I don’t typically write about politics on professional social media such as LinkedIn. It’s not my arena, and frankly, the polarization exhausts me as much as it does anyone else. But something has been bugging me, something that transcends party lines and national borders. It’s the unbridled lack of morality that invades our lives.
When I see the same pattern of moral collapse appearing in boardrooms and capitals, in marketplaces and ministries, silence starts to feel like complicity. And since this sentiment only seems to build up inside of me, I feel the urge to share it publicly.
This isn’t about choosing sides in a political debate. This is about recognizing a disease that’s spread across every domain where power operates: business, government, institutions we once trusted. And if we can’t talk about it because it might sound “too political,” then we’ve already lost something essential.
We’re at a tipping point, and I think most of us feel it even if we can’t articulate why. The rules seem to be changing, but not through any democratic process or thoughtful evolution. They’re changing because we’re letting them change, one small compromise at a time, one convenient surrender after another.
So yes, I’m breaking my own rule of not publicly discussing politics. Because the pattern is too obvious to ignore.
When “Smart Business” Becomes Lethal
Let me start with some business cases that few would defend.
The Funcaps Tragedy
In the Netherlands, a company called Funcaps sold designer drugs; substances deliberately engineered to skirt drug laws while delivering powerful psychoactive effects. People died. Not one or two, but 27 death cases are linked to it, and a total of 49 cases are under investigation.
The company’s defence? “We clearly stated on our website that these pills are not for human consumption“.
Let that sink in for a moment. They sold pills. With product descriptions detailing the benefits of consuming them. But because they included a legal disclaimer saying “don’t consume these“, they believed they’d found a loophole large enough to drive a hearse through.
This isn’t clever business. This is moral bankruptcy dressed in legalese. It’s the precise point where “smart” crosses into lethal, where profit motive devours any semblance of responsibility for human life.
Dieselgate: Engineering Deception
Volkswagen didn’t stumble into fraud. They engineered it. Systematically. Deliberately. Engineers created software specifically designed to detect when emissions were being tested, then temporarily reduce pollution to pass those tests. Eleven million vehicles. Across multiple continents. For years.
This wasn’t one rogue employee; this was institutional coordination. Management knew and they decided to break the rules. They lied about it. And they kept lying until they couldn’t anymore.
The question isn’t just “how could this happen?” It’s “how does an entire organization align around systematic deception?” What culture makes that possible? What leadership enables it?
Cambridge Analytica: Weaponizing Trust
Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook users without consent, then used sophisticated psychological profiling to manipulate political outcomes. They knew they were crossing ethical lines. They knew the data wasn’t theirs to use, but they did it anyway.
Their defence, when it finally came to light, echoed every other corporate scandal: “Everyone does it“. As if widespread immorality somehow neutralizes individual responsibility. As if being part of a trend excuses being part of the harm.
Shein: Disposable Planet
Then there’s Shein, the fast-fashion giant that exemplifies environmental nihilism at scale. Studies suggest roughly 60% of textile products end up in landfills within a year. Sixty percent. Mountains of clothing, manufactured cheaply, shipped globally, worn briefly, discarded permanently.
Is this clever business? Or is it planetary destruction with a marketing budget?
The convenience is undeniable; it’s cheap clothes, easily ordered, and quickly delivered. But the cost is externalized onto an ecosystem that can’t send invoices or file complaints. We’re depleting the very systems we depend on, and we keep calling it commerce, as if that legitimizes it.
A Common DNA
These cases aren’t isolated incidents. They share DNA:
- Legal technicalities substitute for moral reasoning
- Scale and complexity diffuse responsibility
- Competitive pressure justifies the unjustifiable
- “If we don’t do it, someone else will“
Moral boundaries don’t collapse suddenly. They erode. One small rationalization at a time, until the distance between “smart business” and “causing harm” becomes so normalized that nobody remembers where the line used to be.
We must recognize that these aren’t moral accidents; they are systemic features of an architecture where unchecked growth eventually devours its own foundation. And here’s what troubles me most: we see this pattern, recognize it, condemn it; yet, we’re watching the exact same mechanism play out in areas where the stakes are even higher.
Politics as Business
Boats in International Waters and The Honduras Paradox
Recently, the current U.S. administration started to interdict and sink vessels in international waters, allegedly to combat drug trafficking. Setting aside the questionable legality of such actions beyond territorial jurisdiction, consider what’s being normalized: the use of military force in ways that previous administrations would have considered acts of war.
And then there are reports — unconfirmed but chilling — of officials suggesting policies like “we take no prisoners”. Whether literally true or not, the very circulation of such statements sends a message: the rules are changing. Power justifies itself. Morality is negotiable when national interest is invoked.
