Nice infrastructure of irresponsibility we’ve managed to create. First you have first-order grifters: weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and logistics suppliers — the ones who actually make the machinery of violence. Then come the second-order grifters — the think tankers, foreign policy fellows, and adjacent “experts” who don’t make weapons but polish the narratives that keep them flying. They craft the intellectual frameworks that make endless conflict seem not just necessary but inevitable, even noble.
Then there are the third-order grifters: journalists, influencers, academic strivers, minor bureaucrats — people who echo second-order narratives because they need a seat at the table, a clip that lands, a fellowship, a consulting gig. They mimic the frameworks and language because that’s what gets rewarded. They don’t invent the grift, they just learn its rhythms, speaking fluently in the dialect of “strategic interests” and “geopolitical realities.”
Fourth-order grifters are the new online amateur experts — the Twitter threads and Substack warriors building personal brands on borrowed expertise. They don’t get paid, but they build a following by sounding just like the second- and third-order grifters. Their reward is growth, engagement, maybe a podcast spot. They’ve learned to perform expertise without ever having to face consequences.
Fifth-order grifters are the rest of us if we’re not careful — when we share their content and normalize their terms, when we let ourselves be trained to think in their logic. When we start talking about “credible deterrence” and “strategic competition” as if these concepts emerged naturally from our own moral reasoning rather than from boardrooms and war colleges.
The whole system depends on layers of distance — not just from the battlefield, but from accountability. Each layer thinks it’s removed from the consequences, each layer thinks the real decisions are being made somewhere else. What is striking is how each layer has just enough separation to avoid feeling directly responsible, yet each is essential to the whole. This creates what you might call “decentralized moral hazard” — the risks are socialized across society while the benefits concentrate among the first few layers. And because no single layer feels fully responsible, the system becomes remarkably resistant to reform from within.
The Bureaucratization of Violence
What we witness here is the bureaucratization of violence in its most insidious form—not the crude totalitarian machinery that seeks to control all thought, but something far subtler and perhaps more dangerous: the transformation of moral agency into a series of administrative functions. Each layer operates according to what we might call the “logic of the desk”—that peculiar modern condition where responsibility dissolves into procedure, where conscience is replaced by career advancement, and where the distance between action and consequence becomes so great that moral judgment seems almost quaint.
This infrastructure does not merely produce irresponsibility; it systematically manufactures it. The first-order actors can point to market demands and shareholder obligations. The second-order can claim they merely analyze policy options. The third-order insists they are simply reporting or commenting on what others decide. The fourth-order positions itself as democratic participation in public discourse. And the fifth-order—ordinary citizens—find themselves trapped in a discourse they did not create, using concepts that have already been shaped by interests they may never see.
What makes this system so pernicious is precisely its democratic veneer. Unlike the stark hierarchies of tyranny, this apparatus appears to operate through voluntary participation. No one is forced to join the think tank or write the article or share the post. Yet the system has structured the very possibilities of participation such that meaningful dissent becomes almost unthinkable—not because it is forbidden, but because it lacks the vocabulary, the platforms, the career paths that would make it viable.
The “decentralized moral hazard” points to something even more troubling: the disappearance of genuine political space—that realm where citizens gather to act in concert and take responsibility for their common world. Instead, we have a pseudo-public sphere where the appearance of debate masks the absence of genuine political action. Each layer believes it is engaged in legitimate professional activity, yet collectively they produce outcomes that none of them, individually, would likely choose.
This is how a society can wage endless wars while maintaining the fiction that it is peaceful, how it can systematically prepare for violence while its citizens consider themselves humanitarian. The violence is not hidden—it is distributed, professionalized, and rendered abstract until it becomes simply another sector of the economy, another field of expertise, another content category.
The most chilling aspect may be how this system makes everyone complicit while leaving no one accountable—the perfect machinery for what we might recognize as the banality of evil in its contemporary form. Each participant can honestly claim they are just doing their job, just offering analysis, just engaging with the discourse of the day. Yet together they construct the very reality that makes violence seem rational, necessary, and inevitable.
The New Banality of Evil
But this architecture of irresponsibility represents something even more insidious than Arendt’s original formulation. Her analysis of evil’s banality was anchored in recognizable totalitarian systems—1930s Germany, Stalinist Russia—contexts where we could still draw clear lines between perpetrator and victim, between the machinery of the state and civil society. There were borders to cross, uniforms to recognize, parties to join or resist.
What we face now is fundamentally different. This new banality of evil doesn’t provide us with the stark moral clarity of fascism where we can point to jackboots and swastikas and say “there—that’s where democracy ends.” Instead, it operates through the very institutions we’ve been taught to respect: universities, think tanks, media organizations, democratic governments. It wears the costume of rational discourse and evidence-based policy.
We have outsourced our moral lines to what we might call “mythical territories”—to abstractions like “national security,” “strategic interests,” and “geopolitical necessity” that exist somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary moral reasoning. These concepts function like sacred totems that cannot be questioned directly, only interpreted by certified experts. When someone dies from a drone strike, it’s not murder—it’s a “kinetic action in pursuit of strategic objectives.” When we destabilize entire regions, it’s not destruction—it’s “promoting democracy and stability.”
This allows us to remain perpetually detached from reality while maintaining the fiction that we are engaged, informed citizens. We can debate the tactical merits of various interventions without ever confronting the fundamental question of whether we have the right to intervene at all. We can consume endless analysis about “what went wrong” in Afghanistan or Iraq without ever seriously examining the premise that these were enterprises we should have undertaken in the first place.
