I was eating banana-flavored protein ice cream—sugar-free but sweetened with erythritol—the kind that tastes like childhood yet reads like the Periodic Table. But that didn’t stop the ice cream from tasting more banana-like than bananas themselves. A perfect twenty-first-century product: pleasure without guilt, a “healthier” sweetness, or maybe just the illusion of it.
As I scrolled through my phone, an image appeared of Greta Thunberg, icon of twenty-first-century performative morality and the global avatar of sustainability, standing on the deck of a vessel named Madleen. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship, carrying a cargo of humanitarian aid, was sailing into the Mediterranean Sea, aiming to pierce the blockade of Gaza and draw the world’s gaze to those who were suffering. Plastic water jugs, baby formula, the Palestinian flag. The camera images were shaky, but more important was the vibe—warm, empathetic, Instagrammable.
I froze mid-scroll. The image held me. Meanwhile, my ice cream melted, dripping onto the screen and leaving yellow blotches that heightened the unreality of the scene. The whole moment reeked of moral consumption. Greta, now an emoji of freedom. Me, consuming a supposedly guiltless treat.
Jean Baudrillard once wrote that third-order simulacra no longer mask reality—they conceal its absence. What we are witnessing is not an imitation of goodness but its ghost: a phantom that saturates consciousness so thoroughly, we no longer crave the real thing. The sweetener in our mouths lessens our longing for real fruit, just as gazing at the moral tableau on our screens substitutes for actual decisions and actions.
Greta spoke about Gaza, about suffering children, sending out a message: “My name is Greta Thunberg and I am from Sweden. If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces.” Filmed at night, her face dimly lit, filter calibrated, theatrical fury loaded. The world, watching the conscience of global youth symbolically sailing under the banner of the Freedom Flotilla, taps the heart emoji.
Soon after, Israeli naval forces boarded the boat. The Israeli Foreign Ministry dismissed Greta as inciting antisemitism and mocked the vessel as a “selfie yacht.” The Freedom Flotilla voyage floated into the collective feed like a pixelated conscience—brave, tragic, and instantly aesthetic. For some, it was conviction made manifest; for others, a story-shaped commodity. Thunberg, whose commitment has never lacked action, was again pulled into that optics machinery in which sincerity is filtered into content and moral courage becomes a caption. The gesture might have been real—but its afterlife belonged to the algorithms. And that’s where performance begins.
The simulacra and hyperrealities of postmodern theory replicate and proliferate, emerging in ever-brighter colors, stronger flavors that overwhelm the taste for the real—in this case, real, unscripted morality. We no longer seek goodness. We indulge in its performance. And by this logic, it isn’t just banana ice cream that melts but the very substance of morality itself.
This meta-modernity, unlike postmodernity, does not remake the world with the hammer of nihilism. But neither does it restore ingenuous belief. It fosters an “informed naivety,” in which the self oscillates, fully aware that both sincerity and irony are simultaneously possible. This internal tension—a meta-crisis—does not emerge from a single cause but from reality itself becoming unstable: endlessly verified, represented, aestheticized.
Tragedies, wars, and scandals are transformed into Instagram moments. The instant horror strikes—a terror attack, a catastrophe—social-media platforms erupt with ritual phrases: recycled mantras of “We will take immediate action,” “We condemn…,” “We stand in solidarity….” Rarely do these words lead to deeds. A Ukrainian flag by a profile picture. A #StandWithPalestine sticker. This simplified #empathy and performative #goodness are measured in likes, hearts, and views.
One of the more striking examples of a promise turned meme is the West’s support for Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, all the tears, embraces, and sympathy for Ukraine, all the declarations of unity and fraternity, have come paired with emphatic but often unfulfilled promises of military support or NATO membership. More than three years later, just a few months before Thunberg’s flotilla sailed that June, EU leaders had already watched their most ambitious military aid initiative—the so-called Kallas Plan—collapse under internal division. The plan, reported in March 2025, aimed to deliver forty billion euros and 1.5 million artillery shells to Ukraine, but it fell apart amid vetoes and reluctance. Still, by June, European leaders were once again reaffirming their “unwavering support” for Ukraine. The contrast was striking: The declarative unity endured, even as operational cohesion failed.
Another instance of algorithmic morality is the #BlockOut2024 movement, which showed how swiftly, and severely, algorithmic morality demands visible reaction. This online campaign, which emerged in 2024, called for unfollowing or “blocking out” celebrities who remained silent about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially during the escalation of violence. It is no longer enough to feel or think; not feeling publicly becomes morally suspicious. Kim Kardashian lost hundreds of thousands of followers within days after her prolonged silence on Gaza. She became an icon of contemporary “guilt by silence”—a phenomenon where neutrality or delay is framed as complicity.
