The human condition hasn't changed
Moral development is a collective duty
I have spent most of last year walking alongside individuals who have been baffled, shocked and dismayed by the behaviour of senior professionals and the collusion of their institution in their own scapegoating.
I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised. History shows us again and again that most humans are not prone to goodness in environments that reward compliance and where survival depends on alignment with the authority figure or party that provides material, social, and professional security. It’s been difficult delivering that reality check to so many educated individuals who believed that integrity and excellence alone would support their career progression and protect them from bad actors. Without recognising that diplomacy, often dismissed as playing politics, is also part of any job because trust has to be built and sustained in hierarchical settings where those with authority routinely play by their own rules.
Goodness, as in, the desire and capacity to do good things that benefit others while avoiding having negative impact on others, doesn’t persist on its own. It doesn’t scale naturally, nor is it protected by education, intelligence, or stated values. What’s more likely to persist is our default toward self-preservation organised around saving face, especially in stressful circumstances. Any society that assumes goodness will survive without being actively supported, modelled, and defended eventually discovers that a convincing performance of virtue can replace duty and personal responsibility while self-restraint becomes a liability.
My past year came into focus when I read this piece by Harrison Koehli of his excellent Political Ponerology Substack. The article describes default human behaviour, organised around shame, status, and survival, in the absence of restraint and responsibility (the narcissistic S). It draws heavily on examples from tribal and honour based cultures, particularly in parts of India and the Middle East, and suggests that similar dynamics emerge wherever moral development is weak. What struck me was how closely these descriptions resembled the behaviour I’ve observed inside modern institutions, including professional organisations and cult environments. From a dharmic1 perspective, this convergence is unsurprising in the Kali Yuga2, our current epoch, characterised by adharma and behaviour increasingly misaligned with cosmic law.
I was excited to read his piece because it highlights the human condition without sentimentality or demonization. It’s true that a large proportion of adults remain morally and developmentally stunted and organise their lives around self orientation, status protection, and shame avoidance. These adults learn how to prioritise saving face, master the performance of goodness, and rise through hierarchies because our lack of discernment conflates surface level social compliance with social responsibility. This closely resembles the tendency to perceive a confident demeanour as a sign of professional competence in institutions plagued with narcissistic leadership.
Institutions
Institutions are structured arrangements of formal and informal authority that stabilise human roles and conduct over time. They’re shaped by repeated actions, unspoken agreements, and incentive structures that reward some behaviours and suppress others. Livelihood, status, and perpetuity govern these systems, leaving little space for morality in action.
Institutions function as symbols onto which individuals project their needs for safety, income, identity, and authority, much like a parental authority. As people depend on institutions for survival and status, driven by the need for security, they protect them reflexively, regardless of moral behaviour. Over time, the institution becomes an idol that must be defended, even when doing so requires distortion, retaliation, or removal of those who disrupt its image. Accountability threatens this function, so behaviour that preserves the appearance of order is rewarded.
As institutions are composed of groups, it’s worth examining group dynamics more closely. Groups tend to drift toward entropy unless restraint and responsibility are actively maintained. In groups led by insecurity, behaviour quickly organises around avoiding scrutiny and blame. People become careful about what they say, disagreement is risky, and cohesion is maintained through silence and fear of consequences. Peace requires people to tolerate accountability and accept consequences of decisions without retaliation, which requires emotional and moral maturity, often in deficit as you ascend the institutional ladder.
As groups grow, people who are uneasy with accountability gravitate toward risk averse, self-preserving behaviour. This includes deflecting responsibility, aligning with those in power, and removing perceived threats through processes like scapegoating. Others notice that this behaviour is rewarded and gradually become normalised and expected. Integrity, moral behaviour, and personal responsibility put one’s status and livelihood at risk because they disrupt this arrangement. People who insist on accountability face social and professional consequences such as exclusion, targeting, and removal. Compliance stabilises the group by rewarding alignment with the dominant authority and preserving existing norms, even when this happens unconsciously rather than through deliberate choice.
Moral behaviour
Moral behaviour doesn’t arise automatically through education, intelligence, or stated commitments. A persistent assumption shared across society, including among elites, professionals, and those who defer to them, is that education and professional prestige are associated with moral behaviour and trustworthiness.
High intelligence and strong commitments to justice don’t reliably protect against moral distortion and can increase susceptibility. Immunity requires a range of self-examination skills, including curiosity to investigate one’s own reaction to information, curiosity to explore different perspectives, honesty to excavate one’s true motives for holding a specific position, and willingness to confront the emotions that arise from personal reckoning. These capacities are demanding and unevenly developed, particularly when status and livelihood are at stake.
