I recently watched an episode of The Graham Norton Show. Two actresses were asked to select a man from the audience. One chose a modest, kind-seeming bank employee who liked soccer. The other chose a sharply dressed man who openly claimed to be wealthy and connected to the Russian mafia. Later, about ten women were asked to choose between the two men. In a cheerful, playful atmosphere, they selected the “mafia” figure without hesitation, leaving the unpretentious man standing alone.
The audience laughed. It was meant to be funny. But it revealed something we rarely examine: the gap between the values we claim to hold and the choices we actually make.
Jeffrey Epstein operated a child sex-trafficking network for years from his Manhattan townhouse. Much of today’s media attention has centered on who may have been connected to him—political leaders, elites, even royalty—as if the central issue were which names appear on a list, rather than what the existence of such a system reveals about power, impunity, and moral collapse at the top of society.
A similar reckoning unfolded within the Catholic Church in the United States. Hundreds of priests were accused of sexually abusing children over decades. The scandal was not only the abuse itself, but the institutional response: concealment, reassignment, and resistance to accountability. The pattern was systemic.
These are not isolated failures. According to the World Health Organization, about 35% of women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, most often perpetrated by an intimate partner. In the past year alone, an estimated 316 million women experienced such violence. The scale is structural. It is woven into social arrangements we have learned not to question.
The issue is not a handful of “bad apples.” It is a persistent historical phenomenon that cannot be resolved through headlines, outrage cycles, or symbolic punishments. Nor is education the answer—not in any simple sense. Many of those involved were highly educated and culturally sophisticated. What was missing was not knowledge, but ethical formation and inner development. By treating human beings as objects—of desire, power, or utility—we have stunted genuine human growth while expanding our capacity to dominate and exploit. We are living inside a dehumanized bubble, and it is cracking everywhere.
I was fortunate to encounter the Humanist Movement early in life. I witnessed people in deep existential crisis turn to its founder, Silo, for guidance. His first response rarely focused on how to resolve the difficulty. Instead, he asked a more fundamental question: How did you arrive here in the first place?
That shift makes all the difference. It is not an accusation, but an invitation—to understand the inner conditions that make certain choices possible, and even predictable.
Without this kind of inquiry, societies reproduce the same structures of domination regardless of their level of education or technological sophistication. We have little real understanding of how human beings function—how we grow, how we protect ourselves from stress, compulsion, trauma, fear, and isolation. We confuse desire with depth, and power with meaning.
This is why that television scene matters. It was not a quirk. It was a reflection. We express shock at systemic violence and abuse of power. But when was the last time we collectively chose the honest, grounded, unpretentious person—in our personal lives or in our public ones?
And yet, when people choose differently—when actions align with values—another kind of development takes shape.
In Minnesota, people recently came together to support neighbors facing immigration enforcement actions by ICE. They organized mutual-aid networks, coordinated food deliveries for those too frightened to leave their homes, and stood watch for one another in freezing temperatures. There was nothing glamorous about it—just ordinary people deciding that solidarity mattered more than comfort. The gestures were practical and unspectacular, but for those involved they meant safety and dignity.
These moments rarely make headlines. But they reveal the real alternative. They show what human development looks like when it is lived—quietly, consistently, through ordinary acts of protection and care.
Until we begin to take these everyday choices seriously—who we trust, admire, and stand beside—the larger horrors should not surprise us. They grow out of the habits we practice every day.
