Digital Saints, Disposable Morals. AI-Generated.
Modern morality is not dead. It has simply been outsourced—like customer service to a cheaper country. What once lived in the marrow of human conscience now lives in TED Talks, motivational podcasts, and corporate mission statements. The old voice of the soul has been replaced by a cheerful PowerPoint slide.
We still speak of “virtues,” but only as branding. Honesty? That’s a marketing strategy. Compassion? A selfie with a homeless man. Courage? Posting an opinion online and then disabling the comments. Justice? A campaign slogan, flexible as elastic, sold to the highest bidder.
Our ancestors built cathedrals of stone; we build cathedrals of optics. Everything must be visible, photographed, performative. Morality today is not about being good—it is about being seen as good. The saints fasted; we detox. The martyrs bled; we post. The philosophers wrote; we make reels.
And yet, we call ourselves enlightened. We laugh at the primitive codes of the past while bowing to algorithms with the obedience of medieval peasants. We do not burn incense to gods, but we burn our time on glowing screens. We have not abolished idolatry; we have digitized it.
Modern man is not immoral. He is over-moralized—drowning in shallow slogans, choking on fashionable principles, forever switching masks to match the crowd. His values are like fast fashion: cheap, disposable, and instantly outdated. One week he proclaims one cause, the next week he abandons it for the next trending virtue. He is not guided by principles, but by the rhythm of hashtags.
Noise has replaced virtue. We have confused volume with truth. To shout online is to be “brave.” To remain silent, to reflect, is to be irrelevant. Outrage is considered justice; hashtags are considered sacrifice. But hashtags cost nothing, outrage burns nothing, and sacrifice demands everything. Little wonder sacrifice has vanished—it is too expensive for our impatient times.
Consider compassion again. What was once quiet, almost sacred, is now loud and rehearsed. Cameras are brought to charity events, not to document but to advertise. A sandwich for the poor must come with the watermark of a brand. Philanthropy is now PR, and pity is monetized. Kindness has been converted into content, and like all content, it expires in twenty-four hours.
Courage, too, is misunderstood. Once it meant enduring danger, persecution, exile, even death. Now it means announcing one’s unpopular opinion in a safe environment and deleting the app when the mob arrives. Our ancestors risked everything for the truth; we risk nothing but Wi-Fi stability. And yet we congratulate ourselves as if bravery were measured by the number of likes.
Justice, stretched beyond recognition, has been industrialized. Causes are commodified, protests are marketed, and even moral outrage comes in subscription form. Corporations are our new prophets, preaching justice on billboards while outsourcing labor to sweatshops. We live in an age where the same company can release a diversity campaign in the morning and fire thousands of workers by the evening. Yet the audience claps, because the performance looked sincere.
And tolerance—oh tolerance! The virtue of modernity, now a parody of itself. To be tolerant today does not mean enduring difference with dignity; it means applauding on command. We are tolerant of everything—except of the intolerant, which means we are intolerant, but in a fashionable way. Our tolerance is selective, curated, branded. The medieval heretic was burned at the stake; the modern heretic is canceled in digital fire. Both flames leave scars.
And love? Love has been reduced to an algorithm, a series of swipes and curated profiles. Intimacy is outsourced to machines, affection is measured in emojis. Our ancestors carved poetry into stone; we carve our desires into pixels. Even loneliness has been monetized, with apps selling companionship for a monthly subscription. We have succeeded in turning the human heart into a marketplace.
But here is the irony: we think ourselves superior to the past. We call ourselves free, rational, enlightened. We ridicule the ancient laws, the medieval codes, the traditions of our grandparents. And yet we feel restless, exhausted, lonely. We live in a storm of moral slogans, yet our souls are emptier than ever. The contradiction is glaring: the more values we proclaim, the fewer values we practice.
True morality, I suspect, has not died but fled. It hides where the noise cannot find it—in silence, in anonymity, in small acts of dignity that refuse the spotlight. It lives in the kindness that is not recorded, in the courage that is not tweeted, in the justice that is not branded. True morality is not extinct; it has simply gone underground, waiting for this circus to collapse under its own absurd weight.
Until then, let the performance continue. Let the influencers cry, let the corporations preach, let the hashtags rage. Modernity deserves its theater, and every clown deserves an audience. History will look back at us not as wise, but as actors in the longest-running comedy of self-righteousness.
And when the noise fades, when the filters fail, when the applause dies, perhaps morality—the real one, the one that asks for sacrifice instead of slogans—will return from exile. Until that day, I remain a stranger scribbling in the shadows, laughing and mourning, convinced that the last virtue left is the ability to see through the spectacle.