At the same time this administration positions itself as fighting drug cartels, there’s been discussion of potentially pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in U.S. courts of drug trafficking. Really? The very crime this administration claims to be combating?
Let that contradiction breathe for a moment.
You can’t simultaneously wage war on drug trafficking while entertaining pardons for convicted drug traffickers without revealing that the principle isn’t actually the principle. The action is arbitrary. The morality, performative.
The Justification Echo
Listen to how these situations are defended, and you’ll hear echoes of corporate scandals:
- Funcaps: “We followed the rules on paper.”
- Politics: “We’re acting within our authority.”
- Volkswagen: “Everyone in the industry does similar things.”
- Politics: “This is just realpolitik.”
The defence mechanisms are identical. Power without accountability. Action without sustained moral scrutiny. A slow normalization of what would have been shocking just years before.
Whether you’re selling illegal drugs with disclaimers or sinking boats while pardoning drug lords, the pattern is the same: rules are rhetorical devices, not actual constraints. And morality? That’s for people who can afford the luxury of principles.
Our Convenience Bargain
But why does this keep happening? What is the root of this behavior? Why do systems across such different domains (corporate, political, institutional) exhibit the same moral drift?
An Evolutionary Gift That Became a Curse
Here’s something remarkable: human biomass is said to exceed that of all other terrestrial vertebrates combined. We didn’t achieve this through superior strength or speed. We achieved it through collaboration. Our ability to coordinate toward shared goals, to organize into groups capable of extraordinary complexity, to share knowledge across generations; this is what made us the dominant species on Earth.
Cooperation, not violence, is our evolutionary advantage.
But here’s the twist we rarely acknowledge: the same mechanisms that enable collaboration also enable exploitation. As we became more interdependent, we became more vulnerable to those who control the systems we depend on.
Nepotism is cooperation. Corruption is cooperation. Corporate fraud requires massive coordination. Political manipulation demands organized effort. These aren’t failures of cooperation; it’s cooperation with victims outside the collaborating group.
The Authority Trade
Psychologists (Bass, Haselhuhn, Steffel, El Zein) have documented something troubling: people actively prefer that difficult decisions be made by others. We delegate authority not just out of efficiency, but out of convenience. We’d rather someone else bear the burden of complexity, the weight of moral choice, the risk of being wrong.
This instinct made sense in smaller groups where leaders were personally accountable and visible. It makes far less sense when leaders operate at scales where accountability dissolves into bureaucracy and visibility becomes carefully managed public relations.
Yet we keep making the trade: I’ll surrender my agency if you handle the complexity. I’ll look away if you promise me security. I’ll accept your authority if you maintain my comfort.
The Dutch language has phrases that capture this perfectly:
“We hoeven niet Roomser te zijn dan de paus” — We don’t need to be more Catholic than the Pope.
“Als wij het niet doen, dan doet een ander het wel” — If we don’t do it, someone else will.
These are surrender statements. They’re the language of delegated morality, of convenience over conviction.
When Collaboration Has Victims
The scale of modern organization amplifies both benefit and harm. Only humans can coordinate projects of breathtaking complexity: building cities, eradicating diseases, sending people to space. But that same capacity enables harms of unprecedented scale.
Shein requires massive logistics. Dieselgate needed institutional coordination. Political manipulation demands organized infrastructure. These aren’t the work of lone actors. They’re collaborative achievements, just pointed in destructive directions.
We’ve over-optimized for convenience, and in doing so, we’ve created systems where moral responsibility diffuses into fog. Nobody feels personally accountable because everyone is just “doing their job” within a system designed by someone else, approved by someone else, enabled by a culture that rewards compliance over conscience.
The same collaborative instinct that made us dominant has become the mechanism through which those in power operate without meaningful moral constraint, because we’ve actively surrendered our moral agency to them.
Masculine Excess: Competition Without Balance
There’s another dimension worth examining, though it requires careful framing: the role of competitive, dominance-based cultures in accelerating moral erosion.
Too many business environments operate with logic borrowed from warfare. The language gives it away: “crushing the competition”, “dominating market share”, “capturing territory”, “strategic warfare”. We reward aggression, celebrate conquest, hand bonuses to those who win battles regardless of how they’re won.
This isn’t inherently wrong; competition drives innovation, pushes boundaries, and creates value. But when it becomes the only operating principle, when there’s no counterbalancing force, systems become unstable.
Young people grow up immersed in this culture. Video games that reward domination. Social media that promotes a “Manosphere” where everything is hierarchy and conquest. A constant messaging that life is a zero-sum competition where showing weakness means being devoured.
