This essay does not celebrate despair, nor does it romanticise sacrifice. It asks a harder question: why do extreme acts of protest so often dissolve into symbols, while the structures they resist remain intact? Across history, systems rarely collapse because of moral shock alone. They adapt. They absorb. They reclassify disruption as pathology, heroism, or tragedy—anything but structural critique. What appears as radical rupture is frequently metabolised as individual exception. The problem,
