The consequences of denying reality are a lot like being poisoned. Imagine someone wants to poison you, but they are not stupid enough to put the whole dose in your food at once. Instead, they add a little every day. At first, you may not notice anything. After a while, you start feeling sick, but you cannot tell when it began, what exactly is wrong, or where the problem comes from. You might even start thinking that the problem is you.
That is one advantage of slow poisoning: your body has time to get used to something it should never have had to tolerate.
The same thing can happen with reality. You do not have to wake up one morning and find that everything has been taken away from you. It is enough for a little more of what once seemed unacceptable to become normal every day. Today, you ignore a lie. Tomorrow, you look away from an injustice. A few days later, you start treating humiliation as part of life. Eventually, when someone complains about it, you might even wonder what their problem is. Isn’t this how everyone lives?
That is when the damage has already been done, even if you have not noticed it.
People do not only get used to good conditions. They get used to bad ones, too, even when those conditions are destroying them. And once they get used to something, they no longer need a reason to tolerate it. The habit itself is enough.
Let me give you an example.
When I was a kid, my father used to mix cement to repair things around the house. There was always a little cement left at the bottom of the bucket. When he wanted to wash it away, I would tell him it was a waste. Then I would take the leftover cement and smear it over the entrance to an anthill.
Back then, it was probably just a game to me. Ants were tiny creatures whose path I could block, whose home I could destroy, and whose suffering I could watch for fun. I did not have to ask myself why I was doing it. I did not have to think about what happened to them. They were just ants, and I was just playing.
But this is exactly what worries me: people can keep the same impulse into adulthood, the impulse to hurt something weaker than themselves simply because they can.
Only the targets are no longer ants. They are people.
Getting older does not automatically make anyone kinder. Growing up does not necessarily mean growing morally. Sometimes, we only learn to carry out the same old cruelties with more sophisticated tools. We learn how to humiliate, intimidate, and threaten others, then come up with reasons why they deserved it.
Perhaps the most disturbing part is not that people can be cruel. It is that they can become so used to cruelty that they no longer recognize it as cruelty.
Of course, not everyone has equal access to reality. One person knows nothing about the job market, another knows little about the state of the country’s industries, another has no idea what happens in the courts, and another has never experienced what it means to live under unchecked power. A person can be well informed about one part of life while living inside a bubble that has almost nothing to do with the world outside.
The problem begins when people mistake their own bubble for the whole world.
If you have never experienced something, it is easy to deny that it exists. If you have never been humiliated, you might think other people are too sensitive. If you have never seen someone’s life turned upside down by a government decision, you might assume things cannot be that bad. When you are protected from the consequences of a situation, it is easy to mistake its normality for its acceptability.
And if you stay in that environment long enough, you may eventually stop noticing what you cannot see.
In an authoritarian system, humiliation is not just a way to punish people. It can also be a way to train them to accept the lower position assigned to them.
Humiliate people until they learn not to complain. Treat them badly until they start ranking different forms of mistreatment by how tolerable they are. Eventually, they stop asking why they should have to accept it. They start asking which kind of humiliation is easier to live with.
One person accepts it because they do not want to lose their job. Another needs the income. Another is thinking about their family. Someone else has simply concluded that there is no alternative.
This is how people can reach a point where they defend the very thing that is crushing them. Not necessarily because they like it, but because they can no longer imagine their lives without it.
When humiliation becomes part of everyday life, self-respect starts to look like a luxury, something only people who can afford the consequences can have. You learn to give up a little of your dignity to keep your job, your position, or simply some peace of mind.
Then you start making excuses so that you do not have to face what you are doing. This is how the world works. Everyone does it. You have to be realistic. You cannot fight everything.
Maybe you really cannot fight everything. But that is not the same as treating everything as normal.
People do not always change overnight. Sometimes, someone who once felt guilty about owing even a small amount of money gradually comes to believe that being ethical only puts them at a disadvantage.
In the past, if someone paid their fare because they did not have enough change, they might come back the next day, even in the rain, to return the money. They were afraid of dying and leaving the world in someone’s debt.
Then one day, that same person might say, “Fuck it, man. That’s the law of the jungle. I’ll do whatever it takes for my own kid. Everyone else does the same for theirs.”
It is not just the behavior that has changed. The standard for right and wrong has changed, too. The person no longer asks, “Is this the right thing to do?” They ask, “What do I get if I don’t do it?”
And to avoid thinking of themselves as a bad person, they have a ready-made explanation: everyone does it.
That sentence is one of the easiest ways to escape moral responsibility. If everyone is guilty, no one has to feel guilty.
Of course, people in difficult circumstances face hard choices, and we cannot judge every situation in the same way. But one thing remains true: the fact that a behavior has become common does not make it right. Having a reason for doing something does not automatically make it ethical. And the fact that other people cause harm does not relieve us of our own responsibility.
Perhaps this is what the whole thing comes down to: we think getting used to something means adapting to reality. But sometimes, getting used to something only means learning to tolerate what should never have become normal.
If we are humiliated a little more every day, we may eventually stop recognizing humiliation. If we hear a little more lying every day, the truth may start to sound stranger than the lies. If we witness other people being mistreated often enough, we may become less disturbed by the mistreatment and more annoyed by the person who keeps talking about it.
By then, the poison has done its job.
Not necessarily because it has destroyed us completely, but because it has taken away some of our ability to recognize that we are sick. We are no longer just suffering from the disease. We may have started defending it.
That is why the first step may not be finding a grand solution or pretending we can change everything. It may be something simpler, but also harder: refusing to treat something as acceptable merely because we have become used to it.
We can ask ourselves: if this were happening to someone we cared about, would we still call it normal? If we did not have to justify it to get through our own lives, would we still defend it? And if nobody else were doing the same thing, would we still believe it was right?
Maybe we cannot remove all the poison from our bodies at once. But at least we can stop adding the next dose to our own food and to everyone else’s.
The real danger is not just living in a sick society. It is getting so used to the sickness that we no longer remember what being healthy looks like.