Law and shame are no longer able to prevent the de-civilization of power; the instruments created during cultural development have been systematically blunted. If they exist at all, they are now only meaningless empty words. Once again, the last Hesiodic goddesses of everyday life, Aidos and Nemesis—shame and balancing justice—have abandoned mankind. With this loss of civilizational achievements, the challenge of shaping a 'good' and 'well-ordered' society arises anew, a challenge that no one yet knows how to overcome without civilizational catastrophes. For the only means on which hope can be based, democracy, is de facto no longer available to us today. The surrogate that bears this name, largely emptied of its original meaning, was deliberately created in such a way that it cannot be used as an instrument to contain elite depravity. In what is probably the greatest word fraud in history, the civilizing guiding principle of democracy has been expropriated from us, falsified, and turned into its opposite: the rule of elites. However, undermining our natural moral capacities and our natural powers of resistance to manipulation and oppression requires appropriate techniques of systematic exploitation of the qualities of the human mind. Such techniques have been developed and refined over more than a century of capitalist elite democracy to such an extent that the de facto power relations and elite depravity have been rendered virtually invisible, and we ourselves have become complicit in our own oppression. Under extremely unfavorable conditions in the history of civilization, we are thus condemned to repeat the historical experience that elite depravity always paves the way to a civilizational abyss. Today, however, the difference is that the means of repression and military and ecological destruction are so great that they threaten human civilization as such.