Why Are People So Defensive Over Criticism About Taylor Swift? A Systems Thinking Perspective
- Elizabeth Halligan
- Oct 3
- 7 min read
Most people don’t think in systems. They see reality as a one-way feed. A leads to B. X leads to Y. This causes people to see reality as a straight line. They think that this action ‘here’ leads straight to this outcome ‘over there’.
When people don’t think in systems, they tend to see things as black and white, in binaries. Thinking in one-way causality like this leads to a moral and legal framework that is designed only for assigning blame and establishing innocence. Everything is a zero-sum game. Someone is wrong, and someone is right. This is an easier way to think and exist, because it feels clean and clear. The primary motive behind this framework is self-protection.
The difficulty is that reality as a system is not a straight line. It is cyclical. This means reality is more like a web. Every point in the system affects other points. This means that reality as a system is a co-created feedback loop. Within this model the primary intent is not to assign blame, but to discover agency. When you recognize you are part of a web, you then have a point of reference for seeing your place in the system, and then using that as leverage to change it. This involves both agency and responsibility. Most people are afraid of both their own power and being responsible for it. Why? Because it first requires a revision to the brain’s model of reality. The brain’s ego and amygdala inherently resist this, because the amygdala, the brain’s primary fear center, perceives threat to ego, to the brain’s current model of reality, as an existential threat to the physical body itself. The amygdala doesn’t distinguish between threat to the body and threat to the ego.
The Reality-Generation Loop
At its core, the resistance to systemic thinking stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what "reality" is. Most people operate as if reality is an external, pre-packaged event that simply happens to them. They are just passive receivers of a finished product. But that is an illusion.
Reality is not a one-way broadcast. It is a recursive loop that looks like this:
The Internal Model: It begins in the brain. Our beliefs, biases, traumas, and assumptions form a private, internal model of how the world works.
The External Manifestation: We then project this internal model outward. We build institutions, social norms, cultural narratives, and laws that reflect and codify our inner world. A brain that believes in hierarchy builds hierarchical systems. A brain conditioned by scarcity builds economies of hoarding and inequity.
The Feedback Reinforcement Mechanism: These external constructs then produce feedback. They teach us, shape us, and punish or reward us. This feedback stream travels back to the brain and hardens or challenges the original internal model. The loop is closed.
So we are not just in the system. We are the system, manifest.
This is the profound and unsettling truth that critics of passive fandom are instinctively pointing toward, even if they can’t articulate it readily in this way. When they ask you to examine Taylor Swift's role in capitalism, or her fanbase's impact, they are not just asking you to critique an external celebrity. They are asking you to trace the loop back to its source: your own mind.
They are saying: Your consumption, your silence, your defense—these are not neutral acts. They are the fuel that scales the system. You are the co-author of this reality, word by word, stream by stream, dollar by dollar.
This is why it is so deeply uncomfortable. It's not merely an intellectual challenge; it is an existential confrontation. To accept this is to accept that you are complicit in the very structures that may also harm you. It shatters the comforting identity of the "innocent bystander" and replaces it with the sobering responsibility of the "active participant" in the system. The call for systemic accountability is, therefore, a call to conscious authorship. It is an invitation to stop being a passive character in a story written by “unseen forces” or “the powers that be” and to pick up the pen yourself. The first step is to look at the story you've been helping to write all along.
The difficulty of this is accepting the fact that you can be both a victim of an oppressive system, and also be an accessory to propping it up. Most people struggle with the idea that two things can be true at once. Pushing people to engage in this self-reflection is hard for people because it threatens their sense of self. When you challenge someone’s unconscious position in a system, especially when that system privileges them, what they hear isn’t “you’re part of a system that needs dismantling.”
What they hear is:
• “You’re bad.”
• “Your pain doesn’t count.”
• “You’re the problem.”
What happens next is that the ego, triggered by the amygdala, goes into fight or flight response and panics. This short-circuits the ability to think in terms of systems or with any nuance. And neoliberal conditioning—especially for white women—has taught them to see themselves as both good and victimized. So it’s hard for them to hold the paradox of being complicit and harmed at the same time.
