There's this moment of bitter truth before outrage takes hold. We scroll, we see the "wrongdoer," and almost instantly, their life becomes our communal ethical battlefield. All of it gets filtered through a self-serving lens of our own unacknowledged biases. Hundreds of thousands join in seconds. And what lies under this flawless façade of righteous anger and justice is something far more intimate: our own bruised pride and a deep desire to feel morally comfortable in a strategically uncomfortable world.

And honestly, we don't even have to look so far to see this phenomenon take place consistently. This isn't just a theoretical loop in Bangladesh; it can be measured through the common social media interactions of our daily lives. An in-depth analysis of over 2.2 million Facebook comments was conducted by a group of researchers (Rashid, Textual Toxicity in Social Media, 2023), uncovering approximately 1,968 frequently used toxic bigrams. Coordinated moral policing, political hate, and misogynistic bullying are directly reflected in these phrases. Users frequently pass judgments on others based on their perceived lifestyle, looks, and virtue, and make assumptions about a person's life choices and character based on limited online information. The fact that the victims were the ones who were forced, or felt the obligation, to publicly justify themselves distressingly shows how deeply these digital attacks can wound people's real lives.

In a complementary research dataset (BD-SHS, 2022), more than 50,200 Bangla social media comments were mapped across sensitive categories such as political, personal, gender-abusive, and geopolitical. This study strongly illustrates that what we see as online moral outrage here in our country escalates beyond simple moral condemnation to outright moral policing and rather functions as a psychological outlet. It is inherently layered with personal resentment, identity crisis, and collective posturing, rather than just simple virtue signalling. Furthermore, the researchers' machine-learning model achieved a high F1 score of approximately 91, trained on 1.47 million comments, proving these hostile patterns are structurally embedded in the language people consciously use; these are neither rare nor coincidental.

The fact that the victims were the ones who were forced, or felt the obligation, to publicly justify themselves distressingly shows how deeply these digital attacks can wound people's real lives.

Nietzsche identified ressentiment as the basis of a weak moral code in his book On the Genealogy of Morality: the act of transforming a feeling of powerlessness into a claim of ethical superiority — as the resentful man says, "I may not be powerful, but I am righteous anyway." The public outrage cycles of Bangladesh are near-perfect case studies of ressentiment disguised as a demand for justice. A quick scroll through any viral controversy reveals the exact pattern Nietzsche described: people convert their private frustrations into public shaming of strangers.

The politician who once weaponised online mobs against rivals suddenly becomes a loud defender of "free speech" the moment they are no longer in power. A ruling party that happily enjoyed the chaos of unrestricted social media might later promote digital responsibility when facing backlash. Leaders whose supporters engaged in severe destructive criticism of their rivals might cry about civility when they themselves become the subject of criticism.

Durkheim, a prominent French sociologist, in his analysis of the collective conscience, observed that social groups forge solidarity through unified condemnation — not to restore order, but to channel society's unresolved issues and shared psychological wounds. This dynamic reveals a vicious cycle as well: proving we belong to the "acceptable tribe" and maintaining collective purity through the conviction of our own potential impurities.

The public outrage cycles of Bangladesh are near-perfect case studies of ressentiment disguised as a demand for justice. A quick scroll through any viral controversy reveals the exact pattern Nietzsche described: people convert their private frustrations into public shaming of strangers.

Social media has weaponised this ancient impulse into an algorithmic loop designed to convert private resentment into public ritual by compressing time, anonymising actors, and rewarding spectacle. This digital landscape favours the extremes because controversies keep driving engagement, and ressentiment is always monetised as profitable, clickable capital. A clear pattern of hypocrisy emerges across South Asia too: public shaming over minor disputes, viral "justice videos," systematic online hounding among students, and communities delivering mob justice before evidence even surfaces. Accountability becomes a stage dominated by distraction, and it numbs humanity at its core. This institutionalised psychological choreography is pervasive, and it affects institutions as much as individuals. Thus, a society that permits public savagery can even casually accept it in all its foundational institutions: classrooms, households, and the like. The problem is not a couple of "bad actors"; it is an already conditioned culture that prefers reactions over reflections, mere spectacle over humility.

The truth is far quieter than the outrage seeking to extinguish it. Morality doesn't declare itself; it whispers softly. The inevitable desire to hurt others typically results from the roots of our deepest, unacknowledged shortcomings and unspoken anxieties that we are afraid to face. We will eventually build shrines to our outrage and call it justice if we do not face this reality with full honesty. Therefore, before we consider ourselves to be divine, we should reflect within: Was the divine ever supposed to be so cruel and unjust?

Fatiha Mohsin Tusi is a student at Independent University, Bangladesh.

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