Eroding the moral fabric of societies is not “collateral damage”; it is a central strategy. A morally degraded society is easier to govern, easier to manipulate, and less demanding. When dignity ceases to be a reasonable expectation, even the smallest crumb seems like a favor. Selective outrage replaces structural ethics, and sensationalism takes the place of analysis. Cognitive warfare does not seek to produce wicked subjects, but rather demoralized ones, incapable of imagining a shared life that is not riddled with humiliation and abuse.
The Epstein affair is not merely a legal case or a chronicle of individual excesses; it is a historical symptom that lays bare the fragility of the intellectual health of peoples and the symbolic violence they endure in a carefully managed semiotic wasteland. In this space saturated with signs, images, and fragmentary narratives, the truth appears frayed, subjected to a regime of distractions that numbs collective critical capacity. The case bursts forth like a flash of lightning that illuminates, for an instant, the architecture of contemporary power, but is soon shrouded in a veil of noise, legal technicalities, controlled sensationalism, and strategic silences that neutralize its pedagogical power. It is not merely a matter of heinous crimes committed against vulnerable bodies; it is about the reverse pedagogy that power exercises when it ensures that such horror does not lead to a profound reexamination of the structures that produced it.
And now, “semiotic exposure” is that state in which people receive signs without critical protection, exposed to narratives that seek not to understand but to manage outrage. The scandal is doled out, serialized, turned into news merchandise, and ultimately demoralizes the people. The repetition of names, figures, and sordid details leads to saturation and moral apathy. Thus, what should provoke lasting ethical outrage is diluted in the rapid consumption of manipulated news. The problem is not merely a lack of information, but its organization in the service of shock.
In this context, the government’s response seems lukewarm, not due to a lack of clarity, but because it has been systematically dismantled. This lukewarmness is not spontaneous; it is the result of decades of teaching cynicism. It is taught, explicitly or implicitly, that power always escapes, that justice is a selective theater, and that deep outrage is naive or useless. The Epstein case, with its macabre web of financial, political, media, and cultural elites, confirms this perverse lesson: there are crimes that, even when evident, do not receive proportionate political punishment when they touch the heart of the global bourgeoisie. The message is devastating for the intellectual health of the people, because it erodes the very idea of historical responsibility. That macabre toxicity of the bourgeoisie manifests itself not only in the obscene accumulation of wealth, but also in the normalization of impunity. It is macabre because it feeds on the pedophilic objectification of others, because it turns bodies into interchangeable objects and silences into bourgeois pleasures. And it is toxic because it contaminates the symbolic fabric; when those responsible do not face clear consequences, the notion takes hold that harm is negotiable, that ethics can be subordinated to prestige, money, or influence. Death, violence, and exploitation become externalities of success. In this context, the lukewarm institutional reaction is not a failure of the system; it is its normal functioning.
However, the deepest harm lies not only in the events themselves, but in the way they are narrated and socially processed. This semiotic saturation prevents the construction of an emancipatory narrative that links the crime to its structural causes. Evil is personalized in the Epstein surname to protect the system that produces it. The “monster” is spoken of as an exception, avoiding mention of the network of complicity, the values that sustain it, and the economic practices that legitimize it. By isolating the horror, the normality that incubated it is protected. Thus, the bourgeoisie appears as a scandalized spectator of its own reflection, feigning surprise at a violence that is consistent with its logic of domination.
Defending the intellectual health of the people requires much more than sporadic outrage; it demands critical tools to interpret the world, to connect the dots, to resist the fragmentation of meaning. It calls for a political and ethical literacy capable of transforming scandal into historical consciousness. When that health is weakened, society reacts with spasms of contempt that do not disrupt the existing order. The act is condemned, the tragedy is lamented, and we wait for the next issue. Those in power breathe a sigh of relief.
A radical humanism cannot be content with merely managing scandal. It must insist on dignity as a non-negotiable principle and on memory as a political practice. Remembering is not about morbid repetition, but about understanding in order to transform. The Epstein affair calls on people to reclaim their capacity for judgment, to find shelter from the storm through the collective construction of meaning. Not to fuel hatred, but to dismantle the machinery that turns horror into routine. The true response will never be lukewarm when collective intelligence is embraced as a historical responsibility and when ethics ceases to be a rhetorical ornament to become a daily practice of resistance.
For this reason, the ethics of semiotics becomes an unavoidable imperative in the face of governmental inaction, because it is not enough to simply note institutional silence; we must question the systems of signs that make it tolerable. When states choose paralysis, they also choose a language—a discursive choreography made up of euphemisms, procedural delays, and empty statements that feign concern while entrenching impunity. Semiotic ethics compels us to expose these operations, to show how power governs not only through laws or police, but through narratives that normalize inaction and transform the absence of justice into an administrative fact. To remain silent, to file away, to dilute responsibilities, or to divert attention are not neutral acts; they are symbolic decisions that impact society by accepting pedophilic and necrophilic abuse as part of the landscape without confronting the lie, without breaking the narrative anesthesia, and without restoring to the people the capacity to critically analyze capitalism, which imposes everything—including, and above all, through the complicity of inaction.
*Doctor of Philosophy
Original post published by Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez * in La Jornada on March 15th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.