Jenn Writes

What must we think when a president, during a press conference, can hone in on a journalist doing her job and say, “she’s a horror show”, and the moment simply passes?

Not merely passes politically, but morally.

No visible discomfort from those around him. No meaningful defence of the journalist’s dignity. No national conversation about conduct, restraint, or the ethics of public engagement. Just another fleeting spectacle in the endless theatre of modern politics – clipped, reposted, argued over for a few hours, then absorbed into the atmosphere as though nothing particularly important had happened.

But something important did happen.

The office of a president is never ordinary. Words spoken from that position carry disproportionate force because power itself changes the meaning of language. A casual insult between equals is one thing. A public humiliation delivered by the head of state to a young journalist is another entirely. The imbalance matters. The symbolism matters. The emotional signal sent to the country matters.

In moments like these, the issue extends beyond whether one likes or dislikes the journalist involved, agrees with her reporting, or supports the president politically. Those are secondary questions. The deeper question concerns what kind of society is being normalised before our eyes.

What behaviour are citizens being taught to accept?

South Africa once aspired to a political language rooted not only in rights and institutions, but in moral imagination. The democratic project that emerged after apartheid carried with it a vocabulary of restraint, reconciliation, and shared humanity. Ubuntu was not presented as a decorative philosophy or cultural branding. It was understood, at least in principle, as a framework for public life.

“I am because you are, because we all are.”

This idea imposed obligations. It suggested that dignity was reciprocal, not selective. It insisted that power should be exercised with awareness of human consequences. Even disagreement was meant to occur within the boundaries of mutual recognition.

Ubuntu did not require softness. It did not prohibit criticism, anger, or confrontation. But it rejected humiliation as a form of public conduct because humiliation fractures the social fabric itself. It teaches people that dominance is more important than dignity.

And perhaps this is what feels so unsettling about moments like these: not only the insult itself, but the vacuum surrounding it.

No one pauses to ask whether a leader should speak that way to someone with far less power. No one asks what such conduct communicates to young people watching. No one asks whether democratic culture depends not only on laws and elections, but also on habits of respect.

Instead, public life increasingly treats cruelty as authenticity.

Across the world, politics has become performative in a way that rewards aggression. Leaders are encouraged to appear unrestrained, combative, and emotionally theatrical. Humiliation becomes proof of strength. Civility is mocked as weakness. Public degradation becomes entertainment for supporters who experience politics less as governance and more as emotional combat.

In such an environment, the insult itself is often defended as “telling it like it is”.

But this defence misses the central point entirely.

The question is not whether leaders should be emotionally honest. The question is whether societies can survive the erosion of basic norms of human regard. Democracies do not collapse only when constitutions fail. They also weaken when people become accustomed to contempt – when degradation becomes ambient and ordinary.

The danger lies in repetition.

A president humiliates a journalist. The crowd laughs. Colleagues remain silent. The news cycle moves on. Then the next insult comes easier. Soon the public no longer notices the moral threshold being crossed because the threshold itself has disappeared.

This is how political cultures change.

Not all at once, but through accumulated moments of tolerated diminishment.

The journalist in such moments becomes symbolic of something larger. She represents the citizen confronting power. If she can be publicly demeaned without consequence, then the message travels outward: accountability itself is unwelcome. Questions are irritants. Criticism deserves punishment. Human vulnerability is expendable in the pursuit of spectacle.

Ubuntu would ask us to see the moment differently.

Not as a contest with winners and losers, but as a rupture in relationship.

What happened to the humanity of the exchange? What happened to the recognition that even political opponents, critics, and journalists remain members of the same moral community? What happens to a society when public humiliation no longer shocks it?

Perhaps the most troubling part is not the insult itself, but the silence afterward.

Because silence is also a form of education.

It teaches citizens what is acceptable. It teaches young journalists what risks accompany asking difficult questions. It teaches ordinary people that power exempts itself from reciprocal dignity. And over time, it teaches a nation to lower its expectations of leadership.

A society rarely loses its moral vocabulary dramatically. More often, it loses it quietly, through repeated moments where people feel discomfort but suppress it for convenience, tribal loyalty, or exhaustion.

Then one day the language of shared humanity sounds naïve, outdated, almost embarrassing.

Yet South Africa’s greatest political inheritance was precisely the insistence that human beings remain bound to one another even after violence, division, and profound injustice. That inheritance should not be discarded casually in favour of the coarser emotional instincts of contemporary political culture.

Because once humiliation becomes normal, ubuntu becomes impossible to speak except as nostalgia.