Essay
A democracy stripped of ethics becomes a monument without meaning
I am sitting on the rocks of the Pnyx, the hill facing the Acropolis where, in the fifth century BCE, the Athenian assembly once gathered.
I am sitting on the rocks of the Pnyx, the hill facing the Acropolis where, in the fifth century BCE, the Athenian assembly once gathered.
I am sitting on the rocks of the Pnyx, the hill facing the Acropolis where, in the fifth century BCE, the Athenian assembly once gathered. There was no palace here, no marble throne room. Only open air and exposed ground. This was a place where citizens had to face one another to decide on war and peace, on law and punishment. Democracy was not an idea suspended in theory; it was a bodily act. You showed up. You spoke. You were heard. And you lived with the consequences.
Above me, marble throws sunlight back into the sky. Below me, Athens moves in layers and rhythms: honking taxis, scooters threading through traffic, voices spilling from narrow streets. This is no frozen ruin, no museum of lost ideals. This is a living city, grinding, colliding, continuing.
And that is precisely why it is impossible to sit here without thinking about power. About who decides, who is listened to, and who can be systematically ignored. About justice, responsibility, and the limits of morality. These questions were first asked here , not of gods or kings, but of one another.
In fifth-century Athens, an idea took root that would never let the world go: power does not naturally belong to one ruler, but to citizens. Democracy was never meant as a finished system, never as a tidy blueprint. It was an ongoing struggle, a conversation without guaranteed outcomes.
It was radical, and deeply incomplete. Women, enslaved people, and foreigners were excluded. Yet something revolutionary emerged: societies do not have to be built solely on domination and hierarchy. Power can be challenged. Power can be restrained.
Socrates walked these stones. Not a ruler, not a general, not a priest. He held no office, commanded no army. His only weapon was doubt. He wrote nothing down. He unsettled his contemporaries by exposing their certainties. I know that I know nothing was not a sign of humility as a performance, but as a warning. The moment someone believes they possess absolute truth, politics turns into a weapon.
Plato followed that warning to a conclusion we often prefer to ignore. Democracy without ethics collapses. When freedom detaches from responsibility, it becomes prey to demagogues. Then truth no longer matters, volume does. Power shifts not to those who seek justice, but to those who master applause.
Aristotle was less suspicious, but no less sharp. Humans, he argued, are political beings. We flourish only in community. Governance must serve the common good. Politics without virtue, without restraint, without responsibility, leads inevitably to decay.
These words are more than two thousand years old. Today, they do not sound distant. They sound alarmingly familiar.
As I sit here, the present presses in. The questions first spoken on this hill are burning again. The global order is shifting, visibly, audibly, violently.
In eastern Congo and Sudan, wars persist like open wounds that never heal. Generation after generation of civilians pay the price for power games and resource hunger, for a world willing to look away as long as its interests are protected. Children dig cobalt from the earth with bare hands so the West can speak of green futures. Their bodies carry the real cost of our sustainability.
In Gaza, a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds, one that an increasing number of legal scholars and human-rights organisations now name for what it is: genocide. A word many avoid, because it demands responsibility.
What we are witnessing is not a sudden collapse, but a slow corrosion. Power loosens itself from ethics. Politics shrinks into deals, intimidation, and brute force. Law and morality are not abolished; they are dismissed as inconvenient obstacles to "decisiveness."
Nowhere is this clearer than in the United States. Under Donald Trump, a democratic superpower has been reshaped into a system where intimidation, deceit, and lawlessness are no longer aberrations, but methods of rule. Social safety nets are dismantled as if poverty were a crime. Migrants are detained and deported without due process. Science is censored. Universities are pressured. Political opponents are openly threatened.
Asked what still limits his power, Trump answers: his own morality. Not the law. Not institutions. Himself. His ideologues speak openly of a world governed by force, a worldview disturbingly close to the authoritarianism of the last century.
What is perhaps most dangerous is not the abuse of power itself, but how it is normalised. Illegal invasions become "strategic moves." Abductions are reframed as "geopolitical pressure." Language shifts, and with it, our moral compass. Words become anaesthetics.
Even in the Netherlands, the language of power is increasingly adopted in the name of neutrality. Journalists who challenge authority are dismissed as "activists," as if holding power to account were no longer journalism's core task. As if moral outrage were something to apologise for.
The moral emptiness of our time cannot be traced to a single leader or nation. It stretches across the globe, binding conflicts together through power politics, economic interest, and selective outrage. Human rights are not abolished; they are rationed. Applied when useful, ignored when inconvenient.
In China, Uyghurs continue to disappear into camps under the banner of stability. Cultural erasure is marketed as integration. In the South China Sea, warships pass each other in a silent chess game where international law applies only when it does not obstruct ambition.
Ukraine is being crushed between imperial desire and competing power blocs. International law is invoked or discarded depending on who violates it. Civilians pay the price while diplomats speak of red lines and influence zones.
And we must be honest about our own past. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded under the banners of freedom and weapons that never existed. What did exist were contracts, military bases, and strategic advantage. Entire societies were broken. The architects of those wars were never held accountable. Civilians paid the cost, with their homes, their futures, their lives.
