(Original found on the internet - Source unknown)
We keep piling rule upon rule—GDPR, Basel III, CS3D—hoping compliance will somehow substitute for character. But rules without roots don’t build virtue; they crowd it out. When a society can’t name its good, it descends into a negotiation of narcissisms—greenwashing, box-ticking, a politics held hostage to the latest poll—where the loudest and richest win, not the wise or just.
This is the fatal illusion of procedural liberalism: the belief that “fair process” can generate substantive goodness. But procedure presupposes commitments it cannot derive. It cannot tell us which interests are legitimate, which claims deserve standing, or which goods should take precedence.
These questions require prior moral judgment about what enables human flourishing—judgment our frameworks systematically avoid.
And so the process is captured by whoever plays it best.
Corporations writing their own regulations.
Politicians selling out to clientele.
Consultants staging compliance theater.
Activists fragmenting into identity competition.
And beneath it all, the machinery grinds on: property concentrates, power entrenches, and systems continue to subordinate human dignity to accumulation.
The tragedy is not bureaucratic overreach. It is moral evacuation.
#Governance #Ethics #Leadership #PoliticalPhilosophy #InstitutionalDesign