It is tempting to believe that harm arrives fully formed. Planned, coordinated, and imposed from above. That there is always a villain with a blueprint.
But more often, what I notice is something quieter. Opportunities appear. Humans respond.
When a system leaves a gap, someone steps into it. When rules are vague, someone tests them. When accountability thins, behavior stretches. Not always out of cruelty, but often out of convenience, advantage, or self-protection.
We talk about corporations exploiting workers. Governments exploiting citizens. Institutions extracting value while offering little in return. And yet, in smaller ways, we do many of the same things to each other.
We take more than our share when we can get away with it. We bend rules when it benefits us. We excuse behavior in ourselves that we would not tolerate if directed at us. We complain about being monitored, yet monitor each other relentlessly. We resent being reduced to numbers, then reduce others to categories. We protest exploitation, then justify it when it works in our favor.
The pattern repeats at different scales, but the motion is familiar.
This is not about equivalence. Power still matters. Scale still matters. But the behavior itself , the willingness to benefit from imbalance, doesn’t belong only to institutions. It lives much closer to home.
What unsettles me most is not that humans take advantage of opportunity. That has always been true. It is how quickly we normalize it when it does not land on us.
We notice injustice most clearly when we are its target. When we are not, it becomes abstract. Debatable. Complicated.
I do not think this makes people bad. I think it makes us human and unfinished. But it does raise a quieter question, one that is harder to dismiss, If we dislike what power does to us, why are we so willing to do the same things to each other when the opportunity arises?
I am still sitting with that.