Moral Choice

Power attracts projection. People excuse elite misconduct to preserve the illusion that dominance is earned rather than contingent, that wealth signals wisdom rather than the accumulated accidents of structure, timing, and luck. That projection is not merely psychological; it stabilises the system by protecting the myth that status reflects virtue. Predatory opportunism thrives in that dissonance between story and structure, between representation and reality, exploiting a culture that mistakes visibility for competence and treats success as proof of merit.

Bullying, victimisation and exploitation endure because they do not represent functional aberration so much as a distributed, endemic, adaptively regrettable yet persistent property of social organisation, of adversarial dynamics between (and within) human beings, their professional and personal relationships, strategic political complexity, and commercial systems. It resurfaces wherever hierarchy, scarcity, and competition interact, reproducing itself through incentives, norms, and the quiet logic of institutions. Marginal reform cannot reach the core; only revising the underlying axioms — value, risk, power, obligation — shifts the pattern, and such revision frightens people because it threatens the identities and routines they use to make the world coherent.

Democracy is no exception. Its permeability invites participation but also makes it easy for concentrated power to modulate its phase — a shift in the underlying pattern of coordination — until institutions keep their outward shape while sliding into oligarchic function. The United States appears to fall quickly because every political system carries these unstable modes as latent potentials; once activated, they propagate through the communicative field with the speed of resonance rather than deliberation. The truth is bleak: the field can tilt in any direction. Yet awareness of the drift creates a narrow but genuine space for intervention, and that space — fragile, contested, but real — is the substance of moral choice.