Amusing Ourselves to Death: How Neil Postman Foretold the West’s Apathy Towards Gaza
This article hasn’t aged well.
Neil Postman, in his seminal 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death, warned of a society anesthetised by its own entertainment, drowning in trivialities while profound moral crises unfold unnoticed or, worse, ignored. In the digital era, Postman’s critique of television as a medium of distraction and desensitisation resonates more urgently than ever—particularly when applied to the global response to the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza. The deliberate spectacle of violence, coupled with the Machiavellian propaganda machine underpinning Israel’s narrative, has left much of the world—especially the United States—emotionally detached from Palestinian suffering.
The parallels between Postman’s thesis and the West’s indifference towards Gaza are both profound and chilling. The constant stream of televised violence, amplified through social media, has reduced real human suffering to ephemeral content—a disposable tragedy sandwiched between celebrity gossip and viral dances. This reduction of profound injustice to background noise is not incidental; it is the result of deliberate political and media strategies that ensure audiences remain entertained, distracted, and ultimately indifferent.
Televised Violence: A Spectacle Without Moral Substance
Postman argued that television as a medium prioritises entertainment over substantive discourse, shaping how audiences perceive reality. In the context of Gaza, this means images of bombed-out buildings and dead children are delivered to viewers with the same gloss as a reality show or a cooking segment. The horror is packaged for consumption, not action. The more we see, the less we feel; the emotional saturation point is reached quickly, and apathy sets in.
Take, for example, the cyclic nature of Israel’s military campaigns against Gaza. Each round of destruction is accompanied by harrowing visuals, but those images lose their moral gravity when presented without context or urgency. Instead of sparking outrage, they are consumed as fleeting tragedies—symptoms of a conflict framed as inevitable and unsolvable. This desensitisation is a triumph of form over substance, exactly as Postman predicted.
Moreover, the ubiquity of such imagery creates what some psychologists call “compassion fatigue.” By seeing suffering endlessly but without pathways to meaningfully intervene, audiences become numb, resigned, and apathetic. The moral weight of Israeli war crimes is diluted, not because the crimes are less horrific, but because they are presented in a way that absolves the viewer of responsibility.
Machiavellian Propaganda and the Shaping of Perception
Israel’s ability to manipulate its global narrative is a masterclass in Machiavellian propaganda. It combines Orwellian control of language with a Huxleyan understanding of distraction to ensure its version of events dominates Western consciousness. Palestinians are rarely depicted as victims of apartheid or colonialism; instead, they are cast as perennial threats to Israeli security, reduced to faceless abstractions like “Hamas militants.”
In the United States, where support for Israel is deeply embedded in political, religious, and cultural institutions, this propaganda is especially potent. Politicians and media outlets parrot Israel’s language of “self-defence,” carefully omitting the decades of systemic oppression that preceded each conflict. The asymmetry of power, where a nuclear-armed state deploys advanced weaponry against a besieged, stateless population, is deliberately obscured.
One cannot ignore the role of evangelical Christianity in this narrative, particularly in America. The theological fantasy of Israel as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy creates a moral framework that absolves the state of its atrocities. In this context, Gaza’s suffering is not a human tragedy but an unfortunate by-product of a divine plan. It is propaganda elevated to a spiritual mandate, immune to rational critique.
Social media, for all its promises of democratising information, often amplifies these narratives rather than challenging them. The Israeli government, alongside sympathetic Western outlets, floods platforms with carefully curated content designed to evoke sympathy for Israel while dehumanising Palestinians. Videos of Iron Dome interceptions are shared like action-movie trailers, fostering admiration for Israeli technology rather than reflection on the conditions that necessitate its use.
TikTok and the Awakening of Gen Z
Yet amidst the numbing tide of desensitisation, there is a glimmer of hope, one that even Postman might not have foreseen: Gen Z’s growing resistance to propaganda, bolstered by platforms like TikTok. Unlike traditional social media outlets such as Facebook and Instagram, which function as extensions of Big Tech’s alignment with establishment power, TikTok has become an unexpected site of subversion.
The United States government’s recent attempts to ban TikTok, ostensibly for reasons of “national security,” inadvertently exposed the machinations of Big Tech and its role in shaping public consciousness. Gen Z, suspicious of such claims, quickly pieced together an alternative explanation: lobbying efforts by Meta and other Silicon Valley giants aimed to eliminate a competitor whose algorithms prioritised authentic content over the curated narratives of traditional platforms.
In their brief exposure to alternative social platforms like China’s Rednote, TikTok users were confronted with a worldview starkly different from the American Exceptionalism they had been fed since birth. Videos from ordinary Chinese citizens—not filtered through the lens of Western media—revealed a nation at odds with its caricature in American propaganda. This awakening extended to broader issues: if the government lied about TikTok, what else had it lied about?
The result has been a remarkable shift. TikTok, though still rife with distractions, has become a space where Gen Z actively interrogates power structures, challenges dominant narratives, and resists the emotional manipulation that defines traditional propaganda. Unlike their predecessors, they are increasingly sceptical of the official lines on Israel-Palestine, recognising the disparity between the media’s portrayal and the realities on the ground.
For this generation, Gaza is not just a distant conflict but a test case for broader systems of injustice and control. The same mechanisms used to obfuscate Israel’s crimes—misinformation, selective framing, and emotional desensitisation—are being scrutinised in real-time. Gen Z’s capacity to decode propaganda, combined with their access to alternative perspectives, suggests a growing immunity to the lies that have long shaped Western perceptions of Palestine.
Amusing Ourselves to Inaction—or Awakening?
Postman’s critique of the entertainment-driven society explains much of our collective failure to act. In a world dominated by spectacle, moral crises like Gaza are not ignored because they are unimportant but because they compete poorly with more entertaining distractions. The algorithmic priorities of modern media platforms ensure that outrage over Palestine is drowned out by TikTok trends, sports highlights, and Netflix series.
But perhaps Postman’s prophecy does not end in despair. Gen Z’s rejection of American propaganda, facilitated in part by TikTok’s unorthodox role in the information ecosystem, offers a glimmer of hope. It suggests that while older generations may have been lulled into passivity, the young are not so easily deceived.
If there is a way to reclaim our collective humanity, it begins with this scepticism—with the refusal to accept Gaza as an inevitable tragedy or a backdrop to our entertainment. It means demanding accountability, both from the powers that perpetuate the violence and the media systems that excuse it. It means resisting the machinery of distraction and standing with those who, like the people of Gaza, are denied the luxury of amusement.
Neil Postman warned of a world where we would amuse ourselves to death. Yet in the defiance of a generation unwilling to swallow the lies of their forebears, there remains the possibility of life and justice.
This article hasn’t aged well.