The Cost of Belief: What Survives When Illusions Crack
Preface
My mind was wandering today.
With the steady release of ugly files. With public reckonings. With spiritual icons, cultural figures, and institutions being exposed. With everyone suddenly taking sides, choosing narratives, issuing declarations, watching the noise build, watching people rush to wake others up, as if waking were something you could force without resistance.
It is a lot. I feel it. I see it.
I also recognise the pattern. When discomfort rises, many people do not look more closely. They narrow their vision. They protect what keeps their beliefs intact. They mute, block, and disengage. Not because they are incapable of understanding, but because the cost of seeing feels too high. Belief is safer than reckoning.
I saw this long ago. I spoke about it long ago. I was silenced, dismissed, or rewritten by narratives that preferred not to look. That experience cured me of the urge to convince anyone of anything.
I no longer wish to wake people up. Let them sleep. It is not my call.
I choose the middle path. I observe. I work through astrology, alchemy, and psychology. Not as spectacle. Not as persuasion. As pattern recognition. I watch behaviour. I listen to language. I notice action and its absence. I do not market. I do not push. I do not claim moral authority.
I answer questions when I am asked. I stand by my own values. I hold my own line.
I offer support to those who seek it, drawn from lived experience across many worlds within this one. I do not turn away from what feels uncomfortable, because discomfort is where individual change begins. Not collective slogans. Not mass movements. Individual behavioural shifts.
I gave up any desire to lead, to be followed, or to be seen as someone who knows. I am not a marketer. I lose more followers than I gain because what I offer is not performance. It is not optimised. It is not flattering. It is real.
Integrity is not rewarded in this world. It is often overlooked, dismissed, or quietly sidelined. I am at peace with that. I am not willing to trade alignment for approval, or truth for popularity.
As I reflected on the current moment and how everything connects, one thing became clear. Our world, and its psychological foundation, are not built for reconstruction. A truly new world would require a price too high for most people to pay.
This essay is not a call to arms. It is not an attempt to persuade. It is an observation. A record of patterns. A refusal to look away.
On Language
Words are weapons. Not because they are loud, but because they are flexible.
It does not matter which world someone speaks from. Political. Spiritual. Cultural. Ethical. Words are shaped to suit whatever narrative is being defended. The same language can justify harm, excuse avoidance, or signal virtue, depending on who is holding it.
I remember clearly how truth was often met, not with debate, but with dismissal. Let it go. Drop the story. Move on. Do not dwell. Do not make it uncomfortable. You can trust me. My word is my bond. I am a vault. I swear on my children. I would never lie. If I say it, I will do it.
This language functions as shorthand for trust while quietly shutting down further inquiry. It is not reassurance. It is silencing without appearing hostile. It is about containment and control.
Language is rarely neutral. It is masked, softened, and polished. Marketing understands this instinctively. Lawyers depend on it. Legal and political systems are built on how words are heard, shaped, and managed rather than what they actually mean. Award shows celebrate them. News cycles repeat them. Sports commentary reframes them. Power uses language not for accuracy, but for control.
Words are chosen for rhythm. For memorability. For how easily they can be repeated without context. People remember what rhymes, not what requires context. What fits on a banner. What feels good to say out loud.
Complex truth does not travel well. It does not compress. It does not trend. So it is edited down until it becomes harmless, or stripped of meaning entirely.
This is how narratives survive scrutiny. Not by being true, but by being familiar.
Once language is shaped this way, it trains behaviour. People learn what can be said safely. What will be rewarded. What will be ignored. Over time, silence starts to look like wisdom, and discomfort is reframed as unnecessary drama.
This matters because systems are maintained through language long before they are enforced through action. If something cannot be named clearly, it cannot be challenged clearly. And if it cannot be challenged, it persists.
This essay does not attempt to simplify. It does not offer slogans. It does not promise comfort. It uses language deliberately, not to persuade, but to describe what is already visible to anyone willing to sit with it long enough.
Truth does not need to rhyme.
It is often uncomfortable. Rarely convenient.
It needs to be honourable, precise, and handled with care.
Even then, it will meet objections and interpretation.
What you do with it is your choice.
Fashion, Myth, and the Cost of Genius.
Fashion likes to present itself as art, but it operates more like mythology. The industry elevates individuals into near-divine creators, while the systems and people that make their work possible remain hidden. This is not accidental. Myth is profitable. Transparency is not.
