They Know Now
Globalised Desire, Unequal Consequences and the Erosion of Shared Responsibility
Abstract
Globalisation and digital media have not created inequality, frustration, social misconduct or moral hypocrisy. They have, however, changed how these forces interact. Images of wealth, mobility, beauty and freedom now circulate globally, while access to stable employment, effective institutions and social mobility remains profoundly unequal. This article argues that the resulting gap between visible aspirations and credible opportunities can weaken confidence in gradual progress. Under these conditions, immediate rewards-gambling, speculation, risky migration, digital exposure, consumption or domination-may become more attractive.
The process does not affect all classes identically. Those with little power may discount future consequences because their future already appears blocked. Those with substantial power may discount them because money, status and institutional access allow costs to be transferred to others. Public disorder then encourages collective stigma and spatial segregation, while whataboutism prevents responsibility by replacing direct answers with comparisons to other wrongs.
The central argument is not that morality has simply disappeared. It is that desire has expanded, legitimate opportunity remains unequally distributed, and consequences are applied unevenly.
1. Globalisation has changed the experience of inequality
There is a cruel saying: ”Ils étaient malheureux, mais ils ne le savaient pas.”
It should not be interpreted as nostalgia for ignorance. Poverty, hierarchy and injustice were not harmless simply because they were less visible. Access to information has allowed people to recognise abuse, compare institutions, learn new skills and imagine alternatives to inherited conditions.
Yet visibility also changes suffering.
Before mass digital communication, social comparison was more limited by geography and social environment. Today, a young person in a poorly connected town can observe the consumption, relationships, travel and apparent freedom of people across the world. The comparison is no longer occasional. It is continuous, personalised and carried in a pocket.
Research on social-media comparison generally finds that people are often exposed to selectively positive representations of others. A 2023 meta-analysis concluded that “contrast”, rather than identification, is the dominant response to upward comparison on social media, frequently producing more negative self-evaluation.
This does not establish that social media automatically makes every user unhappy. Effects vary according to the individual, the platform and the way it is used. However, it supports a narrower claim: digital platforms greatly increase opportunities to compare ordinary life with curated and exceptional lives.
The result is not necessarily envy in its simplest form. It is often “relative deprivation”: the feeling that one is unfairly deprived when comparing one’s position with the apparent position of others.
Material conditions may remain unchanged while the psychological meaning of those conditions deteriorates. A modest life that once appeared normal can begin to feel like personal failure once a radically different life becomes permanently visible.
Globalisation therefore distributes images more easily than it distributes capabilities.
2. Aspiration becomes unstable when legitimate paths appear blocked
The problem intensifies when societies promote success more strongly than they provide credible methods for reaching it.
Robert K. Merton described this structural contradiction in his 1938 essay [“Social Structure and Anomie”](https://www.csun.edu/~snk1966/Robert%20K%20Merton%20-%20Social%20Structure%20and%20Anomie%20Original%201938%20Version.pdf). His central question was how social structures can place pressure on individuals to pursue culturally approved goals through non-approved means. He wrote that his purpose was to examine how structures exert pressure on some people to engage in nonconforming conduct.
Merton’s model is highly relevant to the digital age.
Contemporary societies celebrate wealth, autonomy, visibility and consumption. Yet access to good schools, stable employment, credit, transport, healthcare, useful networks and political protection is far from equal. The cultural destination is advertised to everyone, but the institutional road remains selective.
The contradiction can be expressed simply:
“The goal is universalised, while the means remain stratified.“
This weakens the moral authority of gradual progress. Advice such as study, work, save and wait depends on a believable connection between effort and future reward. That connection becomes harder to defend when people repeatedly observe unemployment among graduates, corruption among officials, inherited access among elites and sudden wealth among digital celebrities.
This does not mean that effort has become objectively useless. It means that its credibility has weakened.
When legitimate methods appear too slow, unavailable or dishonest, alternative methods begin to seem less irrational. Betting offers wealth without accumulation. Risky migration offers mobility without legal access. Online exposure offers recognition without established social status. Scams offer income without formal employment. Speculation offers the possibility of compression: years of progress imagined as a single successful event.
These behaviours remain different in cause and moral gravity. They should not be placed into one undifferentiated category. What links them is the promise of escaping slow institutional pathways.
3. Digital systems make immediate reward more credible than distant consequence
The loss of faith in gradual progress is intensified by the structure of digital attention.
