 2026 Fauci was invoking the Fifth repeatedly before a Senate committee. Somehow, after all of that, “they” apparently looked at the American public and thought, Sure, we can do this again. LOL. But they mistook exhaustion for gullibility. The bait hit the water and a whole lot of people simply did not bite. The machinery may still be there, but the audience is not the same audience it was in 2020, and I suspect that little miscalculation matters more than they anticipated. And POOF... we collectively disarmed the next PsyOp simply by ignoring it.

That is where I think our collective power becomes considerably more interesting.

Fear and outrage requires attention. The entire outrage economy survives because human beings continually provide the emotional fuel. Mainstream and alternative media does it, as do Political movements. Sadly "influencers" especially do it. Social media algorithms have practically turned it into an art form. Fear keeps people watching, anger keeps people engaged and outrage has become one hell of a business model.

It's not that we should ignore what is happening in the world or refuse to look at uncomfortable realities. I am suggesting almost the opposite. Pay attention, but become much more discerning about the emotional response being requested from you.

There is an enormous difference between being informed and being emotionally recruited.

I cannot control what Russia does, what Iran does, what a president or general decides, or what may be happening in some shadowy room full of people I was apparently not invited to. I can control whether those people get to move into my nervous system rent free. I can remain aware without spending my entire day vibrating like a Chihuahua during a thunderstorm because somebody has announced that Armageddon has once again been penciled in for Thursday.

That distinction matters because our emotional responses do not remain isolated inside our own bodies anymore. We immediately broadcast them.

We repost the frightening headline. We add our anger to it. Someone else reacts to our anger and sends it to another thousand people. Within hours, millions of human nervous systems can be focused on the same fear, the same enemy and the same anticipated catastrophe. We are not simply consuming information anymore. We are participating in its distribution and amplifying the emotional charge attached to it.

That makes every one of us part of the media system.

It also means every one of us has considerably more agency than we may realize.

Whether you understand this through psychology, collective consciousness, frequency, social contagion, manifestation, morphic fields or simply the observable mechanics of human behavior, attention creates momentum. Millions of people concentrating emotionally on the same thing create an enormous amount of momentum.

I think there is an energetic component to that we still barely understand. I also do not need anyone else to believe that in order for the practical principle to work. Human beings influence other human beings constantly. Emotion spreads. Fear, calm, anger spreads. Courage and enthusiasm spreads. Anyone who has walked into a room immediately after an argument knows that something can be felt before anyone explains what happened.

When enough people are feeding fear, fear becomes the atmosphere.

When enough people stop feeding it, something changes.

I no longer think of peace as passive. Maintaining internal peace while remaining fully aware of what is happening around us requires considerably more discipline than simply joining the latest wave of outrage. Refusing to hate complete strangers because someone handed us a flag, a headline and a storyline is not disengagement. Refusing to spend our lives waiting for the next catastrophe does not make us naive. It makes us much harder to emotionally program.

I am not suggesting that we sit quietly while injustice happens or meditate while the world burns. There are moments when speaking matters and moments when action is absolutely necessary. I have become increasingly unwilling to confuse emotional hijacking with meaningful action. Reacting faster does not mean seeing more clearly, and being furious does not automatically make us better informed.

The collective component is where this becomes genuinely powerful.

Imagine millions of people becoming more difficult to provoke. Imagine millions of people recognizing the moment fear enters their bodies before immediately handing that fear to someone else. Imagine millions of people still reading the news, still paying attention, still taking appropriate action, but refusing to automatically feed every invitation into hatred, panic and division.

The emotional temperature of the collective would change.

Certain narratives would stop finding fertile ground. Some stories would still matter, of course, but the machinery would have a much harder time manufacturing momentum simply by pressing the same predictable emotional buttons. The headline could still be written. The broadcast could still be made. The politician could still give the speech. The algorithm could still serve the outrage. What would be missing is the automatic human participation that gives all of it life. That is where I think a surprising amount of our power has been hiding in plain sight.

There is also a very simple way to begin experimenting with this rather than merely agreeing with the idea.

The next time something you read, hear or watch immediately triggers you, resist the impulse to respond for a moment. Before commenting, reposting, arguing or tumbling headfirst into whatever emotional rabbit hole has just opened, notice what is happening inside your body.

Source the somatic response before following the story your mind is already constructing around it. Notice the tightening in your chest, the knot in your stomach, the change in your breathing, the heat in your face, the agitation in your hands or whatever physical sensation appears. Our bodies often register the reaction before our conscious minds have even decided what we supposedly think.

Then breathe.

Not because breathing magically makes the situation disappear and certainly not because you need to convince yourself that everything is wonderful. Take the breath because it interrupts the automatic sequence long enough for you to become conscious again.

Move your awareness away from the person or story that triggered you and bring it back into your own body. Notice where your energy has gone. Notice what you are feeding. Then consciously decide whether that is actually where you want to put it.

You can still disagree. You can still act. You can still speak loudly if something deserves to be said. The difference is that the response now belongs to you instead of whoever successfully pushed your button.

That tiny space between stimulus and reaction is where discernment lives, and I suspect it is also where considerably more of our creative power lives than we have been led to believe.

Now multiply that moment by a million people.

Then multiply it by ten million.

A population that can be frightened on command is very easy to steer. A population capable of feeling fear without immediately surrendering its consciousness to it becomes something entirely different.

My nervous system is not a public utility. My attention is not government property, and my energy is not automatically available for every apocalypse being marketed this week.

I have become much more selective about where I put it.

Perhaps if enough of us do the same, we stop merely reacting to the collective reality around us and begin consciously participating in what we create next.

Building the new world requires building the new you first. I’m fairly certain that’s been written in a thousand ancient texts, whispered through every mystery school worth its salt, and printed on at least one coffee mug in Sedona.