BY Table of Contents
Not long ago I got to see a childhood friend for the first time in a year or two. There had been a lot of buildup to it. He was traveling with his family, and between the schedules and the crowd, we didn’t get the time together I had hoped for, and the time we did get wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
Afterwards, I told him so.
He answered: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
The fauxpology.
In this essay, I’m going to try and unpack what’s wrong with a fauxpology – including why the grammar of it robs it of any real value. (This is also true with institutions, as you’ll see below.)
A real apology takes the speaker’s action as its object. “I’m sorry I did that.” Subject: Me. Verb: Something I did. Object: The thing I did to you.
“I’m sorry you feel that way” aims the regret at the wrong object. If you are upset about how someone treated you, the thing to be sorry for is the treatment, which is the reason you feel the way you do. The phrase regrets your reaction and skips the conduct.
Notice who has disappeared. The speaker never appears as the subject of a verb of doing. You do. You feel. The only agent left standing in the sentence is the person who was wronged, and the only regrettable event in the sentence is their emotional state.
This is why the phrase settles nothing. The problem is no longer what was done, it’s how you took it. Regret gets voiced, nothing gets conceded, and the thing being regretted is you.
There is a second offense underneath. How you feel is your business, not theirs. By apologizing for your feeling, the speaker claims standing over something that belongs to you, treating it as a defect to be soothed rather than a signal to be answered.
Push this two steps further and you arrive at gaslighting proper, where your reaction is no longer merely regrettable but is offered as evidence of instability.
The Corporate Dialect Deletes the Subject
Now listen to organizations. They almost never apologize for actions. They apologize for reactions, and they have built a whole vocabulary for it:
We regret any concern this may have caused.
We are sorry that some customers experienced frustration.
We acknowledge that the rollout was confusing for some users.
We understand that this decision has been difficult for parts of the community.
Read those closely. Concern, frustration, confusion, difficulty. Every one of them names a state occurring inside the complainant. The organization’s own conduct never occupies the subject slot of a verb. In the strongest examples it does not appear at all: The events simply happened, weather-like, and were experienced.
The dialect is international, and it is purest where the customers are most captive. Eskom, South Africa’s power monopoly, spent years scheduling rolling blackouts while its announcements apologized for the inconvenience. Here is the standard construction, from a May 2025 statement announcing another round of Stage 2 blackouts:
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this causes. Eskom remains firmly committed to supplying electricity reliably.
The lights went out on a published schedule, and the regrettable event, grammatically, was your reaction to the dark. A monopoly apologizing to customers who cannot leave produces the genre’s reference specimens, for reasons the second half of this essay is about.
The passive voice does adjacent work, and “mistakes were made” is its most quoted specimen in American public life. Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler put it into circulation during Watergate. Reagan gave it its presidential form in the 1987 State of the Union, addressing Iran-Contra:
But we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.
What makes that example genuinely interesting is what sits four sentences earlier in the same paragraph. Reagan also said, plainly, “I took a risk with regard to our action in Iran. It did not work, and for that I assume full responsibility.” The active admission and the passive deletion are right next to each other in the same breath. Only one of them is remembered, and it is not the one where he shows up as the subject.
The political analyst Bill Schneider called this construction the past exonerative tense. The joke lands because it is a precise description: The error gets reported; the person who made it disappears.
Nobody in these rooms is confused about how to write a sentence. What you are hearing is an equilibrium. It is what accountability-free relationships sound like when they are forced to say something out loud.
Apologies Are Priced, and Exit Sets the Price
Here is the thesis.
An entity apologizes for its actions only when it can be made to pay for them. An institution gets specific about what it did wrong only when someone can make it pay – through leaving, or through a lawsuit.
Where you can walk away, take your money elsewhere, switch providers, or file suit, vagueness becomes expensive. A specific apology is a specific promise, and a firm that needs you back will make it, because the alternative is losing you. It will name the failure, name the fix, and often attach compensation, because that is what buys the relationship back.
Where you cannot leave, none of that pressure exists.
A licensing body, a monopoly utility, a public health agency, a central bank, an HR department at a firm you depend on for your visa: These entities field complaints without facing consequences. The optimal move is to put out something apology-shaped that concedes no fact, admits no agency, and creates no liability. In such settings the non-apology is exactly what you should expect them to produce, and the people producing it are behaving rationally.
Test the claim against the cases where institutions did apologize properly. The apologies that got specific are, overwhelmingly, the ones that arrived attached to money or a court.
