No society is immune to phases in which its moral beliefs and practices come under strain, undergo erosion, or grow uncertain. Periodic moral crises are part of the human condition. But what we are witnessing today appears to go beyond such episodic breakdowns. It resembles, disturbingly, a more comprehensive collapse of the moral universe itself, one that is not confined to a particular region but seems global in scope.

How else are we to explain the widespread indifference—of many governments and the substantial number of ordinary citizens—to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, widely recognised by credible observers as genocide? How are we to account for the moral numbness in response to the prolonged suffering caused by the wars in Sudan and Ukraine and, earlier, in Syria, Libya, and Iraq? These are not marginal conflicts occurring at the edges of global consciousness. They unfold before us daily, in full public view. Yet, the capacity for sustained moral outrage appears not merely diminished but, in many quarters, extinguished.

History offers sobering precedents. After the catastrophic collapse of the rigorous political system under Mao Zedong and the immense destruction unleashed by the Cultural Revolution, several Chinese writers spoke of their society as populated by “amoral” beings: individuals stripped of moral bearings, having lost their moral compass. Similar descriptions are evident in accounts of the society emerging from the heinous violence of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

But the philosopher Stuart Hampshire’s reflections on Nazi Germany remain among the most incisive diagnoses of such moments. When justice and fairness are removed from the public domain, Hampshire warns, a flattened moral landscape emerges—one in which people no longer merely lack a sense of right and wrong but act as if such distinctions are irrelevant. Here, moral sensibility is unambiguously suppressed.

In such conditions, our core moral emotions—samvedana (empathy), karuna (compassion), generosity, concern for the other—are severely dulled, even erased. What also disappears, however, is not simply these raw materials of moral judgment but something more elemental: the very qualities that make us human. People become benumbed, insulated from suffering, emotionally anaesthetised. Nothing matters to them except self-preservation and brute self-interest. And among the minuscule minority of the super-rich who benefit from this reproachable condition, rage, groundless arrogance, greed, and lust reign supreme.

There are two ways in which such moral collapse occurs. The first is by gradual erosion. Over long periods, moral qualities and practices hollow out. They may survive at best as rhetoric or meaningless ritual but with their substantive content drained away. Individuals hover at the edge, between morality and immorality, and more often than not, slide into a moral abyss, into amoral or immoral action. And if they do happen to recognise the remnant of a moral principle, they unhesitatingly choose expediency over it.

The second more dangerous form is not mere erosion but active destruction. This is not simply a slow weakening of ideals such as justice, fairness, impartiality, or propriety in public life. It involves the rise of organised forces that deliberately dismantle the very foundations on which justice rests, along with the institutions that sustain it. Injustice is then no longer an unfortunate deviation from moral norms, a regrettable necessity, but is openly valorised. Prejudice is celebrated as virtue. Compassion is dismissed as weakness. Generosity is viewed as feeble-mindedness, something contemptible. Cultivated hatred replaces love as people speak the language of hate and act on it. What emerges from the rubble are subjects without conscience, without a shred of guilt or shame.

‘Malignant normality’

This condition is more than a “transvaluation” of values, as Friedrich Nietzsche called it. Rather, it is the construction of an order in which injustice and violence are quite openly praised, where domination and exclusion are normalised. The American thinker and psychologist Robert Jay Lifton aptly calls it “malignant normality”.

Hampshire describes this phenomenon as the emergence of evil—understood not simply as moral wrongdoing but as a proactive force working against all that is worthy of praise, virtually everything admirable and exemplary in human life. It is evil not only in aspiration but in achievement. Such forces are always around, lurking in society in a latent form, but are usually restrained, contained, actively discouraged by folk wisdom, which tell us that when these forces are unleashed they throttle love, friendship, and civility and ruin social trust. So when they roam unchecked, they devour all that is decent and worthwhile, becoming a destructive tornado that uproots all that is good.

Contemporary politics provides chilling illustrations. Figures like US President Donald Trump bring about not just policy change or ideological realignment but a crushing moral destruction. They aim to expunge notions of fairness and justice from politics, public life, and eventually from the very minds of citizens. This results in a “bombed and flattened moral terrain” where nothing is off-limits or forbidden. Violence and domination replace adjudication and restraint. Judicial procedures, parliamentary debate, and reasoned argument are treated with contempt, particularly when they obstruct parties, ideologies, or the will of the Supreme Leader. Justice is, therefore, redefined as the will of the powerful, which requires neither justification nor restraint.

Such a world substitutes revenge for justice and displaces impartiality by loyalty to ideology, to the party, and to a war-mongering leader. The weak, the disabled, and the vulnerable minorities are treated as expendable or, worse, are targeted. Consider the persistent lynching of Dalits and Muslims or the rape of young women, which today barely evokes public reaction or even a whisper.

At its core, the idea of justice functions as a basic restraint on unbounded desire: what the Greeks called pleonexia, the sinister urge to take more than one’s due, to possess limitless ambition, and to dominate with impunity. Justice frustrates certain strivings, erects barriers, and declares some actions impermissible. This is precisely why it is under attack today. This is also why in our times immorality is considered so “hot” and morality is actively destroyed.

This is the first of a monthly column that will discuss issues of public ethics and morality and the various ways in which they play out and interact in daily life.

Rajeev Bhargava, a political theorist, is honorary professor at CSDS, Delhi, and director of the centre’s Parekh Institute of Indian Thought.

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