A Defective Species: Outrage Won’t Help, Acknowledgement Would
Every few years, a similar pattern keeps repeating. A set of names tumbles into public view, and the world performs its ritual of shock. Court records are unsealed, testimonies surface, and for a few weeks, it seems as though something that nobody knew has been shockingly revealed. And then, quietly, the cycle completes itself: the names are absorbed into the archives, the outrage fades, and many of those condemned reappear on public stages within months. The Epstein files are only the latest instance. The names may be new, but the pattern is ancient: powerful and rich men caught using their power and money for exploitation. The defect does not merely operate through individuals; it operates through the structures that enable, protect, and profit from them.
Yet each time, we react as though something unprecedented has occurred. Each time, the public treats the revelation as a rupture rather than a confirmation. Why? Is it because the alternative is unbearable? If these are not exceptions but expressions of something fundamental in the species itself, then the problem is not confined to a few powerful predators. It is everywhere, including in the one who is reading this.
Every other species on this planet runs on prakriti, on nature. Two snakes in the same field will behave almost identically; their instincts are calibrated by millions of years of ecological feedback, and those instincts include a natural ceiling. A predator mostly kills only when hungry and stops when full. Humans, too, run on prakriti, but they have developed a peculiar centre that no other species possesses: ego, the sense of “I” that identifies with the body and with everything the body accumulates. The critical difference is that this centre has no natural governor. Instinct tells the leopard when to stop. Nothing tells the ego when to stop. It recognises no limit because it is, at its core, a feeling of incompleteness, a hunger that no amount of feeding can satisfy. The same oversized cerebral cortex that gave us language, tools, and civilisation also produced an operating system whose intelligence is sophisticated enough to override every natural governor. This is what I call a manufacturing defect. It is congenital and universal. East and West, rich and poor, the defect operates identically. A Wall Street financier and a village moneylender are running the same inner programme on different hardware. And here is what must be said plainly: this defect is not restricted to the powerful. It operates in all of us individually. The common man who has never committed a serious crime is not necessarily a decent human being; he may simply be a constrained one, whose apparent decency owes less to inner clarity than to the absence of means and the presence of fear. Remove those constraints, hand that man enough money or power to be untouchable and enough secrecy to be invisible, and what emerges is not a new person. It is the old person, finally unmasked. The common saying that ‘power corrupts’ is the ego’s favourite alibi. It allows one to believe that human beings are born decent and are later ruined by circumstance. They are not. The corruption was already present; power merely provides the room for it to unfold. This is why the outrage that follows every scandal is so hollow. The man typing furious denunciations on social media would, in many cases, accept a job at that same predator’s company if offered a ten per cent raise. The moral vocabulary would shift from condemnation to accommodation without the man even noticing the shift in himself.
The Violence We Call Normal
The defect does not express itself only in what we call crime, but also in what we call breakfast, and also in what we call national security and economic growth. Wherever the principle “I am stronger, therefore I take” operates, the defect is at work.
More than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for food every year worldwide. The principle in every case is the same one that operated on the billionaire’s island: whatever is weaker, whatever cannot resist, is consumed. We recoil when the victim is a child; we do not recoil when the victim has feathers, or scales, or fur. But the inner centre that produces both cruelties is identical. You may find this comparison extreme. But ask yourself honestly: what is the operating principle in both cases? It is this: I am stronger, therefore I consume. India’s census will reveal skewed sex ratios so stark that they point to tens of millions of missing girls, eliminated over decades through a machinery of sex-selective abortion. They were not taken by foreign predators. They were eliminated by their own families: by fathers who wanted sons, by mothers who complied, by doctors who performed the procedures.
The child cannot fight back; the chicken cannot fight back; the foetus cannot fight back. The same darkness in the species that permits one permits the other. This is the defect operating across millions of ordinary homes with the full participation of ordinary people. If one truly follows any of these threads to their root, something terrifying becomes clear: every system currently running on this planet would need to be fundamentally re-rooted. They do not exist to correct the ego; they exist to serve it. A child spends fifteen to twenty years in formal schooling, but at no point is she asked to examine the one who is learning. “Who am I? What is this centre that demands constant feeding?” These questions are absent from every curriculum on Earth because the defect ensures its own protection. Family teaches the child to accumulate identity: name, caste, religion, ambition. Mainstream religion teaches the child to believe and belong, but never to inquire into the one who believes. If self-knowledge were made central to education, the defect would begin to dissolve within a generation.
The Cure and Its Refusal
Here is what makes the situation tragic: the defect can be repaired. Not “repaired” in the sense of a machine fixed once, but in the sense of an honest seeing that must be lived daily. Unlike every other species, human beings possess the capacity to observe themselves, to watch the ego in operation, to see its mechanisms of fear, desire, and aggression as they arise. The direction is the same: turn the light inward, see the defect in operation, and in that clear seeing, the defect begins to lose its grip.
When one genuinely sees a compulsion for what it is, the compulsion weakens. When one sees that one’s outrage is partly entertainment, the outrage becomes quieter and more honest. Honest seeing is the repair. Yet the species, as a collective, refuses. “I am my desires, my fears, my ambitions, my tribe.” And when figures like Socrates and Kabir Saheb try to show us the mirror, they either get executed or hounded. Jesus was crucified and then turned into a religion. The species does not merely refuse the cure; it often kills the doctor and then builds a hospital in his name, one that serves the very disease he tried to dissolve. So the question is addressed to you, the reader. The defect operates in you. In the way you consume without asking why, in the way you worship figures whose private lives you have never honestly examined, in the way you avoid the one question that could begin the repair: “Who am I, beneath all the accumulated identity?” The scandals will continue. But none of it will repair the species. What can change is one person’s willingness to stop pointing outward and begin the private work of looking inward.
The defect is yours. So is the possibility of repair. The species is defective. That is the honest starting point. Whether you remain so is no longer the species’ question. It is yours alone.
Acharya Prashant is a teacher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; views are personal
