Orwell Wasn’t Cynical Enough
I was a strange child. Not the charming, oddball kind they make movies about. No, I was the kind of strange that asks awkward questions during mass and tries to understand why adults lie so easily. Before I was even a teenager, I served as an altar boy. It was one of those half-sacred, half-practical functions a rural kid could get pulled into. Our village was small, rooted in Catholic rituals and post-war dust. I was late to the game, so by the time I was drafted into God’s service, I was one of the bigger lads.
Which is why they quickly reassigned me from the altar to the organ pump. Our church had a monstrous pipe organ that required two boys to operate it manually. No electricity. Just raw leverage. One boy pushed the great iron lever down when it rose, while the other took his turn gasping for air. We didn’t make music—we kept the lungs of the beast breathing.
From today’s vantage point, it sounds medieval. But it also sounds real. No ambient motors humming beneath stained glass. No automation. Just sweat, rhythm, and obligation.
I grew up in a very traditional village. Traditions so baked in they’d fossilized. But even as a boy, I was skeptical. Not rebellious—just watchful. And the first thing I distrusted was human nature. I had this residual belief, maybe absorbed from Sunday school or bedtime myths, that deep down, people want to be decent. That even liars knew they were lying. That some vestigial conscience made them wince, even if they still went ahead and did what they did. That decency, though suppressed, lived somewhere in the cellar of the soul.
Then came September 2019. A congressional hearing. Representative Adam Schiff publicly paraphrased a call between Trump and Zelensky in a way that was not only dishonest—it was a caricature. When called out, he smirked into the camera and said it was just parody. Not a flinch. No twitch of shame. Just a smug, flatlined performance. And something inside me finally snapped.
I had never believed politicians to be moral exemplars. I always assumed they were transactional animals, predators of status and survival. But even I hadn’t quite grasped how hollow they had become. How completely divorced from shame. Schiff didn’t just lie—he revealed that truth and falsehood are no longer categories that matter to his kind. What matters is control of narrative. Performance. Leverage.
And Schiff is not the worst or the most corrupt example of that species. They exist in all political movements in any country. This is no specificity to any political persuasion or conviction. Schiff was simply the one I noticed first in his total depravity. Now, since I have fully opened eyes, I see it everywhere. Like wild weed. Schiff is merely one among the many.
Let me be clear: I am not a fan of either political party in the US. In fact, I’m not even on the political map. If I showed you my actual positions, even the most tinfoil-hatted parties would hand me a cup of tea and politely ask me to leave.
Politics is a meat grinder of interests. Parties are machines—cold, calculating, and designed to protect the ruling class. Principles are window dressing. Emotion is a tool to manipulate. No ideology survives contact with the donor class.
But this isn’t just about politics. The same rot runs through every institution of power. Business. Media. Academia. Even the sanctimonious corners of NGOs. Leadership today is a function of system-loyal prostitution. The higher you rise, the more flexible your spine must be. Integrity is not an asset; it’s a liability.
We often hear about the “Deep State,” a term misappropriated from the Ottoman Empire. It describes a caste—not of conspirators—but of symbiotes. They feed off institutional continuity. They legislate, regulate, and gatekeep not for the public good, but to maintain the structures that feed them influence, money, and status. Not everyone is in it for all three. Many settle for just one. Plenty of bureaucrats cling to status like a bone. They get nothing else, but the illusion of power keeps them warm.
That doesn’t make them evil. It makes them Cipolla’s helpless. Remember Carlo Cipolla’s theory of human stupidity? Some people cause harm without benefiting themselves. These are not the whores. These are the functionaries, the backfillers, the well-meaning administrators who serve the beast while believing they are doing good. They’re cannon fodder. Tragic, maybe. But not malicious.
The real whores are the architects. The ones who built the system to be gamed. The ones who expand it like a metastasizing cancer. Who climb not by competence, but by submission to the machine. Who will say anything, do anything, throw anyone under the bus so long as the spotlight stays warm and the payout is wired.
