The most telling characteristic of terminally dysfunctional polities is the perversion of language, as Thucydides explained long ago.

So, how do you cope in a place where all sorts of evil, mean-spirited and patently worthless individuals mouth the right words? Where the most socially iniquitous policies, privileging a few select minorities at the expense of the commonweal, are dubbed "socialism"? Where all sorts of prescriptive droits de seigneur, extorted through blackmail and violence by strategically situated groups with the correct political coloration and ties to power, are sanctified as "workers rights" at the same time as the vast majority of working people are strangled in order to maintain this discriminatory order? Where departments of state are given the fanciful names of "ministry of social solidarity" at the same time as the health service that they are supposed to administer has gone to the dogs? Where "business enterprise" means the privilege, granted by "bribe-devouring magistrates" (δωροφάγους βασιλήας, to remember good old Hesiod) to sell to the government useless products and services and/or those that are needed at a hundred times the normal price? Reactionary feudalism masquerading as "the social state".

Well, cope you do not. Your option is to migrate to another universe. If that does not work, you give thanks, to God or to whomever, that at least you were not born in Haiti. Beyond that you simply refuse to see and hear. You migrate to an inner space and try to build it up to a fortress named personal integrity.

This is no solution, certainly. The cacophony of malignant passions bent upon destroying the common good and interest for the sake of sordid egotism does penetrate through the cracks.

Worst of all, you keep hoping...Your antennae are still somehow turned towards that external spectacle of self-satisfied debauchery and callousness, because you grew up at a time when words did have their proper meaning more or less attached to them; at a time when to be public minded and care about the improvement of society carried with it a steep price in terms of private comfort and profit and was not a ticket to a hub of power from where to suck the marrow from society's bones. You are still looking for a ray of light in this abyss. The illusions of youth never really die. And what is more important they should not be described as dead to the young people. For if they perceive them as such, then their only option is to join the orgy of destruction, to become efficient exterminators themselves.