Closer to home, Europe guards its borders with legal precision while people vanish at sea. Pushbacks are denied, disguised, or buried in paperwork. Those who drown become numbers. Those who survive become files. Human rights end where courage is required.
This is not a series of isolated failures. It is a pattern: law reduced to a tool, values proclaimed but not practised, universality defended only in theory.
Iran reveals this pattern with brutal clarity. Not suddenly, not unexpectedly, but as the outcome of decades of repression.
Time and again, people took to the streets, first peacefully, with hope. In 2009, millions believed their votes mattered. The result was imposed. Protests were crushed. Arrests, torture, and death followed. In 2018 and 2019, resistance returned as survival itself became unaffordable. In 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police and never returned. Her death tore something open. The country moved again, and again the movement was drowned in blood.
The cycle repeats: protest, violence, silence. Internet blackouts erase entire populations from view. Minorities are hit hardest. Resistance is framed as a threat, so repression can be justified. Iran is not an exception. It is a warning. A reflection of what happens when power loses all ethical restraint and the world decides that watching is enough.
Nowhere is this moral blindness more devastating than in Gaza. For more than two years, destruction has unfolded on a scale that legal experts and human-rights organisations increasingly describe as genocide. Not as rhetoric, but as a conclusion, based on patterns: systematic devastation, collective punishment, starvation, denial of medical care, and death on a scale that defies any claim of proportionality.
Hospitals have become targets. Journalists are killed while visibly at work. Children die not only from bombs, but from hunger and untreated illness. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. What remains is rubble, dust, and silence.
And still, the West largely stands behind Israel. Weapons continue to flow. Diplomatic protection paralyses accountability. Calls for "restraint" come without consequences. International law is not ignored out of ignorance, but calculation.
Those who speak out are discredited. Criticism is twisted into hostility. Legal terms are dismissed as political bias. Moral clarity is reframed as extremism. In doing so, the West loses its moral authority. Law defended only when convenient ceases to command respect. Perhaps this is why Western dominance is eroding, not only economically or geopolitically, but ethically.
Gaza is not just a tragedy. It is a test of whether human rights are truly universal. And that test is being failed every day again.
In Europe, fear has become political currency. Migration is no longer discussed as a reality, but weaponised as a threat. Elections are won, governments collapse, and societies fracture, not because migration is new, but because fear is profitable.
Across the continent, migrants are framed as an existential danger. Complex global crises are reduced to a single scapegoat. Human lives become symbols of collapse.
This rhetoric spills onto the streets. In the Netherlands, asylum centres are blocked, residents threatened, and local officials intimidated. What once seemed isolated has become systemic. Xenophobia grows louder, more accepted, more normal.
Polarisation is not countered; it is engineered. Politicians speak of "floods" and "replacement." The media repeat the language in the name of neutrality. Social platforms amplify outrage and erase nuance. Distrust becomes the default. Empathy becomes suspect.
Right-wing movements thrive in this climate. Harshness is sold as strength. Closed borders as solutions. Human rights as obstacles. Solidarity as weakness. Meanwhile, structural truths are hidden. Housing shortages stem from decades of policy, not migration. Inequality is the result of choices, not fate. But scapegoats are more useful than accountability.
Fear divides those who share the same struggles. It redirects anger away from power. And it normalises cruelty, until it becomes law, policy, habit.
What is at stake is not migration policy alone, but Europe's moral identity. A continent shaped by the memory of exclusion now risks repeating it, this time knowingly.
Fear may win elections. It builds no future.
This logic reached its most chilling point on Lesbos. For years, 24 humanitarian aid workers, including 78-year-old Pieter Wittenberg, were prosecuted in the largest criminal case against humanitarian assistance in Europe. Their crime: watching boats, sharing information, saving lives. Solidarity was reframed as smuggling. Conscience as conspiracy. Eight years of legal limbo followed.
On 15 January 2026, all were acquitted. Not because evidence was lacking, but because no crime existed. The court confirmed what should never have been questioned: saving lives is not illegal. It is the foundation of the rule of law. And yet the damage remains. Years stolen. Lives suspended. The verdict restores legality, not trust. It reveals how far systems can fall when deterrence outweighs justice.
That this happened in Greece, where democracy was born, is no irony. It is a warning.
Here, on the rocks of the Pnyx, one question remains: Can we still see one another as human beings, beyond borders, passports, and categories?
In a world bound together economically, digitally, ecologically, we cling to politics of exclusion as if interdependence were a threat rather than a fact. Perhaps it is time to imagine something different. A politics rooted again in ethics. Where dignity is not conditional. Where solidarity is not criminal, but essential.
Here, I allow myself to dream. Of shared responsibility. Of futures carried together. Of people who understand that their fate is tied to one another, and to the earth beneath them. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle disagreed on many things. But on this, they would have stood together: a society without ethics cannot survive. Democracy lives only as long as we refuse to surrender our humanity.
And here, where it first drew breath, that truth is not philosophical abstraction, but moral demand: Who do we choose to be, and how long will we keep looking away?