The genius of this system is that it provides the psychological comfort of moral engagement without the discomfort of moral responsibility. We feel informed when we read the foreign policy journals, sophisticated when we use the approved terminology, responsible when we vote for the candidates who promise to manage the violence more competently. But we never have to confront the possibility that the entire framework is predicated on assumptions that no decent person would accept if stated plainly.
This is why the infrastructure is so resistant to reform. Previous forms of evil required visible enforcement mechanisms—secret police, propaganda ministries, concentration camps. This system enforces itself through career incentives, social status, and the simple human desire to be seen as serious and informed. The violence is real, but the responsibility is always somewhere else, managed by someone more qualified, justified by principles too complex for ordinary moral intuition to grasp.
The question that haunts this infrastructure is not whether any individual participant is evil—most are probably decent people trying to advance their careers and provide for their families. The question is whether a system can be fundamentally destructive even when composed entirely of people acting according to ordinary professional incentives and democratic procedures. The answer, unfortunately, seems to be yes.
The Comfort of Familiar Dysfunction
Now that the infrastructure of irresponsibility is reverting to an earlier operating system—under the narcissistic, bipolar faux-strongman of the Trump administration—we can all take solace in the very dysfunction we helped normalize.
There’s almost a relief in having a recognizable villain again. A man who tweets his cruelties, who makes the violence explicit instead of technocratic. Trump’s return lets us slip back into the cozy binary of resistance versus collaboration, where the problem is personal, not structural. We get to feel morally superior for opposing the obvious monster, while conveniently forgetting that the same machinery of violence ran just as smoothly under more polished, polite hands.
We would like to act. But we cannot.
Because, at the same time, we are silent witnesses—silent participants—in a genocide carried out with our own support.
This is the schizophrenia of the imperial citizen.
We cry over the images—flattened buildings, dead children, mass graves—and then we split ourselves in two: the self that feels horror, and the self that enables it. One hand clutches its pearls, the other signs the check. We tell ourselves we are against genocide—just not this one, not now, not if it complicates the infrastructure of irresponsibility
This is not hypocrisy. It is pathology.
It is the survival mechanism of a decaying empire: to fragment its people so they may bear witness to atrocity and do nothing, but believe they have done something. To be both mourner and accomplice, activist and spectator. To feel virtuous powerlessness while wielding actual power—and refusing to use it.
We are told this is nuance. But it is madness.
And it is this madness, this comfortable schizophrenia, that keeps the bombs falling.
The think tankers can recycle their 2017–2021 talking points about “defending democracy.” The journalists can reboot the profitable outrage cycle. The academics can dust off their citations on “authoritarian populism.” Everyone gets to feel righteous again—fighting fascism while applauding bipartisan military budgets, unbroken drone strikes, and uninterrupted weapons sales.
This is the deepest cruelty of the infrastructure: it allows us to mistake theater for action, posture for principle. We protest the aesthetics of cruelty while funding its machinery. We oppose Trump’s overt nationalism while supporting the exact same ethnic cleansing when it’s managed by Democrats and sanitized by think tanks. The infrastructure doesn’t care who’s at the helm. It speaks in different dialects, but always says the same thing: You’re not responsible.
And so, we scroll, we post, we sigh. And the bombs fall.
Coda: The Konratieff Winter and the Return of Familiar Violence
We’re in the Winter phase of the K-Cycle. The infrastructure is rusting, the myths are cracking, and the margins are shrinking. In these moments—of stagnation, unrest, and unraveling—the state doesn’t just hunker down. It sharpens.
In Europe, there’s a cultural memory of this: when the economy collapses, the military doesn’t just go abroad—it comes home. Sabers in the streets. Tanks in the plazas. Secret police in the stairwells. From the Prussian crackdowns to the Paris Commune, from Franco’s Spain to the Eastern Bloc—people remember what happens when empire turns on its own body. This memory doesn’t make Europe more humane, but it does make its people a little more wary. A little more allergic to uniforms and boots and flags when times get cold.
In America, the story is different.
The military is a projection machine. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq—our troops go “over there.” The violence is cinematic, distanced, externalized. Even our war crimes happen on someone else’s soil. Even our dissenters imagine empire as something that happens elsewhere. When the state kills at home—Wounded Knee, Tulsa, the Bonus Army, Kent State—it is quickly buried, atomized, disconnected. These aren’t remembered as part of a pattern, but as regrettable anomalies.
So when the Konratieff Winter hits here—when capital retracts, when jobs disappear, when the social contract dissolves—Americans are psychologically unprepared for the weapons to be pointed inward. We don’t see it coming because we never believed it could. And yet:
The empire turns its arsenal inward when its outer edges collapse. This is the schizophrenia of American decline: we cheer for militarism abroad, then act shocked when it knocks on our door wearing riot gear and an American flag patch.
This is not theoretical. Post-9/11, the distinction between foreign and domestic “security” has collapsed. We’ve militarized the police. Given them MRAPs and drones. We’ve blurred SWAT tactics with battlefield doctrine. We’ve trained our cops in counterinsurgency—then let them loose on protestors. The logic of Fallujah has come to Ferguson. The War on Terror became the War on Us.
Europeans, for all their flaws, retain a trace of historical muscle memory. Many Americans do not. That absence of memory is not innocence. It is vulnerability. It is the perfect soil for authoritarian frost.
So as Winter deepens, we should ask ourselves: Are we mourning what’s lost? Or are we just surprised that it’s happening here? Because the boots are already on the ground. We’re just not sure if they’re marching home, or marching on us.
Leave a Reply