Think of Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius. A woman so naked in her ambition and depravity that she turned the imperial palace into a literal brothel, selling access and favors like a merchant on market day. She didn’t just play the game—she was the game. And for a while, Claudius let it happen. The doddering fool who wasn’t a fool at all eventually acted. He had her executed. But the damage was done. Rome had seen what a system run by the corrupt looks like.
And unlike Claudius, today’s emperors don’t prune their gardens. They water the rot.
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs began with revolutionary slogans and ended up drinking whiskey in the farmhouse, indistinguishable from the human tyrants they overthrew. The tragedy was not their betrayal—it was how easily they adopted the tools of power. The real tell is in the mirror. When the animals looked in and could no longer tell pig from man. That’s where we are now. The bureaucrats squeal in the same tones as the CEOs. The journalists wear the same suits as the lobbyists. The NGOs have the same donors as the arms manufacturers.
We live in the age of total howification. Everything is a process. A playbook. A brand strategy. Even rebellion has been monetized and color-coded. Everything reduced to a method. Every method to a service. Every service to a scam.
There was probably a time—maybe in the chaotic birth of the postwar republics, maybe in the fraught formation of America—when some values actually mattered. When principles had currency. When being caught in a lie cost you something. But even then, the grifters were waiting.
Consider Talleyrand: priest under the Ancien Régime, revolutionary under Robespierre, foreign minister under Napoleon, and diplomat under the restored monarchy. The man was a sine wave in human form. A political cockroach. If opportunism were a sport, Talleyrand would be its Michael Jordan.
And it’s hard to find a political equivalent to Talleyrand in today’s world—not because we lack spineless, shape-shifting opportunists, but because we lack the revolutionary conditions that make such metamorphosis both possible and visible. Revolutionary France provided a unique stage for that performance. Talleyrand was not alone. Abbé Sieyès played a similar tune on a different flute. The actors are always plentiful. What’s rare is the script.
So here we are. A republic of whores. And by “whores,” I don’t mean the desperate. I mean the careerists who prostitute their minds, values, and souls for the mere proximity to power. Who feel no shame. No hesitation. For whom the public is not a constituency, but a herd to be milked and discarded.
There must be some academy somewhere, some finishing school for the soulless, where they learn how to lie without blinking. Where they train not to twitch when exposed. Because they don’t care. And that tells us what they really think of us:
Cattle. Idiots. Dopamine addicts sniffing the latest outrage like glue.
And the worst part? They’re not wrong. Most people don’t want to know. They don’t want clarity. They want sedation. They want a curated stream of palatable lies that justify their inertia. The system doesn’t just enable this—it depends on it.
We think we lost our innocence. I don’t buy it. I think we never had any to begin with.
The only defense left is disconnection. Mental exile. You can’t defeat the system—it’s too large, too well-fed, too evolutionarily optimized for betrayal. But you can go dark. You can play their game on the surface while cultivating an inner citadel. You can stop believing. Stop hoping. Hope is the drug they sell you to keep you docile.
Detach. Observe. Build your own codes. Find the people who still blink. Who still feel shame. Who still ask questions.
The whores will never stop. But you don’t have to become one of them.
Because being a whore to the system carries a price—and it’s not one you’d want to pay. Whores depend entirely on external gratification. Their success or failure is never in their hands. They’re powerless in the grand scheme of things, bobbing on tides they pretend to command. If they blink even once—if they hesitate for a fraction of a second—another whore is already backstage, teeth gleaming, waiting to bury them with a smile.
Whores are their own worst enemies. Whores eat whores. And the only way not to end up on the menu is to refuse the invitation entirely.
This game carries momentum. To keep up, you have to be ready to lose everything. Like José Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, who walked away from the palace back to his humble farmhouse. A rare man who could hold power without becoming its prisoner.
But how often does that happen?
