These days I'm starting to suspect that the world is pretty much pure corruption. The problem isn't with the governments, the problem is just normal people. All sorts of horrid crimes and abuses hidden under a veneer of respectability doesn't describe particularly corrupt people, it's the average.
What I know about history seems to suggest this behavior is somewhat reformable - if it wasn't, they never would have made marital rape illegal, for example. It still happens all the time, but by metric it seems to happen less at least in certain countries? But then, how would we even know, since successful marital rapists abuse their victims such that they rarely end up reported.
It seems like common sense that going from a world where people brag about committing rape and get high-fives from the boys to one in which it is at least somewhat shameful and illegal would constitute a successful reform, but at the same time we constantly get exposures of all these closed groups where there are people still bragging in that way and accepted within that group's culture for it.
It's like what I said about the Trudeau blackface scandal(s) - it proves that the average member of the Canadian political class has either done blackface or doesn't object to it. The Conservatives in Canada didn't even think to use the knowledge they surely had of Trudeau's blackface habits until decades had passed, and then Trudeau and the Liberals won reelection pretty handily anyway. That sort of thing is why it's always laughable to me to hear rightists complaining about #cancelculture or shit like that - you can't get canceled if you don't choose to be. Trump certainly never got cancelled using that strategy.
And that's what represents the Canadian """""""""""""left""""""""""""'s limits on standards. Shit is so much worse here. People want to hear a tape of Trump using slurs, and sure it probably exists, but so what? Do you need the tape? Of course Trump uses slurs. If Trump hasn't done blackface it's only because he's too vain to put paint on his face. And everybody acts like they would if the tape were released already, supporter or opponent, so the tape is immaterial.
Does anything mean anything? Our subjective judgements of good and evil are the only valid ones possible, and even from this view moral nihilism seems illegitimate, but those judgements sure seem to suggest to me that we're all just getting the suffering we deserve whether we honestly believe in those judgements or not. From even a purely mechanistic standpoint we seem to need some decency to survive as a civilization, but I don't think we really have any to go around.