So here emerges the essential question: When did goodness become something we display not from deep conviction but out of fear? Not from an inner compulsion but in response to social demand? When did goodness cease to be a deed and become a spectacle?
“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” Nietzsche’s thunderous cry marks not only a theological rupture but also a moral one. The death of God, in his philosophy, signals the disappearance of any objective or transcendent good, a collapse of the metaphysical foundations on which the West had built its moral edifice. Once, moral norms were anchored in divine authority or absolute truth: the Christian imperative to love one’s neighbor, the sanctity of the Ten Commandments.
But once modernity proclaimed God’s demise, goodness as a reflection of transcendence began to vanish along with its metaphysical ground. We were left without the eye that sees from above, without the ear that listens to our silence. We were left alone. And in a world without God, it wasn’t just the altars that emptied. So did the human interior.
With #morality and #goodness reduced to centerless constructs, we now proclaim our own values, yet these values rest on nothing unquestionable. This is no longer a search for truth. It is adaptation, the versatile changing of masks in response to the shifting moods and demands of society.
After this moral rupture, Baudrillard enters. He not only reveals what happens when God is gone but also maps out what values become: empty signs. In his theory of simulacra, goodness becomes a sign that no longer refers to any actual good or to the Good itself but only to other signs. Baudrillard presents the topography of a world where God is dead, and in His place stands not truth but advertising. It is here, in these emptied houses of God, that the Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han takes up the thread. He writes not in the era of simulacra but after it—in a world where the game of signs has become unbearable and the human being becomes subject to the tyranny of transparency. This is no longer merely the emptiness of signs but the obligation to be seen: to display, to denounce, to react.
Han describes the precise state in which silence, reflection, and solitary value is replaced by moral noise—the compulsion to live as if one had values, even when no one is truly listening. It is moral theater without an audience, only mutual surveillance.
In this way, three philosophical tectonic shifts—those of modernity (Nietzsche), postmodernity (Baudrillard), and meta-moral meta-modernity (Han)—become one extended piece of choreography: from the loss of metaphysical foundations to the inflation of values through simulacra to the dictatorship of transparency.
The houses of God are no longer empty. They are noisy and filled with advertisements. And we, tired, alone, and constantly watching one another, keep waiting for someone to finally enter.
Does all this mean that morality in the West has been utterly hollowed out?
The diagnosis seems bleak. The public sphere is saturated with virtue signals, value declarations, and performative emotions.
And yet before concluding that morality in the West has been emptied beyond return, it is worth remembering that the history of moral thought is cyclical, not linear—a pendulum swinging between excess and absence. Perhaps today we live at the peak of performance, but tomorrow we may return to equilibrium. Already, we sense a growing unease, an increasingly urgent question: Where has authenticity gone? Are the loudest voices truly the most virtuous? There are whispers now, braver than before, calling us back to personal responsibility, to an inner morality that does not chase the applause.
There remains one form of goodness not yet taxed by transparency, untouched by public-relations ethics: quiet goodness.
Political philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on the interplay of privacy and publicity, once noted something essential: Goodness, by nature, tends to remain unseen. She invokes the Christian tradition:
[T]he moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness.… When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness.
According to Arendt, openly performed goodness veers toward utility or, worse, hypocrisy. That warning, sounded in the mid-twentieth century, now echoes with eerie clarity. The regime of “be seen as good” threatens the very essence of goodness because true virtue does not seek or heed an audience.
If Arendt’s stance feels radical today, it is because our social climate insists we share everything. But unless we embrace such “radicalism,” we may lose morality altogether.
Nietzsche believed that in the ruins of morality, humans must undergo a metamorphosis—become Übermenschen, the ones who create values for themselves. If we no longer want to be good in the old way, perhaps it’s time to redefine what it means to be good from within.
Maybe this crisis of performance is not a collapse but a cut—a wound that invites a new kind of moral honesty to begin the healing. Once we recognize emptiness, we may begin to long for substance.
In the meantime, we live suspended in tension: between the desire to believe in publicly declared goodness and the growing sense that it is often hollow. Living in such tension is not easy, but it is necessary, lest we fall into naive credulity or corrosive cynicism. The solution, most likely, is not revolution but a slow, quiet turning, driven by each of us asking: Could I still act with integrity if no one ever found out?
History offers hope. The greatest heroes often acted without recognition. Some remain unknown. One ancient Jewish legend, drawn from the Talmud, speaks of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim—thirty-six righteous people hidden in every generation. Their quiet, unseen goodness keeps the world from collapse. They themselves do not know who they are.
Today we are wary of mysticism. But the idea still beckons: to do good even when no one claps. Maybe that is the courage our age most desperately needs.