By Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, General Secretary, ACT Alliance
Only days ago, the world marked World Humanitarian Day. We honoured those who enter places others are fleeing. We remembered humanitarian workers who have been killed while delivering food, medicine, shelter and protection. We repeated familiar words about humanity, neutrality, international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians.
Then the news cycle moved on. Not because the suffering ended. Not because the wars stopped. Not because the hungry were fed or the displaced returned home. It simply moved on.
In 2025, 907 humanitarian workers were killed, injured or kidnapped, according to figures highlighted by the United Nations for World Humanitarian Day; 350 of them were killed. Gaza remained the deadliest place for aid workers. Sudan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other crises continue to expose civilians and those trying to help them to extraordinary danger.
Yet much of what dominates our public conversation concerns something else: geopolitical competition, markets, artificial intelligence, elections, tariffs, military superiority, technological races, corporate valuations and the ambitions of powerful individuals.
These things matter. But perhaps we need to ask a more disturbing question: Have we confused what is important with what is powerful?
There is something profoundly wrong when humanity can discuss the next generation of artificial intelligence, missions beyond our planet and the accumulation of previously unimaginable fortunes while hundreds of millions of people still do not know whether they will eat tomorrow.
The latest global estimates suggest that around 645 million people faced hunger in 2025. At the same time, global military expenditure reached approximately US$2.9 trillion — the eleventh consecutive annual increase.
This is not an argument against technology. It is not an argument against legitimate security. And human curiosity, scientific discovery and exploration should be celebrated. The question is one of purpose and proportion.
What does it say about our civilization when we can mobilize extraordinary financial, scientific and political resources to develop weapons, algorithms and technologies capable of transforming life itself, yet repeatedly describe the resources required to feed people, protect refugees, respond to disease or prevent climate catastrophe as insufficient?
Perhaps our greatest crisis is no longer simply economic, political or environmental. Perhaps it is a crisis of moral imagination.
We have become very good at asking what humanity can do. We seem increasingly reluctant to ask what humanity should do. And behind that question lies another: Who decides what matters?
We should resist simplistic conspiracy theories. There is no single room somewhere in which a handful of people decide what eight billion human beings will think tomorrow. Reality is more complicated — and perhaps more troubling.
Political power, concentrated wealth, media ownership, algorithms, commercial incentives, military interests and geopolitical competition increasingly interact with one another. What attracts attention acquires political importance. What generates clicks attracts investment. What threatens powerful interests commands immediate action. What affects people without geopolitical influence can remain invisible for months or years.
The result is a hierarchy not simply of news, but sometimes of human worth.
- Some deaths shake governments. Others become statistics.
- Some violations trigger sanctions. Others trigger statements.
- Some refugees are embraced. Others are treated as threats.
- Some breaches of international law produce immediate consequences. Others produce another carefully worded communiqué expressing “deep concern”.
And that double standard is steadily eroding the moral credibility of the international system.
Consider what is happening now in the occupied West Bank. On 18 August 2026, Israeli authorities opened a tender for 1,234 housing units in the E1 area east of East Jerusalem, part of a wider plan for 3,401 units. The significance is not merely the number of houses. E1 occupies a strategic corridor whose development would further separate East Jerusalem from Palestinian communities in the West Bank and seriously disrupt territorial continuity between its north and south. The United Nations and European governments have repeatedly warned that settlement expansion there jeopardizes the viability of a future Palestinian state and therefore the prospects for a two-state solution.
The international community knows this. Governments condemn it. Diplomats issue statements. International law is cited. And then?
This is the uncomfortable question. At what point does condemnation without consequence become part of the problem? There are moments in history when saying that something is unacceptable while continuing to accept it is not diplomacy. It is contradiction.
