The 10 Modern Plagues: Not divine. Self-imposed.
- Leah
- Mar 27
- 2 min read
Every society has its plagues.
The biblical plagues were unmistakable — dramatic, visible, impossible to ignore. Ours aren’t.
What if ours don’t feel like plagues? What if they feel like normal?
They didn’t arrive in dramatic waves or by God’s hand. They crept in. A little less trust. A little more noise. A little quicker to anger. A little slower to care.
What makes our plagues different: They’re participatory.
We’re not just living through them. We’re inside them — feeding them, forwarding them, funding them with our attention and our silence.
That’s why so many don’t notice. Or perhaps you did.
The 10 Modern Plagues
Disinformation Swarms — Truth drowns beneath distortion: half-truths, manipulated narratives, convenient lies.
Algorithmic Manipulation — Invisible systems shape what we see, desire, and despise.
Outrage Contagion — Anger becomes currency; empathy is treated as weakness.
Trust Erosion — Confidence collapses: first in truth, then in institutions, then in each other.
Civic Apathy — People stop showing up; corruption and injustice thrive in their absence.
Dehumanisation Capitalism — Profit prevails, even when people are harmed, exploited, or humiliated.
Moral Inconsistency — Justice for some. Excuses for others.
Normalisation of Lawlessness — What’s excused spreads. What’s repeated becomes normal.
Celebrated Cruelty — Harm is excused — or even cheered — when it hits the 'right' targets.
Permission to Dehumanise — Some lives are treated as worth less — and we act accordingly.
These weren’t handed down to us. They weren’t inevitable. Some invited them. Most of us permitted them — gradually, collectively, often without noticing… until noticing required effort.
The old story of the plagues and exodus began the same way: Someone notices that something feels wrong. At some point, a threshold is crossed, it couldn't be ignored — and everything that followed, followed.
But there’s a major twist in our story: An exodus isn’t the answer. Because the modern plagues travel.
They’re not attached to geography; they’re attached to us. To the systems we build, the platforms we use, the norms we let slip.
You cannot leave a plague that lives in the architecture of modern life.
You cannot leave what you cannot see. You cannot resist what you haven’t named. You cannot fix what you’ve chosen to accept as normal.
The modern exodus isn't a departure. It's a decision to stay — and to actively defend what you're not willing to lose.
That requires knowing where your lines are. What you will and won't accept. What you refuse to let become the new normal. Because the plagues don't need force. They only need permission — and permission comes in the form of silence, of scrolling past, of deciding it's not your fight.
Draw the lines. Then hold them.
So instead of asking where the plagues will lead us, here’s the question we should be asking:
What have we started to accept — that we wouldn’t have, a few years ago?
Sit with it. It has a way of drawing a line.
The Red Lines Series is a set of open, intellectually honest conversations about the questions that don’t get enough airtime. It launches soon.
Come if you think clearly. Stay if you’re willing to be uncomfortable.
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