There comes a point in the life of any system that is falling apart when corruption stops being greed, incompetence, or excess and starts being something obscene. A point when people stop saying they’re out of touch, and start saying they’re not human. When power stops looking merely selfish and begins to feel predatory. When language itself warps, because ordinary words cannot carry the weight of things people cannot believe they are watching. That point is here.
Spend five minutes anywhere: outside press releases, policy briefs, and padded debates, and you will hear a different vocabulary. You will hear the language of rot. The elite are no longer corrupt. They are vampiric. The powerful are no longer indifferent. They are sadistic. Power is no longer injustice, like it used to be. It feeds from the vulnerable. Literally and symbolically. They consume what they think they rule. Maybe it has always been this way, and I was blinded to it, it is possible. But what has happened cannot fall into forgetfulness. Nor in forgiveness.
When people say the world is run by monsters, it is to say that trust has died. They speak as if the “moral contract” has collapsed so completely that only horror feels proportionate. The gulf (good word choice, I know) between rhetoric and reality is so wide that metaphor turns violent just to keep pace.
For many decades, Western institutions have endured because they have stayed predictable. Power could be flawed and still familiar. Leaders could lie within boundaries people recognized. Crimes were corruption or influence peddling, and that looked cynical, sordid, transactional, rather than horrendous. Condemnation remained possible. That predictability is no longer.
In its place there is now a sensation that those in charge inhabit a completely different moral universe. An island where the rockets of consequences fail to land, where suffering becomes abstract, where the language of care sits much comfortably beside inexplicable acts and policies that grind populations down in numbers. Ultimately this gap becomes unbearable. What keeps returning in public language is pattern recognition. Abuse, protection, silence. The involvement of people who should have been stopped long before they were. Cases where evidence exists, testimony exists, warnings exist… and yet do you see Lady Consequences? I do not. Where those without power were scrutinised, exposed, destroyed, those with power exited quietly, reputations buffered, their networks and necks intact. This is not speculation anymore. Not rumour anymore. It is what happens when power becomes insulated from consequence.
When we speak of the feeding of the vulnerable, we are not speaking in metaphor anymore, it is a reaction to the repeated discovery that even the most basic moral red lines have not functioned as limits at the top. That the systems designed to protect the vulnerable instead protect status, wealth and friends. That what would annihilate an ordinary (if you can call it that) person’s life becomes, at worst, a temporary inconvenience for those higher up. When that realisation settles in, there should be outrage. The scale of the failure feels, and is, existential.
The horror here is not only in what occurred, but in what follows. Or rather, what does not. Trials are not happening. Some names are not surfacing. Questions are being retired. This is where trust should snap. Because people can survive hypocrisy, they can survive corruption, but they cannot survive the belief that there’s no limits for the powerful and that no one at the top is bound. Every new revelation is interpreted as confirmation. Each page reads as further evidence that the rules are real only for those without power.
It is here that we stop asking “What went wrong?” and start asking “What kind of system allows this to happen at all?”. Because assertiveness no longer feels honest. How could it? When the most severe violations produce no proportionate consequence, restraint itself looks like denial. Moral language is unavoidable because the alternative feels like complicity. This brings a slow, corrosive realisation that justice has become procedural theatre. And this outrage accumulates, because release never comes.
Society arrived at this moment unprepared because we confused legitimacy with stability. We trusted economic growth and procedural democracy to protect us from disgust. Disgust waited anyway. Unthinkable moral failures, but also war, inequality and ecological ruin tug at the mask. And when the mask finally slips, the sensation is vertigo. Calls for calm, nuance, or trust in institutions land with a hollow sound now. They all depend on a shared reality that many no longer inhabit. Again, moderate language fails when experience feels worse than a literal psychological thriller.
But there is, however, an uncomfortable truth beneath all this. Apocalyptic language cannot carry a society forever. When power is reduced to pure demonology, politics turns into prophecy, and prophecy offers no good. Outrage alone exhausts those who carry it. But this does not mean forgetting, and it definitely does not mean forgiveness.
Rage must be carried back into thought, to sharpen it. To turn fury into direction, memory into pressure and into consequence. Because anger that cannot be organised will eventually be absorbed or dismissed. Anger that can be named, shared and sustained is force. What we are responding to is real: the sensation that those at the top no longer face the rules imposed on everyone else, that consequence stops at a certain level, that memory is short and absolution comes cheaply. This feeling must be held collectively, without mythologising, but without mercy for impunity. The figures people describe as monsters are not different from normalcy. They are shadows cast by a system that no longer feels human or accountable, bound by nothing and noone. These shadows recede only when power is forced back into the realm of consequence. We should refuse erasure. We should make the outrage collective and durable. Equal and free societies crumble when we forget what we have already seen, and we allow the unthinkable to pass, once again, without consequence.