This principle should apply universally. It cannot depend on whether the country violating international norms is an ally, an adversary, economically useful or militarily powerful. Human rights cannot mean one thing in Ukraine, another in Palestine, another in Sudan and yet another in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. International humanitarian law either protects human beings because they are human beings, or eventually it protects nobody.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo provides another painful example of what happens when suffering becomes normalized. The country is now facing the largest Ebola outbreak in its history. By 12 August, WHO reported 4,665 confirmed cases and 2,184 deaths in the DRC, with transmission across six provinces. The outbreak is unfolding amid armed conflict, population displacement, attacks on health facilities and severe limitations in access to healthcare, clean water, food and protection. WHO has specifically warned of the heightened danger posed to people living in overcrowded sites for internally displaced people.
Congolese authorities, WHO, local communities and humanitarian organizations are responding. But there is a difference between a response existing and the world responding with a seriousness proportional to the emergency.
Imagine the international reaction if thousands of Ebola cases were multiplying at this speed in London, Paris, Geneva or Washington. The virus would be on every front page. Emergency financing would appear. Political leaders would convene. Markets would react. Resources would move. Why should a Congolese life require a different threshold of urgency?
This is precisely where morality becomes more than charity. Compassion is not feeling sorry for someone far away. Compassion demands that we recognize that the value of another person’s life does not decrease with geographical distance, nationality, income, religion or political usefulness.
Cuba confronts us with another dimension of the same inconsistency. One does not need to defend the Cuban political system to recognize the human consequences of policies intended to isolate and punish the country.
The UN human rights office has warned that Cuba’s deepening socioeconomic crisis — amid longstanding structural problems, extreme weather, the decades-long embargo and more recent restrictions affecting oil supplies — is severely affecting access to electricity, water, food, medicine and healthcare. The World Food Programme likewise describes serious food-security challenges resulting from a combination of domestic economic conditions, disasters and the embargo.
And on 20 August, the United States announced another round of sanctions against Cuban officials and state entities. Again, we should ask a moral rather than ideological question:
When does political pressure on a government become collective punishment for ordinary people?
A child needing medicine is not a communist. A Palestinian child is not a terrorist. An Israeli child is not a government policy. A starving Sudanese family is not a military faction. A Congolese person fleeing an armed group is not a geopolitical calculation.
Human dignity cannot be conditional upon whether we approve of the government, army, ideology, ethnicity or religion associated with the territory where a person happens to have been born. This should also trouble religious communities.
Religion has inspired some of humanity’s greatest movements for justice, reconciliation, liberation and service. Faith has sent people into hospitals, refugee camps, prisons and disaster zones. It has taught generations that the stranger has dignity, that power must answer to conscience, that wealth carries responsibility, and that every human life has value beyond its economic productivity.
But religion can also be instrumentalized. When faith becomes a means of defining who belongs and who does not; when sacred texts are recruited to legitimize territorial ambition, racial superiority, nationalism, political authority or violence; when religion is used to silence dissent or portray entire populations as morally inferior, it has ceased to serve transcendence and has begun to serve power.
No religious tradition worthy of its deepest moral teachings should become an instrument for making another human being less human. And this brings us to artificial intelligence. AI may generate extraordinary benefits for medicine, education, agriculture, humanitarian response and human knowledge. We should welcome those possibilities. But technological capability does not automatically produce moral progress.
The UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence has already highlighted questions about concentration: who controls the infrastructure, who determines access, who captures the economic benefits, and how AI may affect employment, wages and inequality.
These are not secondary questions. If the technologies capable of shaping information, labour, political debate, military systems and economic opportunity become concentrated in the hands of a very small number of corporations, governments and extremely wealthy individuals, humanity could enter an era in which power is more concentrated than at any previous moment in history.
We should not fear intelligence. We should fear intelligence without ethics, power without accountability and innovation without purpose.
The same applies to wealth. There is nothing morally objectionable about creating prosperity. But wealth ceases to be merely private when its concentration gives a tiny number of individuals the ability to influence governments, media ecosystems, technology platforms and ultimately the conditions under which billions of other people live.
Estimates released in 2026 put the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires at a record US$18.3 trillion. The most important question is not whether someone should be allowed to become extraordinarily wealthy. It is whether wealth should be allowed to become political sovereignty.