The modern fashion industry was built on the idea of singular genius. One name on the label. One mind behind the vision. That framing allows brands to claim originality while absorbing labour, culture, and technical knowledge from others without attribution. Once a myth is established, it becomes self-protecting. Consumers defend it. Media repeats it. Archives quietly omit inconvenient facts.
The case of Coco Chanel is instructive. She is still positioned as a feminist icon and creative revolutionary. The historical record tells a colder story. Chanel relied heavily on unnamed seamstresses, patternmakers, and collaborators while aggressively consolidating credit under her own name. During the Nazi occupation of France, she attempted to seize full control of the Chanel perfume business by exploiting antisemitic laws to remove her Jewish business partners. Her cruelty was not incidental. It was strategic.
What matters is not that Chanel behaved badly. Many people did. What matters is how effectively the brand erased this reality and replaced it with a consumable fantasy. This became the blueprint for modern luxury.
Contrast this with designers whose originality stems from process rather than persona.
Issey Miyake explicitly rejected the idea of the lone genius. He described his work as collaborative and technical, consistently crediting engineers, textile developers, and production teams. His Pleats Please line was not about surface aesthetics but about material innovation, durability, and accessibility. He spoke openly about wanting to create clothes that last, not clothes that dominate. His work still existed within global capitalism, but the intent and structure were transparent. The art was in the method.
Rei Kawakubo built an entirely internal design language. She did not rely on appropriating marginalised cultures or romanticising labour. Her work dismantled Western ideas of beauty, gender, and form. She has stated that she does not think of herself as a fashion designer at all, but as someone creating new values. Her ethics are not gentle. Her workplaces are demanding. But her originality is real and traceable, not extracted.
Alexander McQueen’s legacy is often flattened into spectacle. He was trained in Savile Row tailoring and treated craft as a form of intelligence. He openly acknowledged his mentors and teams. His work drew on history, trauma, and personal experience rather than anonymous labour pools. His collapse was not the result of exploiting others at scale, but of being consumed by an industry that rewards excess and punishes vulnerability.
Vivienne Westwood occupies a more contradictory position. She pioneered punk aesthetics and later became an outspoken environmental activist. She used her platform to criticise overproduction and climate collapse while continuing to operate a global brand. Her ethics were sincere but inconsistent. She represents the limits of individual morality inside a system designed to reward growth above all else.
The uncomfortable truth is this. No fashion designer has achieved global power, wealth, and influence without ethical compromise. The system does not allow it. What exists instead is a spectrum. At one end are brands built almost entirely on myth, extraction, and erasure. At the other end are designers who prioritised originality, transparency, and collaboration, even when it limited their scale.
Fashion’s reckoning will not look like Hollywood’s. There will be no single scandal. No dramatic fall from grace. It will come through archives, lawsuits, labour data, and boredom. When consumers realise that many luxury brands are selling recycled ideas at obscene markups, produced by invisible workers, the magic weakens.
Luxury depends on belief. Once belief cracks, the industry is forced to confront what remains. Clothes. Labour. Margins. Truth.
Fashion has always known how to tell a beautiful story. The next phase will depend on whether it can survive being understood.
The Consumer Is Not Innocent
There is one final discomfort the fashion, film, and music industries prefer to avoid. None of this survives without buyers. Power does not only sit at the top. It circulates through money.
People like to say they are powerless, but every purchase is a vote. Not a symbolic one. A literal one. When consumers reward brands, celebrities, and designers with money, attention, and cultural relevance, they validate the system that produced them. Exploitation does not need universal consent. It only needs enough demand to stay profitable.
This is why ethical language has become a marketing tool rather than a practice. Movie stars, music stars, and fashion icons speak ethics far more fluently than they practise them. Sustainability, empowerment, and inclusivity. These words are deployed strategically, not structurally. They calm the buyer while leaving the system intact.
A clear example is the celebrity perfume economy. A famous name attached to a chemically dense fragrance launches and sells out instantly. Consumers rush to buy proximity to an icon, not a product they understand. These perfumes are often toxic to skin, harmful to waterways, and produced in factories where labour protections are minimal or nonexistent. The environmental and human cost is well documented, yet the product is rewarded with massive sales, glowing press, and industry accolades.
Poison remains poison, even when it comes in beautiful packaging.
What is being purchased is not scent. It is identity. A feeling of belonging. A fantasy of access. This is how the system sustains itself. Harm is abstracted. Responsibility is diffused. Everyone points upward while continuing to pay in.
The fixation on individual villains allows society to pretend the problem is isolated. It is not. Abuse, exploitation, and extraction are not glitches in the system. They are features. They appear differently across industries, but the logic is the same. Power concentrates. Labour disappears. Profit is laundered through story.
