The Proximity of Monsters
Humans require no catastrophic justification to commit atrocities—only the wrong people gaining the right levers of power. Every genocide, every act of systematic cruelty, emerges not from extraordinary circumstances but from ordinary human capacity for evil meeting opportunity. The true horror lies not in humanity's potential for monstrosity when pushed to extremes, but in how little pushing is actually required. We are always one institutional failure away from unleashing what perpetually lurks beneath civilisation's threadbare veneer.