They are not looking for the guilty, they are staging pantomimes. Witch hunts for puppets who, when seemingly cornered, reveal themselves as shadows on the wall, projections of a system that admits no fault and foresees no culprits. The institutions, by now, are nothing but the court of an invisible prince, a patriciate of careerists and traitors to the common good. Their one, true function is to nip in the bud any vibration, however faint, that sounds like a question posed to their authority. It is a perfect machine, a legalized mafia, that has no need for explicit threats. A whisper is enough, half a word, and careers stall, doors slam shut, voices vanish into the vortex.

And the people? The people no longer react. They are an embalmed herd, a pack of sleepwalkers. They have been resigned, conformed, dulled by the quiet life and the small daily cowardices. They have been domesticated like a yard dog, the one that wags its tail at the master even when kicked. Every grumble, every attempt to lift its head from the dust, is immediately branded as hate. And hate, as we know, is the modern crime, the one that authorizes public shaming and institutional revenge. So, the common folk stay silent. Not out of dignity, but out of calculation. They have understood it’s better to play dead.

Then there is the great theater of the digital, the kingdom of triumphant idiocy. An incessant and empty chatter, a hive’s buzz where the most off-key bees believe themselves to be nightingales. It is a vanity fair that feeds on itself, that revels in its own vacuity. They exchange likes like chocolate coins, they build castles of opinions on sand. It is a rowdy and sad game, which gives the illusion of debate but does not scratch the surface of things. Because the truth, the profound nature of reality, is a shy lady. She does not love the uproar. She loves to hide, and shows herself only to those who have the patience to seek her in silence, far from the din of the cretins.