Again: not all of this is harmful, but without balance, without models of collaborative strength and mutual benefit, the culture tilts toward excess.
The Missing Counterbalance
Consider the environments where moral catastrophes incubated:
- Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood: a system built on power imbalances where objecting meant career death.
- The Epstein-Maxwell network: elite circles where wealth and connection insulated behavior from consequence.
- Financial sector culture: read Joris Luyendijk’s documentation of how perverse incentives became normalized.
These weren’t balanced ecosystems. They were monocultures of power, competition, and dominance, with no meaningful counterforce demanding nurture, sustainability, or long-term stewardship.
This isn’t about gender in the biological sense. It’s about operating principles. Systems that prioritize conquest over cultivation, short-term victory over long-term health, individual dominance over collective thriving; these systems eventually eat themselves.
Growing femicide rates, violence as a first resort rather than last, intolerance toward perceived weakness; these are symptoms of cultures that have lost balance, that have optimized so completely for one mode of operation that they’ve become brittle and destructive.
Nature doesn’t work this way. Which brings us to what might be our most important lesson.
What Nature Already Knows
In reading about biomimicry — the study of how we can learn from natural systems — I’ve been struck by how clearly nature has solved the problems we’re struggling with. A recent conversation underlined this beautifully; there are plenty examples where biomimicry uncovers what we seem to have forgotten about organic ecosystems.
Nature’s Non-Negotiable Rules
Janine Benyus, in her foundational 1997 work “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, identified principles that govern mature, stable ecosystems:
- Optimize, don’t maximize. No species appropriates all resources. The moment one does, the system destabilizes. There’s a difference between thriving and metastasizing.
- Self-organize, don’t centralize. Natural systems distribute decision-making. They’re more flexible, more adaptable, more resilient to shocks than top-down hierarchies. Intelligence is embedded throughout, not concentrated at the top.
- Close the loop. Waste is food. Nothing is truly discarded; everything feeds something else. The concept of externalized costs doesn’t exist.
- Remain in balance. Systems that lose equilibrium collapse. Predators exist, but they don’t define the entire ecosystem. Competition and cooperation coexist in dynamic tension.
- Run on information. Mature systems use information efficiently rather than just extracting materials destructively.
Now compare these principles to how we’ve designed our corporate and political systems:
We maximize profit rather than optimizing for sustainability. We centralize power rather than distributing it. We externalize costs rather than closing loops. We reward imbalance; the biggest winner takes the most. We hoard information rather than sharing it strategically.
Is it any wonder our systems keep producing crises?
The Ecosystem’s Response to Imbalance
When a species becomes too dominant in nature, ecosystems respond. The imbalance triggers corrective mechanisms: resources become scarce for the dominant species and predators adapt. Diseases emerge and the system rebalances itself.
Cancer is what happens when this mechanism fails; it’s when cells optimize for their own replication without regard for the organism they depend on. They grow, metastasize, consume resources until the host dies. Then they die too, because they’ve destroyed the system that sustained them.
On a tangent, but what sprang to mind is Clive Barker’s vision in his book ”Weaveworld”; a world consumed by forces that can’t see they’re destroying the very foundation of their existence. Not defeated by external enemies, but hollowed out from within by their own excesses.
When I look at the textile industry producing mountains of waste, or financial systems creating fictional value to generate more fictional value, or political systems that normalize what would have been unthinkable a decade ago, I see the same pattern: not individual pathologies, but systemic imbalance that’s being allowed to run unchecked.
Biomimicry in Practice
This isn’t just theory. Biomimetic principles produce results:
The Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe mimicked termite mound ventilation systems, reducing energy use by 90%. Not through high-tech solutions, but by studying how termites solve the exact same climate control problem.
Kalundborg Industrial Park in Denmark created a symbiotic network where businesses share and reuse each other’s waste materials; closing loops, turning costs into resources, exactly as natural ecosystems do.
Interface Corporation, a carpet company, worked with biomimicry consultants to create designs inspired by random pattern formation in forest floors. It became their top-selling product line, representing 40% of sales. Proof that biomimetic approaches aren’t just ethical: they’re profitable.
The lesson is clear: systems modeled on nature’s 3.8 billion years of evolutionary refinement outperform systems built purely on domination and extraction.
The question isn’t whether biomimicry works. The question is whether we’re humble enough to learn from it.
Sadly, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room: pressure.
Pressure vs. Performance
Wells Fargo employees created 3.5 million unauthorized accounts. This wasn’t a few bad apples. This was systemic culture where unrealistic sales targets made fraud feel necessary for survival. When you’re told your job depends on hitting numbers that can’t be hit honestly, what do you do?