Digital platforms deliver stimulation immediately. Users can access entertainment, gambling promotions, pornography, outrage, validation and consumer desire without delay. By contrast, education, employment, savings and institutional reform remain slow and uncertain.
The World Health Organization reported in 2024 that 11% of surveyed adolescents showed signs of problematic social-media behaviour, compared with 7% in 2018. WHO defines this in terms of difficulty controlling use and experiencing negative consequences. Girls reported higher rates than boys, at 13% and 9% respectively.
These figures do not prove that social media is inherently harmful or that 11% of adolescents are addicted in a clinical sense. They demonstrate that problematic patterns are measurable and significant among a minority of young people.
The broader concern is temporal. Immediate rewards feel concrete; future costs feel abstract.
This imbalance is especially important for minors, whose understanding of probability, commercial manipulation and long-term consequences is still developing. A betting advertisement displays the winner rather than the statistical mass of losers. An influencer displays a purchase rather than the sponsorship agreement, debt or family wealth behind it. A migration video may show arrival but omit detention, exploitation, deportation or death.
The platform does not need to lie completely. Selection is sufficient.
4. Boredom is not emptiness alone; it is failed engagement
Boredom belongs in this structure, but it must not be used as a vague explanation for all destructive behaviour.
Psychological research generally treats boredom as an unpleasant state in which a person wants to engage but cannot find satisfying engagement. It is not merely the absence of activity. A person can be surrounded by stimulation and still be bored if none of it produces meaning, agency or sustained attention.
In a series of studies, Agnieszka Kılıç and colleagues found that boredom proneness was associated with greater risk-taking across financial, ethical, recreational and health-related domains. Their experimental work also suggested that induced boredom could increase risky choice under some conditions.
This relationship should be treated carefully. Boredom does not mechanically cause gambling, violence or cruelty. Most bored people do not become destructive. The risk becomes more plausible when boredom is combined with other factors:
“weak purpose + immediate rewards + sensation-seeking + low perceived consequences”
For an excluded person, boredom may emerge from unemployment, poor transport, weak public spaces, limited privacy and the absence of a believable future. Risk can temporarily transform passive time into intensity.
For a protected person, boredom may arise for a different reason. Access is abundant, ordinary experiences lose novelty, and status reduces external restraint. The search for increasingly intense consumption or transgression can then become possible.
These two conditions must not be morally equated. One is often linked to blocked opportunity; the other may involve privilege and impunity. Yet both alter the relationship between present action and future consequence.
For one person, the thought may be:
> I have little to lose.
For another:
> I will not be the person who pays.
5. “They do it because they can” has two meanings
The phrase ”people do it because they can” identifies a mechanism that moral explanations often miss.
The first meaning of “can” is material capability: access to money, institutions, technology, bodies, audiences or vulnerable workers.
The second is practical permission: weak enforcement, social silence, legal protection or the ability to transfer costs.
Research on power supports a cautious version of this argument. Keltner, Gruenfeld and Anderson’s influential [approach-inhibition theory of power](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/keltner.power.psychreview.2003.pdf) proposes that elevated power is associated with rewards, freedom and approach-related behaviour, while reduced power is associated with threat, punishment and inhibition.
This does not mean that wealth or authority inevitably produces cruelty. Power can also be used responsibly. The relevant point is that power changes the field of possible action and the expected cost of mistakes.
A wealthy offender may have lawyers, private treatment, institutional connections and reputational protection. A poor offender may face punishment immediately and without mediation. The same behaviour can therefore produce radically different futures.
Power is not only the ability to act. It is also the ability to determine where the consequences land.
A company profits from gambling while families absorb debt. A platform earns advertising revenue while public institutions manage addiction and mental distress. An employer benefits from precarious labour while workers carry insecurity. Political elites use foreign schools, healthcare and assets while the public systems under their authority deteriorate.
The ethical issue is not only misconduct. It is the “externalisation of cost”.
6. Formal schooling is not identical to education
The same distinction is needed when discussing the “educated” and the “uneducated.”
Literacy, schooling, knowledge, intelligence and judgment are related but not interchangeable.
UNESCO states that oral traditions transmit “knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory.” Stories, songs, proverbs, apprenticeship and repetition can preserve environmental observation and practical knowledge across generations.
