Every society has a moment when the mask slips — when the gap between what is promised and what is delivered becomes too vast to ignore. One of the most straightforward and devastating moments occurs when a new administration takes power on a wave of bold rhetoric — particularly the promise of justice — only to deliver silence, inaction, and the quiet continuity of elite impunity. That is the moment society fails the litmus test. When a government, having every moral and legal justification to act, chooses not to — and when no one in the media holds them to it — the illusion collapses.
The administration in question didn’t just suggest it might pursue justice — it built its identity around it. “No one is above the law,” they said. “We will restore accountability,” they declared. These weren’t vague suggestions. These were core campaign pillars, echoed by high-ranking officials and amplified by a media machine that treated looming justice like a countdown. The public, starved for consequences in a culture of elite corruption, responded. They voted, believing that power would finally serve justice — not protect it.
But when the dust settled and the administration took office, a deafening absence followed. Not a single arrest. Not one major prosecution. The exact figures who had become symbols of corruption — whether through financial crimes, political manipulation, or medical crimes leading to uncountable deaths — remained untouched. The institutions that had promised to act didn’t. The administration pivoted to legal ambiguity, gesturing at “ongoing investigations” while quietly walking away from its boldest promises.
This wasn’t just policy drift — it was betrayal. And it was only made possible through the complicity of mainstream media, which played the dual role of hype machine and memory hole. During the election, major news outlets leaned hard into the narrative that justice was coming. Headlines teased indictments. Analysts hinted at accountability. Pundits said with certainty: “It’s no longer a matter of if, but when.”
But when “when” came and went with no action taken, the media pivoted — not to outrage or pressure, but to silence. The issue disappeared. The journalists who championed the narrative offered no follow-up, no investigation, no reckoning. They moved on, taking the public’s expectations with them, hoping no one would remember how breathlessly they had sold the dream of justice.
This is where the betrayal lies. The public did remember, and in that remembering, they clearly saw what the media had tried to blur: that justice was never actually on the table. It was campaign bait, a narrative tool, a managed belief. And when it had served its purpose, it was discarded.
That moment — when a system promises accountability, is given the chance to deliver, and chooses not to — is a litmus test not just for justice but for reality itself. If the rules don’t apply to everyone and the consequences are reserved only for the powerless, then the rules aren’t real. They are theater. The system’s actual function isn’t justice — it’s image management. When the media actively participates in that deception, reality is no longer shared; it is manufactured.
Manufactured reality is the silent coup of modern society. It’s not enforced through force or censorship but through narrative control, selective forgetting, and total omission. When the media amplifies the promise of justice, it generates emotional investment. But when it ignores the betrayal of that promise, it rewrites the public memory. It trains people to lower their expectations, to accept cognitive dissonance, and to feel naïve forever believing things might change.
This process breeds more than cynicism — it breeds compliance. When a society witnesses blatant criminality among the elite, hears promises of accountability, sees those promises broken, and watches as the media simply shrugs it off, people begin to accept that truth is flexible. They stop expecting justice. They stop looking for it. Eventually, they stop believing it ever mattered.
And so the litmus test isn’t just about whether criminals go to jail. It’s about whether society can recognize that they haven’t — and what that reveals about the structures we’re told to trust. The test is whether we can distinguish between narrative and reality, between perception and consequence. When we fail that test, we don’t just lose faith in institutions; we lose our grip on what’s real.
Because in a functioning reality, powerful people who commit crimes are investigated, prosecuted, and punished. In a functioning reality, political promises are measurable, and betrayals are remembered. In a functioning reality, the media holds power accountable, not just when it’s convenient, but when it’s hard. If none of those things happen, then what we’re living in isn’t a system of justice — it’s a simulation of one.
What’s left is managed perception — a matrix not built of code but of consent. The administration offers platitudes instead of prosecutions, the media shifts the camera away, and the public is left disoriented, wondering whether they were ever right to expect anything different. That is the actual failure of the litmus test: when even reality can’t be trusted to show its true colors.
And so, we are left with a truth that cannot be unlearned: when justice is only theater and memory is selectively erased, we are not citizens of a nation — we are consumers of a narrative. Until we demand more than storylines and insist that reality matches rhetoric, the test will continue failing — and the matrix will keep holding.
(Featured Image: “Dark Capitol” by Tearstone is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