Intelligent people are often skilled at constructing coherent narratives even when critical facts are missing. Those with good intentions are especially open to frames that assign blame in the name of being on the right side of justice, while preserving their own moral standing. Once a position becomes established as the compassionate stance, conflicting information is no longer treated as something to examine but as a challenge to one’s legitimacy and reputation. This behaviour is sustained by institutional structure and by unexamined responses to status and threat, which I’ve explored elsewhere.
People who prioritise saving face rise because they experience little friction between speech and action. They punish a colleague in the morning and speak about values in the afternoon without inner turmoil. Undiscerning observers interpret this smoothness as competence and solid leadership.
Those with a more developed conscience hesitate before acting because they consider consequences and impact. Those who are used to displays of smooth confidence as true leadership perceive hesitation as weakness and unreliability. Over time, those who are able to spot the incongruence and distorted value system withdraw, are sidelined, or are forced out, leaving group dynamics increasingly dependent on performing virtues rather than embodying them.
Moral development depends on authority figures who demonstrate that accepting consequence strengthens authority. When authority is used to preserve image, groups regress, performance survives, and responsibility decays. Institutional self-preservation is rewarded, and these lessons reproduce themselves without instruction because they’re reinforced materially and socially.
Constraints
The people who do care tend to be those who feel beholden to their dharma, understood as a lived sense of duty rather than a belief or identity. Their behaviour is organised around obligation rather than reward and is demonstrated in their actions rather than declarations of benevolence. They exercise self-restraint where compliance would be easier, speak truthfully where distortion could protect them, and accept consequence instead of blaming others. This way of operating puts them at a disadvantage within most contemporary institutions, carrying personal and professional costs, yet it persists because duty is non-negotiable.
This is how people behave when their status and livelihood are at stake.
The present state
The human condition hasn’t changed. What has changed is the willingness to sustain the conditions under which goodness can survive. Responsibility now carries disproportionate cost, while performance offers protection. Unlike what many people are saying, the past few years didn’t reveal a sudden moral collapse. They clarified how much goodness depends on being actively supported.
I don’t know what will emerge from my work in 2026, given how 2025 unfolded. What I do know is that without continual reminders of our actual human tendencies, shame-based reactions to ordinary situations will continue to shape behaviour and draw people into collective despair. Many thoughtful writers are focused on thinking better and cultivating epistemic humility, and I’m thankful for them. However, that focus on its own does not address the problem I keep encountering.
My belief is that you can have all the great thinking skills and still be relationally unskilled, because our emotions drive behaviour, not our thoughts.
You’ll see more transgressive ideas about emotions as the true drivers of our actions, and a push toward moral development grounded in cosmic laws that defy logic, thought, and feeling.
You’ll also continue to experience a calm, humanising, and reflective approach to writing that doesn’t attempt to manipulate you into feeling special, righteous, virtuous, or superior. Approaches that rely on those dynamics can be effective, but they tend to exhaust both readers and writers over time.
I hope you will continue to stick with me and support my research and practice so I can provide helpful and actionable processes that liberate people from societal conditioning, reduce suffering, and promote peace.
Thank you for all your support in 2025 (and before). Onward to 2026!
-Nathalie
PS Most of my work is going behind a paywall. There are articles as far back as 2021 that are as relevant today as they were then. Scandalous yet fleeting cultural moments and current events are often more satisfying to focus on, but they rarely explain the root causes of personal distress and interpersonal problems. My work focuses on recognising patterns driven by less visible forces that persist over time and make sense of what people are living through. A paid subscription supports my ongoing independent research and writing, and gives you access to that work and the language to see what’s actually happening.
Thank you for your support!
Dharma refers to duty and right conduct that sustain moral and cosmic order. It is not a matter of belief or identity, but obligation, upheld regardless of reward or consequence.
Kali Yuga is a concept from post-Vedic Hindu cosmology, grounded in earlier Vedic understandings of dharma and cosmic order. The Kali Yuga is the final age in a cyclical sequence of epochs and is characterised by the decline of dharma, the rise of adharma, and the normalisation of immorality, greed, deceit, and corruption. Classical sources describe it as a period in which truthfulness, duty, restraint, and right conduct deteriorate, while self-interest and material gain dominate human affairs. The term is used here as a descriptive framework for moral and behavioural decline, not as a religious or apocalyptic claim.
Hack narcissism and support my work
I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.
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