THE CAKE IS A LIE

#philosophy #morality #empathy #ethics

I’ve written about morality before. Too many times, probably. Each time pretending I was circling an answer, when really I was just pacing the perimeter of something I didn’t want to step into. I think this is the last time, not because I’ve resolved anything – but because something finally snapped, and now there’s nothing left to interrogate.

I saw an image again, and you’ve likely seen it too. A Jewish woman, half naked, being chased through a street by children holding bats. Lviv, Ukraine, July 1941. History compresses it into a caption, like that’s enough to contain it.

What unsettled me this time wasn’t the image itself, it was where it’s been turning up. Not as warning, not as never again, but as response, as commentary, as celebration. Shared – not with dread, but with warmth, with fondness, like someone dusting off an old photo album and smiling at a time they miss.

Sit with that.

Not justice, not even cruelty justified through some warped moral arithmetic, just pleasure. The uncomplicated enjoyment of another human being’s terror. Suffering as entertainment, pain as nostalgia.

And I think that broke something in me.

I’ve questioned morality before – usually by examining its absence in others. But this time the question turned inward, as if the lens slipped, as if the room rotated and I was suddenly the anomaly. As my mind flicked through its usual archive – medieval devices, witch hunts, mass graves, nuclear shadows burned into concrete – I wondered whether morality was never the rule at all. Whether I was the malfunction.

So instead of asking the age-old question “why do people do evil?”, maybe the correct question to be asking is “why did I assume they wouldn’t?”

Nature doesn’t have morality, not in any meaningful sense, and I’m not religious, so I can’t just say “God” and drop the mic. So maybe morality simply doesn’t exist, not objectively, not cosmically. Maybe it’s just a story we tell ourselves to sleep at night.

But then – why do I have it?

I tried to isolate why that image clawed so deeply. Brutally speaking, if the woman had been chased by bears, it wouldn’t have haunted me in the same way. That matters, that distinction matters, because it tells me this isn’t about pain, it’s about betrayal. The how could they? The violation of something I assumed was shared.

I grew up believing people were generally good, that civilisation meant something, that beneath the noise and the cruelty, there was a baseline of decency quietly holding the structure together. What horrified me wasn’t that people do evil – but that they enjoy it. That once permission is granted – by religion, by politics, by society – cruelty doesn’t just emerge, it flourishes, it becomes enthusiastically cruel.

So maybe evil isn’t the deviation, maybe it’s the default, locked in a cage – waiting not for justification, but for opportunity.

I’m not claiming moral superiority. History is very clear on what humans are capable of, and I don’t get to exempt myself. But if cruelty really is our baseline, then the morality I thought was woven into us was never real, it was wishful thinking, a collective lie we agreed not to interrogate too closely.

And that is the betrayal.

Because if the world isn’t fundamentally safe – if people aren’t good by default – then I’ve been living comfortably inside an illusion. And now that I can see the walls, I don’t feel enlightened, I feel angry, isolated, and betrayed.

To put on my cosmic hat for a second. –

If morality isn’t a property of the universe, maybe it wasn’t discovered at all. Maybe it was engineered, incentivised. Groups that discouraged murder, betrayal, and unchecked cruelty simply survived longer. Rules came first, feelings followed. Over generations, those rules burrowed so deeply into us that we internalised them – mistook them for instinct. And now, when they vanish, the absence feels obscene.

I’ve always said my moral integrity is who I am. That what keeps me in line is the need to look in the mirror and still recognise myself. If I commit evil, then I cease to be me.

But maybe that’s not integrity.

Maybe I’m not protecting my identity – but the version of the world I need to believe in to function. A world where suffering isn’t enjoyed. Where cruelty isn’t nostalgic.

I want to believe my morality is intrinsic, that it’s me.

But what if it’s just self-preservation?

Because if that view of the world really is an illusion –

I don’t know how long I can keep living inside it, but I’m also incompatible with the reality outside. I just don’t belong, and I don’t want to.

:: PREVIOUS POSTS ::