Human Rights after 1945 and the Neoliberal Unmaking of Morality

HUMAN RIGHTS, 27 Jul 2026

Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service

20 Jul 2026 – Humanity came out of the Second World War staring into an abyss of its own making. The concentration camps, the mass bombings, the industrialised extermination of entire peoples and ways of life—these were not accidents or misunderstandings. They were the logical endpoint of a system that had fused bureaucratic rationality, racist ideology, and state power into a machinery of annihilation.

In the ruins of that machinery, the post‑war human rights project was born. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, later regional human rights regimes and constitutional charters: all of these were explicit attempts to say “never again,” not only in moral rhetoric but in law. They attempted to place limits on what states and markets could do to human bodies, communities, and environments. They tried, however imperfectly, to encode a minimum of human dignity into the operating system of global politics.

Yet barely a few decades later, another operating system began to dominate: neoliberalism. It promised freedom, efficiency, growth, and individual opportunity. In practice, it has systematically hollowed out the very conditions that post‑war human rights were meant to secure. And it has done so through a new kind of bureaucracy—one that wears the neutral mask of technocracy but behaves, in structural terms, like a regime of functional sociopathy and psychopathy.

This essay asks a simple but uncomfortable question: will we dare to recognise the horrors we are in the midst of, or will we, like so many after 1945, retreat into denial and “we didn’t know,” long after the damage is irreparable?

From “Never Again” to “Market Rules”

The post‑war human rights framework emerged under a clear memory of fascism, colonial brutality, and total war. Its architects had seen what happens when state power is unconstrained and entire categories of humans are declared disposable. They sought to erect universal norms that would bind states and, gradually, other powerful actors.

Yet even as these norms were codified, another trajectory was forming. Post‑war reconstruction, decolonisation, and the Cold War created an opening for a particular economic vision: the idea that markets, liberalised trade, and capital mobility would be the engines of peace and prosperity. Over time, this vision hardened into doctrine. It came with its own institutional architecture: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, structural adjustment programmes, investor‑state arbitration, and a dense web of trade and investment agreements.

Neoliberalism did not abolish human rights language; it swallowed it and rendered it largely toothless. Rights were tolerated as long as they did not fundamentally disrupt the primacy of capital flows, growth targets, and “competitiveness.” Social protections became “distortions.” Environmental safeguards became “non‑tariff barriers.” The very idea that the economy should be subordinated to human dignity and ecological limits was rebranded as unrealistic or extremist.

What emerged is a world in which human rights are honoured in declarations, courts, and commemorations, while the core machinery of economic power operates according to a different code: maximise returns, externalise costs, treat the living world as an infinite sink and source.

The Rise of Bureaucratic Sociopathy

Sociopathy and psychopathy are often framed as individual pathologies. But what happens when institutions reward traits that, at the system level, mimic these disorders?

Consider the structural incentives that govern many of our most powerful institutions:

• Corporations are legally structured to prioritise shareholder value, even when this conflicts with environmental sustainability or social wellbeing.
• Financial markets reward short‑term gains and speculative growth, punishing actors who choose slower, less destructive paths.
• Governments are evaluated on GDP growth, investor confidence, and fiscal discipline, even when these metrics correlate with ecological collapse and social precarity.

Within these structures, decision‑makers who consistently subordinate human and ecological concerns to “market logic” are not seen as disordered; they are seen as rational, responsible, successful. Compassion, precaution, and moral refusal are treated as weaknesses or inefficiencies.

This is what I mean by a bureaucracy of functional sociopathy and psychopathy: a system in which:

• Empathy is systematically filtered out of consequential decisions.
• Foreseeable harm to millions, even billions, is normalised as “collateral damage” or “unintended consequences.”
• The ability to dissociate from the suffering one’s decisions co‑produce is a tacit job requirement.

The point is not that all leaders are individually sociopathic or psychopathic. The point is that the system demands and rewards behaviours that, in another context, we would recognise as morally disordered.

Planetary Ecocide and Slow Genocide

The climate and ecological crisis is often described in neutral, technical terms: rising temperatures, biodiversity loss, deforestation, ocean acidification. These descriptions are not false, but they are radically incomplete. What we are living through is a planetary‑scale ecocide: the systematic, cumulative destruction of the life‑support systems on which countless human and non‑human communities depend.

This ecocide is not evenly distributed. It maps onto histories of colonialism, racism, class stratification, and gendered power. Those who contributed least to the problem—Indigenous peoples, small farmers, poor urban communities, children—are often those most exposed to its early and most brutal impacts. The same holds for many non‑human species and ecosystems, whose destruction is treated as an acceptable cost of “development.”

When the destruction of environments and life systems targets, or predictably devastates, particular peoples or ways of life, we enter the territory of genocidal dynamics—even if no one stands up and declares a “final solution.” Genocide does not always come in the form of gas chambers and explicit racial laws. It can also emerge through:

• The deliberate continuation of policies that are known to destroy the conditions for survival of particular communities.
• The displacement and cultural annihilation of peoples whose lands and life‑ways stand in the path of extractive projects.
• The toleration of climate and ecological impacts that make whole regions uninhabitable for those without the means to flee.