We therefore return to the question at the beginning. Who is responsible for the direction humanity is taking? Is it the relatively small number of people controlling extraordinary concentrations of capital, technology, weapons, platforms and political access? Yes, they carry enormous responsibility. But the answer cannot stop there.
Governments are responsible when they surrender public policy to economic intimidation. Political leaders are responsible when they know that something is wrong but calculate that silence is safer. Corporations are responsible when profit is treated as detached from human consequence. Media institutions are responsible when the logic of attention makes spectacle more valuable than suffering. Religious leaders are responsible when they bless exclusion, remain silent before injustice or allow faith to become a weapon of political identity. International institutions are responsible when principles are applied selectively. And citizens also have responsibility.
Across 2026, people in many countries have gone — or will go — to the polls. Elections will not solve the moral crisis of our time. But they remain one of the moments when citizens can ask candidates questions deeper than the familiar ones about taxes, migration, security and economic growth.
Ask them:
- What kind of society are you asking us to become?
- Ask whether their security depends upon someone else’s insecurity.
- Ask whether economic growth that leaves millions behind is really progress.
- Ask whether they will defend international law when doing so is politically inconvenient.
- Ask whether they will protect minorities even when the majority does not demand it.
- Ask whether they consider compassion a weakness or an obligation of leadership.
- Ask whether they will stand up to powerful countries when pressure is exercised against the interests and dignity of their own people.
- And above all, ask whom they consider worthy of concern.
Because leadership is ultimately revealed not in the treatment of the powerful, but in decisions concerning those who have little power at all.
Political courage sometimes means telling an ally: No.
- It means saying that a civilian life cannot be negotiated away.
- That starvation cannot become a weapon.
- That humanitarian workers cannot become targets.
- That territorial ambition cannot override international law.
- That an epidemic among displaced people is not somebody else’s emergency.
- That sanctions designed to hurt governments cannot be morally indifferent to the suffering they impose on populations.
- That artificial intelligence must serve humanity rather than gradually redefining humanity according to the priorities of those who own it.
And yes, exercising such courage may have consequences. There may be commercial retaliation. Diplomatic pressure. Lost contracts. Sanctions. Political attacks. But if governments are unwilling to bear any cost for defending the principles they constantly proclaim, then those principles are not values. They are slogans.
We may already be approaching a dangerous threshold. Climate disruption is accelerating. Wars are becoming technologically more sophisticated. International law is increasingly contested. Economic inequality gives a small elite unprecedented influence. Artificial intelligence may magnify both human creativity and human manipulation. Religious identity is being weaponized in political struggles. And societies exhausted by crisis are becoming accustomed to suffering they would once have considered intolerable.
The greatest danger may therefore not be that humanity suddenly becomes cruel. It is that we gradually become accustomed to cruelty.
- That another dead child becomes a number.
- Another bombed hospital becomes a headline.
- Another starving community becomes an appeal.
- Another violated treaty becomes a statement.
- Another displaced population becomes a statistic.
And then we continue scrolling. There must be another way of measuring civilization.
- Not by the intelligence of our machines.
- Not by the distance our spacecraft travel.
- Not by the size of our armies.
- Not by stock-market capitalization.
- Not by the fortunes accumulated by the richest human beings who have ever lived.
Perhaps civilization should be measured by something much simpler: What happens to the person who has no power when they stand before those who have it?
That question belongs to religion, but it does not require religion. It belongs equally to humanism, ethics, philosophy, law and simple human decency.
Whatever our beliefs, most of us understand compassion. We understand fairness. We understand that children should not starve. We understand that hospitals should not be attacked. We understand that people should not be killed because of their identity. We understand that power should have limits.
Perhaps the world does not need another sophisticated definition of the problem. Perhaps it needs the courage to act on truths we already know.
- We possess unprecedented intelligence.
- We possess unprecedented wealth.
- We possess unprecedented technology.
- We possess institutions built precisely because previous generations experienced what happens when power is allowed to operate without moral limits.
The question is whether we still possess the moral courage to use them for humanity. And if we do not, then perhaps the most urgent question of our time is not where technology is taking us.
It is: Who are we becoming — and who have we decided is allowed to pay the price?