A person who cannot write may therefore possess sophisticated knowledge of a particular ecosystem, craft or social environment.
However, this should not become a romantic defence of all tradition. Long survival does not prove that every inherited belief is true or just. Traditions may preserve ecological knowledge, but they can also preserve hierarchy, prejudice and domination.
Formal education is equally ambiguous. Schooling can give access to science, historical comparison and methods of verification. Yet it can also produce people who possess vocabulary without depth.
The dangerous category is not necessarily the person who knows little and admits it. It is the person who has acquired fragments of sophisticated knowledge and mistakes them for complete understanding.
Digital media accelerates this condition. Psychological labels, economic theories, religious quotations and fragments of history circulate separately from the disciplines that produced them. Concepts become tools of identity rather than tools of investigation.
Personal resentment can then be translated into apparently objective analysis.
Rejection becomes a theory about women.
Humiliation becomes a theory of national superiority.
Fear becomes a theory about another culture.
Envy becomes an accusation of betrayal.
The problem is not information alone. It is information without context, testing or awareness of limits.
7. Whataboutism converts global knowledge into moral escape
Globalisation has created an almost infinite archive of wrongdoing. Anyone facing criticism can immediately identify another crime, hypocrisy or historical injustice elsewhere.
Get Younes Ouchtouban’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This creates the ideal environment for whataboutism.
Whataboutism is not the same as legitimate comparison. Comparison is necessary when evaluating double standards, historical context or unequal enforcement. It becomes whataboutism when a comparison replaces the obligation to answer the original claim.
Its basic form is:
“A is accused of wrongdoing. A responds that B has also done wrong.“
The second statement may be completely true. It still does not establish that A’s conduct was acceptable.
A 2024 study published in “International Organization” describes whataboutism as a strategy in which states respond to criticism by accusing critics of similar faults. The research examined how this strategy can shape public attitudes in international affairs.
Whataboutism is particularly effective because it mixes truth with evasion. Colonial violence, foreign intervention, racism, corruption and elite impunity are real. But their reality can be used to suspend judgment indefinitely.
A discussion of local corruption is diverted toward foreign crimes.
A discussion of harassment is diverted toward racism.
A discussion of street violence is diverted toward financial crime.
A discussion of elite theft is diverted toward incivilities among the poor.
Each participant can be factually correct about the other problem while refusing responsibility for the problem under examination.
The result is an ethical deadlock:
“Because no critic is innocent, no criticism is considered legitimate.”
Historical suffering becomes moral credit. Group victimhood becomes protection from internal examination. Responsibility is replaced by a competition over who has suffered more.
Globalisation therefore spreads not only aspirations but excuses.
8. Disorder becomes stigma when behaviour is converted into identity
When harmful behaviour becomes visible in public space, societies face a genuine problem.
Harassment, vandalism, aggression, intimidation and disregard for shared rules cannot be dismissed as inventions of prejudice. Denying them abandons victims and allows political actors to monopolise the language of order.
The dangerous transition occurs when behaviour is generalised into identity.
An individual act becomes evidence about an entire neighbourhood, ethnicity, class or generation. Risk assessment then moves away from demonstrated conduct and toward appearance, accent, clothing, address or surname.
Incivility provides the event. Stigma supplies the generalisation.
This generalisation is politically powerful because it permits exclusion to be described as neutral management. A business does not announce that a particular social class is forbidden. It speaks about atmosphere, dress, reservations or security. A landlord does not always state a discriminatory preference; some applicants simply receive no response.
The exclusion remains socially legible while becoming legally deniable.
9. Income inequality becomes spatial separation
Stigma becomes durable when it is built into space.
The OECD’s report [*Divided Cities*](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/divided-cities_9789264300385-en.html) documents how income inequality, residential patterns and unequal access to services produce concentrations of advantage and disadvantage. It notes that socioeconomic segregation is closely linked to income and wealth inequality and that welfare and housing systems can either soften or intensify its effects.
This is not necessarily apartheid in the strict historical and legal meaning of the term. Apartheid refers to an explicitly racialised system of state-enforced separation. The more accurate concepts here are “class segregation”, “socioeconomic segregation” or, when used carefully, “social apartheid” as a metaphor.
The mechanism is cumulative.
Those with sufficient income leave deteriorating public systems. They use private schools, private healthcare, guarded housing, private transport and selective leisure spaces. Their exit reduces their direct dependence on common institutions.
