A friend and I have a shorthand for prioritizing our energy: That’s outside of the fuck budget, we’ll say, or All my fucks for today are allocated. It’s not that we don’t give a fuck—it’s that our fucks have been spent elsewhere: raising a child, caring for a loved one, prioritizing our health.
Lately, I’ve been telling friends and colleagues that we need to be mindful of how we budget our energy, attention, and outrage. Yes, everything is happening at once, and everything feels like the end of the world, but if we pour all our energy into one place, we’ll burn out in days and have nothing left for the long fight ahead.
Naomi Klein famously wrote about this in The Shock Doctrine. She describes how political actors exploit the chaos of crises to push decisions the public would otherwise reject. Shock paralyzes systems, rendering them unable to respond adequately. This is true of any system: when your body goes into shock, it’s due to a lack of resources—namely, blood flow—causing a cascade of failures. Again, to oversimplify (apologies to the audience), the resources to respond to everything at once simply aren’t there.
As a child of dictatorship, having lived most of my life under a political system that thrives on chaos, I argue that disasters aren’t just exploited to control a population—they’re often created for that purpose. When survival becomes the priority—wondering if there will be food, water, electricity, or if it will be safe to get home or go to work—there’s no bandwidth left to critically engage with society or organize dissent.
No matter how often human rights activists and scholars insist that human rights are interdependent and indivisible, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still reigns supreme: it’s easier to give up freedom of speech than food. Food feels far more urgent. It’s no surprise that global cooperation is always the first casualty.
If the goal is to resist, endure, and eventually prevail, we first need to understand that this war is being fought inside our heads. Every time we let our attention be swayed by nonsense or our outrage consumed by distractions (trust me, I once had a president who claimed the former president spoke to him through a bird), we are letting them win. Chaos, confusion, disinformation, and ridiculousness are not the byproducts of incompetence; they are the tools of a government that is accomplishing exactly what it set out to do.
And to quote Lao Tzu: There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.
Marianne Díaz Hernández (Altagracia de Orituco, Venezuela, 1985). Lawyer, writer and researcher in the intersection between human rights and technology. She has published: Cuentos en el espejo (Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, 2008, winner of the Contest for Unpublished Authors of Monte Ávila Editores, Narrative), Aviones de papel (Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, 2011) and Historias de mujeres perversas (El perro y la rana, Caracas, 2013, winner of the I Gustavo Pereira National Biennial of Literature, 2009), and has also been part of the compilations Antología sin fin (Escuela Literaria del Sur, 2013), Voices from the Venezuelan City (Palabras errantes, 2013) , and Nuevo País de las Letras (Banesco, Caracas, 2016). She co-founded the small press Casajena Editoras. Pieces of her work have been translated into English, French and Slovenian. She currently resides in Santiago de Chile.