Don’t Kill the Messenger

The world under the spotlight: when Epstein’s emails forced us to look at ourselves.

The problem isn’t exclusively what gets exposed, but how we transform it into moral spectacle. We inhabit a moment where collective reaction frequently precedes reflection. Every revelation rapidly becomes binary narrative: good and evil, heroes and villains, absolute victims and complete monsters. That logic soothes consciences but impoverishes thinking.

This text concerns not lists, names, nor media trials. Something else fascinates me: the historical moment traversing us and what that moment communicates concerning ourselves as civilization.

Humanity has experienced comparable instances repeatedly: Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, empires at peak power. Each moment humans feel omnipotent, unencumbered, saturated with resources and possibility, an identical mirror emerges. Not condemning, but confronting.

Traceability

We inhabit an epoch where technology amplifies everything: accelerating, exaggerating, distorting, going viral. Yet it performs another, less spectacular and considerably more uncomfortable function: it uncovers. It renders visible what previously remained shadowed.

Here emerges a crucial contemporary concept: traceability. Being traceable means actions leave footprints. What we communicate, decide, and sustain can no longer hide behind narrative or image. Traceability generates discomfort because it demands coherence where ambiguity previously existed. Yet it additionally arranges. And perhaps matures.

The Suspension of Conscience

When particular demographics access augmented power, income, influence, or perceived immunity, boundaries become indistinct. Rules transform into negotiable. Not because individuals misunderstand ethics, but because they inhabit a psychological terrain of self-exception.

I reject the notion that any human lacks awareness of boundary-crossing. We comprehend. Always. The discrepancy isn’t epistemological — it’s decisional. Internal negotiation. We feign distraction.

That is what this moment genuinely exposes: not celebration, not excess itself, but what we perform with consciousness when imagining no observation — until observation arrives.

Beyond Moral Spectacle

Executing the messenger resolves nothing. Identifying the monster doesn’t dismantle systems rendering them viable. Outrage doesn’t improve us.

Perhaps what’s genuinely uncomfortable isn’t revelation, but our inability to feign astonishment. Removing masks hurts — yet presents opportunity.

Everything nowadays feels rawer, increasingly exposed, grittier. Yet additionally transparent. And transparency introduces novel responsibility: consciously selecting our positions and the planetary existence we collectively construct.