Indecency in public life is not new. What stings is watching it win.
What once ended careers now launches them. What once brought shame now draws applause. Indecency does not just appear; it wins, gains power, draws followers, reshapes norms.
Three things hurt: the act, the audience forced to watch, and the success that proves the guardrails failed. Moral vertigo. If indecency triumphs, what does that say about the people who reward it? About the institutions that permit it?
Watching corrodes you. Watching without acting breeds complicity, yet acting too soon risks becoming what you oppose. The exhaustion is deliberate. Flood the zone with enough shamelessness and people stop noticing, stop expecting better, stop believing better is possible. Outrage becomes performance because no one can sustain genuine outrage at industrial scale.
Republics have fallen when citizens chose strong leaders over decent ones, when spectacle replaced competence, when the look of strength mattered more than actual strength. Normalize transgression, attack accountability, redefine virtue as weakness, celebrate dominance over service.
The question is not whether indecency sometimes wins — it always has — but whether it wins permanently through silence or exhaustion. Document what happens. Build alternative institutions. Guard decency where you live. This is the moment before we choose capitulation or resistance. That triumph is temporary — unless we decide otherwise.