Spectacular Justice

Sunday, April 6, 2025

(on the judicial system that cannot hold what it claims to repair)

Modern justice is not justice.
It is a performance.
A ritual.
A theatre of punishment dressed as order,
where actors in robes rehearse fairness
within a structure built not to feel, but to function.

The courtroom is not a space of reckoning.
It is a stage
where pain must be formatted,
where testimony is filtered,
where truth must be translated into admissible syntax —
and anything that cannot be spoken in the right language
ceases to exist.

Justice today does not seek resonance.
It seeks compliance.
It does not ask:
What happened in the soul, in the silence, in the history of being?
It asks:
Was there proof? Was there a breach?
As if harm were a fact,
and not a fracture in the ethical order of relation.

Victims must perform coherence.
Aggressors must perform remorse.
Judges must perform neutrality.
And the system itself —
must pretend that the law is not a mask.

But law is not truth.
Law is a codification of what the system can bear.
And what it can bear
is always less than the real weight of violence.

This is why survivors often leave the courtroom feeling more violated.
Because their reality was not denied —
it was compressed
into a shape that could be processed,
judged,
and discarded.

True justice cannot exist
where resonance is excluded.
Where ethical rupture is reduced to legal breach.
Where the suffering of the body,
the silencing of generations,
the scream that never found its voice —
are treated as secondary to form.

What we call justice today
is an aesthetic of balance
for a society afraid to feel the depth of its own collapse.

Until we dismantle the stage,
until we let the truth remain raw, messy, embodied —
there will be no justice.
Only verdicts.