We are not yet at the point where international law recognises “systemic ecocide and slow genocide through environmental destruction” as a codified crime. But morally, the pattern is disturbingly familiar: defined groups are exposed to foreseeable lethal conditions, while those with power rationalise their inaction by invoking necessity, growth, or inevitability.

The New “Just Following Orders”

After 1945, one of the most disturbing defences heard in war crimes trials was “I was just following orders.” It forced the world to confront the possibility that ordinary people, within certain hierarchies and cultures, could participate in extraordinary crimes.

Today, the equivalent defence sounds slightly different:

• “I was just following market signals.”
• “I was just doing my duty to shareholders.”
• “I was just implementing the policy.”
• “I was just working within the mandate.”

The effect is the same: responsibility is diffused into the system, while individual actors claim that they had no real choice. Layers of bureaucracy and abstraction shield decision‑makers from the full reality of the harms they enable or authorise.

What makes this defence more insidious today is that it is often wrapped in the language of legality and even rights. Policies that strip communities of protection, expand fossil fuel extraction, or cut social supports are passed through parliaments, rubber‑stamped by courts, and legitimised by technocratic reports. We are not dealing with a “state of exception” in the classical sense; we are dealing with a state of normalised destruction, in which law itself becomes an instrument of ecocide and slow genocide.

The question is whether we will recognise this as it unfolds, or whether we will, like so many post‑war bureaucrats and citizens, insist that we did not understand the consequences.

The Refusal of Forensic Engagement

One of the most shocking aspects of our present moment is the widespread refusal—especially in parts of academia, law, and policy—to engage with the crisis at a forensic, systemic level.

We now have:

• Robust scientific frameworks, like the planetary boundaries and doughnut models, that show clearly when societies are operating outside safe and just limits.
• Detailed data on national and corporate contributions to ecological breakdown.
• Growing evidence that climate inaction and environmental destruction violate fundamental human rights.

Yet in many institutions, this evidence is treated as a backdrop, not as a trigger for structural accountability. Instead of asking, “Who is responsible? What duties are being breached? What legal and institutional changes are required?” the response often remains at the level of:

• Incremental reforms and “green growth” narratives.
• Technical fixes and voluntary pledges.
• Research and funding practices that avoid naming the economic and legal architectures at the heart of the problem.

This refusal to engage forensically is not neutral. It preserves the legitimacy of the current order and prevents the translation of empirical evidence into legal and political reckoning. It is, in effect, a form of institutional denial—a way of saying, “Yes, the house is burning, but we will continue to discuss the colour of the fire escapes.”

Will We Recognise Ourselves?

The haunting question is whether, in 30 or 50 years, survivors will look back on this period and hear familiar refrains:

• “We didn’t know it would be this bad.”
• “We thought someone else would act.”
• “We were constrained by the system.”
• “We were just doing our jobs.”

But we do know. We have the science, the law, the testimonies of affected communities, the warnings of youth and Indigenous movements, and the visible manifestations of collapse. We know that the current economic‑legal architecture is not a neutral backdrop but an active driver of ecocide and slow genocide. We know that the language of human rights rings hollow if it cannot constrain the very systems that make rights impossible to realise.

The question is not whether future generations will judge us. They will. The question is whether, while there is still time, we can shift from passive complicity to active transformation:

• From a human rights discourse that coexists with structural harm to one that takes systemic responsibility
• From a neoliberal rationality that normalises functional sociopathy to a political culture that rewards care, precaution, and solidarity.
• From a bureaucracy of denial to institutions willing to investigate, name, and dismantle criminogenic structures.

Toward a Forensic Human Rights Practice

If we are to avoid becoming the moral equivalent of those who claimed ignorance after 1945, we need a new practice of human rights: one that is forensic, systemic, and ecologically grounded.

Such a practice would:

• Use frameworks like the doughnut and planetary boundaries not just as planning tools but as evidence in legal and political processes.
• Treat sustained overshoot and social shortfalls as signs of systemic duty‑failure, triggering investigations into the economic and legal mechanisms responsible.
• Expand concepts like complicity, omission, and state responsibility to encompass deliberate inaction in the face of foreseeable ecocidal and genocidal risk.
• Create and empower institutions with mandates to investigate “doughnut violations,” attribute responsibility, and recommend or enforce structural remedies.

This is not about criminalising individuals for existing within a flawed system. It is about recognising that certain systemic mechanisms—certain combinations of law, policy, and economic power—are incompatible with human rights and planetary survival, and acting accordingly.

The post‑war human rights project tried to ensure that the horrors of fascism and total war would not be repeated. Neoliberalism has, in many ways, hollowed out that project while maintaining its rhetorical shell. The task now is to reclaim and radicalise the core insight: that law and institutions must be designed to protect the living, not to sanctify the freedom of capital to destroy.

We are not observers of a distant crisis; we are participants in a turning point. The choice is stark: either we recognise the horror while it unfolds and act to transform its causes, or we rehearse, once again, the tragedy of those who claimed, too late, that they had no idea what they were part of.

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Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher and social-ecological activist whose work focuses on the systemic links between financial architecture, systemic violence, ecocide, and global inequality.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 27 Jul 2026.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Human Rights after 1945 and the Neoliberal Unmaking of Morality, is included. Thank you.

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