As dependence declines, political commitment to those institutions may also decline.
The public system becomes increasingly associated with people who cannot escape it. Its deterioration then confirms the decision of the next household to leave.
The cycle is:
weak common services → private exit → reduced common investment → weaker services
Segregation does not merely reflect inequality. It helps reproduce it by separating social networks, educational environments, security, healthcare and expectations.
People cease to inhabit the same social reality.
10. The system produces different forms of detachment from consequence
At this point, the entire argument can be stated without treating every social problem as identical.
Global exposure expands the range of lives people can imagine.
Unequal institutions limit the credible ways of reaching those lives.
The loss of confidence in gradual progress increases the attraction of immediate reward.
Boredom and digital stimulation make intensity easier to access.
Power determines whether consequences are suffered, transferred or avoided.
Visible disorder produces fear.
Fear is generalised into stigma.
Stigma legitimises segregation.
Segregation further weakens common institutions.
Whataboutism prevents the cycle from being confronted because every group points toward another group’s wrongdoing.
The excluded and the protected occupy different positions in this system.
For the excluded, the future may feel inaccessible:
> Why wait for a future that does not appear to include me?
For the protected, the future may feel guaranteed:
> Why restrain myself when the consequences can be managed?
These positions are not ethically equivalent. Desperation does not carry the same responsibility as domination. But both can weaken the force of future consequences in present decision-making.
Conclusion
The decline of shared ethics cannot be explained only by saying that individuals have become greedy, ignorant or uncivilised.
Moral conduct depends partly on whether societies maintain a credible relationship between effort, dignity and reward. It also depends on whether consequences are sufficiently predictable and equal to make restraint rational.
Globalisation has expanded aspiration, information and comparison. It has not equally expanded access to secure institutions, social mobility or protection. Digital systems then compress attention into immediate rewards, while unequal power allows some actors to transfer the costs of their behaviour.
The result is not a single moral collapse but a chain:
visible inequality → frustrated aspiration → weakened faith in gradual progress → immediate escape → unequal consequences → disorder → stigma → segregation → weaker common institutions
Whataboutism keeps this chain intact by ensuring that every accusation can be redirected and every group can present its own suffering as an exemption.
The central contradiction is therefore not simply between rich and poor. It is between universalised desire and stratified possibility.
Some act because they believe they have little to lose.
Others act because they know they will not pay.
A society cannot make desire effectively infinite, opportunity scarce and consequences unequal, then describe the outcome as a simple failure of personal morality.
References
Boniel-Nissim, M., et al. (2024). [*A focus on adolescent social media use and gaming in Europe, central Asia and Canada*](https://iris.who.int/bitstreams/f787fae6-e564-477c-a0e6-d54f24b38f0b/download). World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.
Chow, W. M. (2024). “The Diplomacy of Whataboutism and US Foreign Policy Attitudes.” *International Organization*.
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). [“Power, Approach, and Inhibition.”](https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/dacherkeltner/docs/keltner.power.psychreview.2003.pdf) *Psychological Review*, 110(2), 265–284.
Kılıç, A., Van Tilburg, W. A. P., & Igou, E. R. (2020). [“Risk-Taking Increases Under Boredom.”](https://repository.essex.ac.uk/25885/1/Boredom%20Increases%20Risk%20Taking.pdf) *Journal of Behavioral Decision Making*, 33(3), 257–269.
McComb, C. A., Vanman, E. J., & Tobin, S. J. (2023). “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Social Media Exposure to Upward Comparison Targets on Self-Evaluations and Emotions.” *Media Psychology*.
Merton, R. K. (1938). [“Social Structure and Anomie.”](https://www.csun.edu/~snk1966/Robert%20K%20Merton%20-%20Social%20Structure%20and%20Anomie%20Original%201938%20Version.pdf) *American Sociological Review*, 3(5), 672–682.
OECD. (2018). [*Divided Cities: Understanding Intra-Urban Inequalities*](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/divided-cities_9789264300385-en.html). OECD Publishing.
UNESCO. [“Oral Traditions and Expressions, Including Language as a Vehicle of Intangible Cultural Heritage.”](https://ich.unesco.org/en/oral-traditions-and-expressions-00053)
World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. (2024). [“Teens, Screens and Mental Health.”](https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/25-09-2024-teens--screens-and-mental-health)