The United States apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed that August. The apology came bolted to $20,000 in redress for every surviving internee, and the statute named the causes as racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.
Clinton’s 1997 apology for the Tuskegee syphilis study is the cleaner specimen, because you can hear the grammar work:
What the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.
Subject, verb, object. The government did it, the thing it did was shameful, and the speaker is sorry for the doing rather than for your feelings about the doing. That sentence arrived forty years after the study began, twenty-three years after the class action settled for $10 million, and not one day before the bill was paid.
Corporate apologies acquire nouns and verbs at roughly the moment discovery begins.
None of this means the specific apologies were insincere. It means specific apologies show up where the structure forces them.
Find the Verb and Ask Who Is Doing It
This is the part worth keeping, because you can take it anywhere and it costs nothing to try.
Listen to whether an organization’s apologies name its own actions. If they never can, you have no leverage over it, whatever the org chart or the mission statement says.
The test is narrower than “they seem cold” or “I don’t like them.” Specifically: Does the institution ever appear as the subject of a verb describing what it did wrong? If the answer is consistently no, then whatever the paperwork calls you, you are a captive audience, and the language is telling you so.
The test is useful because it is hard to fake and easy to check. Institutions manage their claims about accountability carefully (there is usually a whole page about it). They do not manage their grammar, because almost nobody is auditing it.
It also runs in the other direction, which is the more practical use.
If you are choosing a school, a bank, a doctor, a town, a church, or a chain of suppliers, look at how the institution talks when it has failed. The one that says “we did this, and here is what we are changing” is telling you it expects to need you tomorrow. That expectation, and not any stated value, is the thing actually protecting you.
When the Sentence Is Actually Defensible
Individuals do this too, and not always from a position of power.
Sometimes the non-apology is cowardice rather than dominance, a person who wants the conflict to stop and has no idea how to end it honestly. Sometimes it is genuine bewilderment: They truly do not understand what they did, and “I’m sorry you feel that way” is the closest thing to goodwill they can produce.
And occasionally the sentence is simply true. If you do not believe you did anything wrong, then regret for the other person’s distress may be the only honest thing available to you, and manufacturing a false confession to end an argument is its own small corruption.
That is roughly how it went with my friend, in the end. We got on the phone afterwards and talked for the better part of two hours, and the friendship came out ahead of where it started. Notice what did the repairing: Not the phrase. The conversation the phrase had been standing in for. Individuals can get there, because a friendship carries loyalty in both directions.
The phrase is damning when it substitutes for an apology that is owed. It is defensible when no apology is owed and the speaker declines to perform one.
Hold both. The diagnostic is aimed at institutions, which have no bewilderment to plead and no feelings to spare.
Albert Hirschman Gave This a Name in 1970
The usual case for voluntary association is moral: It is wrong to bind people to arrangements they never chose. That case is correct, and it persuades almost nobody, because it is abstract.
Albert Hirschman built the concrete version in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. His argument was that a dissatisfied member of any group has two instruments: voice, meaning complain and try to change the thing from inside, and exit, meaning leave. I take that pair up properly in a companion essay, Voice vs. Exit, where it earns a full treatment. This essay is the diagnostic that comes before it.
Because what the grammar shows you is which instrument you actually hold.
Exit is what makes institutions honest at the sentence level. Oversight can be captured. Codes of conduct can be rewritten by the people they bind. The ombudsman reports to the same building. The ability to leave is the one mechanism I can find that reliably converts “we regret any concern this may have caused” into “we did this to you, and here is what we owe.”
Now apply that to the counterparty almost nobody can leave, the one I have stood before as a supplicant at a consulate counter.
Today the federal government is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, healthcare provider, and pension guarantor.
Does that sound like limited government to you?
Read the list again as a catalogue of relationships rather than a catalogue of superlatives. Every entry marks a place where the exit door is bolted, priced out of reach, or guarded by the same people who would have to apologize for it. The grammar was never going to come out any other way.
This is also why the argument travels so well among people building exit-shaped things (Balaji Srinivasan’s version of it is roughly why the crypto world adopted Hirschman wholesale). Sound money, jurisdictional arbitrage, and parallel institutions are all bets that leaving beats complaining.
You can use all of this without a theory of legitimacy. Just listen to how they talk when they fail.
The next time an institution in your life apologizes, find the verb and ask who is doing it. Then decide how much of your life you want to keep inside that relationship.