“My evil is law!” - Aku’s words that thunder in your ears from the very first moments of Samurai Jack. Aku knows. His subjects do not. And today, too, we move inside a system with no real point of reference, except a glance backward to a past that was often even worse, or toward the countries of the Global South, drained by neocolonialism.
There is a crack between the letter of the law and human conscience, a crack the ancient Romans already understood: non omne quod licet honestum est (not everything that is permitted is honourable).
Citizen of America: for you, paid sick leave does not exist at the federal level. You go to work ill or you stay home. After all, “that’s how the system works.” Here, the law keeps silent.
Citizen of Europe: for you, the very idea of going to work sick is unthinkable. The regulations you live under are not perfectly aligned with health and safety, either. Yet you cannot imagine working fewer than eight hours a day and still having more time for yourself and the people you love; not without losing the pay you have now, obviously.
Law grants moral legitimacy to fragments of reality that do not deserve it. It can be lobbied into existence but so can a certain inviolacy within it. The Epstein case is not a glitch in the system. It is proof of the system functioning: a thousand are questioned, the small fry answer, the client remains untouched. Legality is not justice. It is a normalized slice of reality shaped by capital before anyone has time to ask a question.
And there is something I cannot see myself. I cannot see it because my insight is too low. Some things remain invisible to us because we are trapped inside the material standing we were born into. We are citizens of Aku’s future and we’ve grown used to calling it normal.