Looking away does not make one neutral. It makes one complicit.
Fashion’s reckoning will not arrive through outrage alone. It will arrive when consumers stop confusing aesthetics with ethics, branding with values, and rhetoric with practice. When people stop buying myths and start asking who benefits, who pays, and who is erased.
Until then, the industry will keep selling belief. And belief remains far more profitable than truth.
No One Is Exempt
This is not written from a box seat. There is no claim of purity here. Participation in modern life means participation in compromised systems. Consumption alone implicates everyone.
The point is not finger-pointing. It is pattern recognition.
These are not small industries. Fashion, film, music, beauty, and manufacturing. They are multi-billion-dollar machines. Any system that concentrates that much power while obscuring labour will carry corruption within it, not as an anomaly, but as a structural condition. The ethics governing sex trafficking, financial exploitation, labour abuse, and environmental destruction are not separate categories. They are variations of the same logic. Extract. Obscure. Reward. Repeat.
Condemning one visible villain while continuing to fund adjacent systems is how the illusion stays intact.
This position is observational, not superior. It examines the psychology of outrage, how quickly people condemn individuals while refusing to interrogate the systems they support. There is comfort in believing the problem is external, isolated, and solvable by shaming someone else. That comfort is part of the fantasy.
The world has been sold a story. A seductive one. A story about glamour, success, access, status, and belonging. A modern Emerald City built on branding and belief. For a long time, the illusion held.
It is cracking now. Not because people are suddenly better, but because the scale has become impossible to hide. Supply chains are exposed. Archives are opening. Narratives no longer align with lived reality. The myth is failing under its own weight.
When illusions collapse, responsibility moves closer to the individual.
The question is not who is guilty. The question is what happens next. What do you support now that you know what you know. What do you buy, endorse, repost, defend, or excuse. Do you ask harder questions. Do you follow the money. Do you understand who benefits from your participation and who pays for it.
Ethics are not proven by outrage. They are revealed by behaviour.
Will it change, or will it be selective.
History suggests selectivity.
A total ethical overhaul would require dismantling almost every major commercial system we rely on. Food. Furniture. Consumer goods. Fashion. Beauty. Materials. Film. Music. Even the commodification of ethics itself. None of these industries survives scrutiny intact. They are built on extraction, scale, and distance from consequence. Pull one thread honestly, and the entire fabric begins to unravel.
That level of change is not reform. It is rupture. And rupture is politically inconvenient.
This is where politics enters. Not party politics, but power politics. Everyone is implicated. Everyone is either a player or a supporter, actively or passively. Even refusal to engage preserves the status quo. Avoidance is easier than confrontation. Blame feels righteous. Change is exhausting, destabilising, and personally costly.
Most people do not want the truth if it demands sacrifice. They want accountability without loss. Ethics without consequence. That is why change, when it comes, is usually cosmetic. A few figures are sacrificed. Language is updated. Marketing adjusts. The machine keeps running.
What replaces systemic change is moral triage. Some behaviours are condemned loudly. Others are quietly normalised. Selective outrage becomes a pressure valve. It releases tension without altering structure.
Real dismantling would threaten jobs, markets, national interests, and lifestyles. It would require less convenience, less abundance, less speed, and less fantasy. That is a hard sell in any political system addicted to growth.
So the likely outcome is not collapse, but curation. Certain abuses are named. Others are relabelled. The illusion evolves rather than disappears.
Which brings it back, uncomfortably, to the individual again.
Large-scale change does not begin with moral consensus. It begins with sustained refusal. Fewer people buying the lie. Fewer people defending what they benefit from. More people willing to sit with discomfort rather than outsource it to outrage.
Blame is easy. Change is slow, unglamorous, and unrewarded.
The question is not whether the world will change completely. It almost certainly will not. The question is whether enough individuals will change their behaviour quietly, consistently, and without applause.
Because that is the only kind of change that ever has.
Delahrose Roobie Myer
Confidante • Catalyst • Clarifier
Depth • Design • Direction
“I work with people during periods of upheaval to help them orient, clarify what’s happening beneath the surface, and make grounded decisions rather than reactive ones.”
Author, Fatima’s Alchemy: A Treasure to Behold
Hardcover available via major booksellers
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FIABCI World Prix d’Excellence Silver Medallist, Sustainable Design
Founder, Awaken Designs
“Sunrise at 1770,” Queensland, Australia