Here’s how this dynamic has come about:
Most people are taught to center morality around intent, not impact. So any critique feels like a personal moral indictment. That’s why they say things like “I’m a good person, I do xyz”, as a defense. They are defending identity rather than do what is being asked, which is to take a pause, look around, and engage at the level of systemic responsibility as a node in the web.
Most white folks have been conditioned to confuse criticism with condemnation. They think being asked to examine their role means they’re being “blamed” in a punitive way, instead of seeing that they are being invited to transform and examine the power of agency.
Fan Psychology
Systems thinking is emotionally uncomfortable and intellectually non-linear.
It requires people to hold contradiction and say:
• “I am a victim and I played a role.”
• “I benefit from injustice and I feel powerless sometimes.”
• “My comfort can come at someone else’s cost.”
Many fans develop intense one-sided emotional relationships with celebrities, known as parasocial bonds. These parasocial relationships provide a sense of connection, comfort, and even belonging. Criticism of the celebrity can feel like a betrayal or attack on a close friend, triggering strong protective instincts. The dissolution or threat to this "bond" feels personal, making critique of the celebrity hard to tolerate.
Fans often invest emotionally (and materially) in a celebrity over years, connecting their work to important life events or memories. Criticism is then interpreted as invalidating not just the celebrity, but the fan’s own cherished experiences, creating fear of loss or grief. Identification with a fanbase offers belonging and shared culture they may not be able to find elsewhere. Defending a celebrity becomes a way to defend the group’s identity and cohesion. Critique feels like a threat to social bonds, potentially risking exclusion according to the person’s inner model. Celebrities serve as ideals onto which people project their own values and aspirations. Attacks on the celebrity can be interpreted as challenges to those ideals or hopes, causing cognitive dissonance and ego resistance.
At the same time, it is critical to understand that fans may use their loyalty as a way to outsource or bypass complex moral questions. Defending a star becomes a stand-in for more difficult self-reflection or engagement with real-world systems. Criticism triggers discomfort because it demands an update to the fan’s moral or ethical framework. Critique disrupts the illusion of control and predictability, because it challenges the brain’s familiar inner narrative, causing insecurity or anxiety about broader cultural narratives or role models. For some, being a dedicated fan is part of their social capital and online identity. Critique of the celebrity or their consumption threatens that status, fueling a need to defend not just the star, but their own standing in fan hierarchies or communities.
Also, it is important to note that engaging in this level of reflection—seeing oneself as a system input—is not encouraged in mainstream spaces, especially not in white-dominant feminist spaces. Which is why the critique gets distorted into binaries and is resisted so vehemently.
Thinking in systems is challenging to the way most of us normally operate. It requires the ability to examine and process paradox, feedback loops, unintended consequences, and the uncomfortable truth that most of us are both victims and perpetrators within different systems. This is cognitively and emotionally expensive. It creates psychic distress. It forces you to dissolve the clean, comforting firewall of "innocence" and sit in the messy, ambiguous reality of shared causality.
The goal of sharing this perspective, for me, is not to assign a new, more subtle form of blame. The goal is to help people discover and think about points of agency. Within a linear model, you are either a guilty perpetrator or an innocent victim—both are passive roles defined by the action of another. Within a systemic model, you are a node of influence. You are an active participant. Seeing the web is the first step to learning how to re-weave it. The discomfort of this examination is the price of fully stepping into your own power.
Amygdala Hijack: When Emotion Takes Over: https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack
Prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and threat processing: implications for PTSD: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01155-7
Why Are Celebrities Targets for Haters?
“I’m Your Number One Fan”— A Clinical Look at Celebrity Worship: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3960781/
The psychology of celebrity worship: https://www.yahoo.com/news/psychology-celebrity-worship-172721721.html
Are celebrities accountable for the misconduct of their fans?: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mar.21604
What Makes People Defend Celebrities So Viciously?: https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/what-makes-people-defend-celebrities-so-viciously-14964535
People who are obsessed with celebrities: https://geediting.com/people-who-are-obsessed-with-celebrities-and-famous-people-usually-display-these-behaviors-says-psychology/
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