The pressure to perform isn’t inherently corrupting. But pressure without counterbalancing values, without protected space to object, without consequences for those demanding the impossible: that pressure becomes toxic.
Is this just “how business works“? Or is it a design flaw we’ve normalized?
“If they can do it, why not us?”
When governments overstep boundaries and we allow it, we set precedent. When company owners tolerate bullying, they legitimize it for others. When tech companies manipulate data and face minimal consequences, they teach the industry what’s actually permitted versus what’s merely stated policy.
Across the industrialized world, trust in major institutions is at a record low. That’s not coincidence. It’s the cumulative effect of watching leadership violate stated values without meaningful accountability. This creates a feedback loop: moral collapse breeds more moral collapse. The first transgression is the hardest. Each subsequent one gets easier because “they did it and nothing happened”.
Fictional Value
The pressure exists. But pressure doesn’t have to corrupt. Not if we design systems with built-in resistance, with distributed accountability, with consequences that matter. Right now, we’ve designed systems where cutting corners is rewarded and moral stands are penalized.
Consider tech bubbles where money is borrowed against fictional value to create more fictional value: stock prices are untethered from actual productivity. Are these inevitable market forces? Perhaps simply “acts of nature”, as part of the dynamics of that particular system? Are they the choices we’re making, because that’s just “how things work”? Choices to reward extraction over sustainability, growth over stability, speed over thoughtfulness?
That’s not inevitability. It’s a design choice.
Wake-Up Call
I refuse to end this pessimistically, because pessimism is just another form of surrender.
Recognition is the first step. The pattern exists across domains, whether corporate, political, or institutional. It’s not “just business” or “just politics” or “just how things are.” It’s systemic, which means it’s designed, which means it can be redesigned.
The good news? Once you see the mechanism, you can reclaim moral agency. Stop trading convenience for abdication. “Let someone else handle it” is precisely how we arrived here in the first place.
This doesn’t mean everyone must become an activist or martyr. But it means: recognize when you’re being asked to look away. In your workplace decisions, in your purchasing choices, in your civic participation; in small daily moments where principle meets pressure. Small acts of resistance to convenience culture accumulate. They create a new culture. They signal to others that alternative responses are possible.
The Dutch phrases I mentioned earlier? Reject them.
We should hold ourselves to higher standards than those in power. And if we don’t do the right thing, nobody else automatically will.
Biomimicry offers practical principles for institutional design:
- Distribute authority instead of centralizing it. Self-organization creates resilience.
- Close accountability loops so consequences actually reach decision-makers, not just the people executing orders.
- Optimize rather than maximize. “Enough” should be a value, not a weakness.
- Build in balance mechanisms where power checks power, where different operating principles coexist in productive tension.
These aren’t utopian fantasies. They’re observable features of systems that have sustained themselves for millions of years.
The Choice Before Us
We can continue down a path where our greatest evolutionary advantage — collaboration — has been weaponized by those we’ve surrendered authority to.
Or we can learn from billions of years of evolutionary wisdom about how to build systems that self-regulate, that balance competing forces, that sustain themselves precisely because they don’t let any single principle dominate completely.
This is Barker’s question from Weaveworld: which world will we choose? The one that devours itself in pursuit of unchecked growth? Or the one that maintains the balance necessary for long-term survival?
The answer isn’t predetermined. We have agency. But agency requires action, and action requires breaking the habit of convenient delegation. We can turn the tide. We can develop better systems. But only if we stop pretending that morality is someone else’s responsibility.
When Must Morality Kick In?
We return to the opening question with new understanding.
“When must morality kick in?” isn’t actually a question of timing. It’s a question of design. In healthy systems, morality doesn’t need to “kick in” because it’s already built in. Nature doesn’t wait for morality to arrive; balance is structural, embedded in how the system operates.
We’ve designed systems where morality is optional, where it’s treated as a constraint on efficiency rather than a foundation for sustainability. We’ve built cultures where convenience trumps conscience, where delegation becomes abdication, where “smart business” and “strong leadership” can mean anything as long as it produces results.
But we can — and must — design differently.
We can build systems where balance is structural. Where accountability is distributed. Where optimization replaces maximization. Where the wisdom that nature has refined over billions of years informs how we organize ourselves.
This isn’t about politics, though it touches politics. This isn’t about business ethics, though it includes business. This is about how we choose to organize ourselves as a species.
And that choice is still ours to make. The line we keep crossing isn’t invisible. We see it. We feel it. We know when it’s been violated. The system is not in great shape. I think it needs a reset and I would like to think we can have a soft system reset. A gentle recalibration. If we can’t do that, I fear we’re heading for a hard reboot.
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