The Machine That Makes Cruelty Look Normal |
People keep saying that democracy is in danger because we have lost seriousness. That diagnosis is too flattering. It suggests that what stands between a society and barbarism is mainly a matter of tone: less irony, more sincerity; less mockery, more earnestness; less distance, more moral courage.
History is rarely defeated by bad manners.
Cruelty does not triumph because too many people rolled their eyes. It triumphs when mechanisms are built that allow contempt to circulate without friction, to appear reasonable, administrative, even necessary. It triumphs when humiliation becomes procedural, exclusion becomes policy design, suspicion turns into workflow, and responsibility is broken into fragments so small that no one feels large enough to stop the machine.
That is why so much contemporary commentary misses the point. It psychologizes what should be analyzed operationally. It moralizes where it should map mechanisms. It treats political collapse as a failure of character when it is often a success of infrastructure.
The old image of danger remains theatrical: men shouting from balconies, symbols draped over buildings, explicit doctrine, open hatred. But the more durable form of contemporary deformation is colder. It does not always arrive as spectacle. It arrives as a quiet shift in thresholds.
It does not happen all at once. First, a certain word becomes easier to say in public. Then an entire category of beings becomes easier to suspect, classify, manage, downgrade, or expend. After that, a bureaucratic exception becomes easier to justify, a legal restraint easier to bypass, a humiliation easier to laugh off, and a cruelty easier to rename as security, realism, efficiency, necessity, sovereignty, or simply the cost of living in hard times.
This is not a decline in civility. It is a reformatting of what counts as admissible.
What matters is not only what a society claims to believe. What matters is what it allows to pass as normal, professional, strategic, or unavoidable. Once contempt crosses that line, it no longer needs ideological fanfare. It acquires something far more powerful: routine.
Routine is where democracies begin to decay without admitting it. Not because people stop talking about values, but because values become detached from the procedures that actually organize daily life. Public language remains saturated with noble abstractions, while actual systems are quietly redesigned to process inequality, disposable populations, and permanent emergency with greater efficiency.
This is where the fashionable call for earnestness reveals its inadequacy.
Earnestness may be emotionally respectable, but it is not yet political intelligence. One can be perfectly sincere and still serve as decoration for a machine one does not understand. One can speak the language of decency while the architecture of exclusion is being optimized elsewhere: in data systems, media cycles, informal executive habits, selective enforcement, donor networks, platform algorithms, security rhetoric, and the calibrated production of public fatigue.
The problem is not simply that people no longer mean what they say. The deeper problem is that saying serious things is no longer the same as being attached to serious consequences.
We need an older, harsher understanding of seriousness. Seriousness is not a tone. It is not solemnity. It is not even sincerity. Seriousness is a structure of consequence. Something is serious when it binds action, redistributes risk, imposes real costs, and changes what can be done next.
That is why so many institutions now feel simultaneously grave and weightless. They still speak in serious voices, yet they no longer consistently bind the world. They issue statements, frameworks, principles, reviews, consultations, and condemnations, but more and more often these gestures do not reorganize power. They merely document its erosion while calling it resilience.
This raises an uncomfortable question: does the very concept of institution still help us understand what is happening?
Yes, but only if we stop treating institutions as if they were defined mainly by buildings, titles, and ceremonial legitimacy. The classical institution was legible. One could point to the court, the university, the parliament, the newspaper, the ministry. These bodies still exist. But a growing part of real power now moves through dispersed protocols that cut across them: metrics, platforms, audits, rankings, supply chains, financial dependencies, algorithmic filtering, media tempo, strategic ambiguity, and outsourced enforcement.
The institution remains standing. The operative logic has often migrated elsewhere.
A university may still have its senate, its logo, and its mission statement. But its actual behavior may be governed far more by grant structures, reputational risk, compliance requirements, and external pressure than by any serious commitment to truth. A court may still issue judgments, yet their force depends on whether those judgments can survive political theater, police discretion, media framing, and executive impatience. A parliament may still convene, while meaningful decisions have already shifted into informal war cabinets, donor ecosystems, emergency vocabularies, and permanent crisis management.
In such conditions, defending institutions in the abstract becomes dangerously easy. One risks defending facades long after their operative core has been hollowed out.
But abandoning the concept altogether would be equally mistaken. It would leave us with nothing but spectacle, mood, and personality. We still need the idea of the institution, but stripped of innocence. An institution must be examined as a machine of selection. What does it make visible, credible, actionable, punishable, or conveniently forgettable? What kinds of speech does it reward? What forms of fear does it normalize? Which injuries does it render administratively invisible?
This examination is especially urgent in Israel.
Here, institutional language and existential rhetoric constantly intertwine. Security is real. Threat is real. War is real. But those facts do not suspend the need for analysis. They intensify it. A society under genuine pressure is especially vulnerable to turning emergency into method. Once that happens, the language of survival begins to authorize more than defense. It begins to reorganize the moral field itself.
Perhaps this is what is most bleak today: not that ethical language has disappeared, but that it has lost its power of differentiation. Terms such as evil, cruelty, greed, dignity, and conscience still circulate, but no longer as real thresholds of judgment. They function instead as tribal markers, signals of loyalty, or instruments of image management. They no longer order the field, stop the hand, or mark a limit. They are spoken and then neutralized by an apparatus that translates everything into necessity, security, interest, realism, survival, response, or retaliation. As a result, conflict among human beings is less and less experienced as a question of good and evil, and more and more as a question of effectiveness, narrative control, and the right to inflict losses. This does not mean that the ethical dimension has vanished. It means that it has been degraded into a secondary form: it appears only afterward, as commentary on what force has already decided.
And perhaps the crisis goes deeper still. Perhaps what is collapsing is not only ethical judgment within politics, but the very capacity to inhabit the world through obligation rather than management. Identity, in that sense, is not the heart of the matter. Not ethnic identity, not national identity, not religious identity, not political identity, not even the human as a self-certifying category. All of these can survive the collapse of seriousness. All of them can be mobilized without limit. What matters is whether any form of existence still carries an internal prohibition, a discipline of measure, a refusal to turn every being into usable material.
This is why the problem cannot be contained within one people, one state, or one ideology. The flattening is wider than that. It extends to the treatment of bodies, animals, language, memory, land, attention, and even truth itself. Everything is drawn into circulation, calculation, optimization, extraction. In that sense, one might say that Babylon has already won long before war records its victor. Not because one empire conquered all others in the old style, but because the Babylonian principle has generalized itself: equivalence without remainder, power without inward limit, administration without reverence, abundance without covenant. Victory, then, is no longer merely military. It is civilizational, atmospheric, metabolic. It takes hold the moment measure is replaced by manageability.
Then the danger is no longer only what enemies may do from outside. The deeper danger is what a society learns to permit from within while still calling itself responsible, democratic, and civilized.
This is the point at which slogans fail. Neither cynical detachment nor therapeutic earnestness is enough. What is required is a colder vigilance: the capacity to detect where the threshold has shifted, where contempt has been proceduralized, where exception has become habit, and where the public still speaks the grammar of law and dignity while the operative code has already changed.
After Nuremberg, the world learned to speak often about evil. It learned far less consistently how to analyze the ordinary architectures that make evil executable. That gap remains with us. We still prefer moral theater to structural diagnosis. We still reward the emotional performance of seriousness more readily than the harder work of mapping mechanisms.
If we want to know whether a society, any society, including our own, is in danger, we should stop asking first whether its people sound serious.
We should ask: what, exactly, now passes through without resistance?
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig