Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph Steadman

Moral authority is dead here, and Steadman is writing its obituary in the only medium that still feels honest to him: grotesque exaggeration. As a cartoonist forged in the acid bath of late-20th-century media (and famously entangled with Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo view of America), he treats public ethics not as a failing but as a format problem. If morality once arrived with institutions, clergy, law, or leaders, he suggests it now arrives as programming: packaged, scored, and switched off.

The line about "world opinion" being "a game show" is doing more than sneering at shallow crowds. It attacks the mechanics of attention: audiences trained to clap on cue, contestants reduced to types, the whole thing engineered for suspense rather than truth. "Game show" implies rules that are arbitrary but rigid; you don't win by being right, you win by playing to the host, the edit, the commercial break. In that frame, outrage and virtue become strategies, not convictions.

The final twist - good and evil as "changing channels" - lands because it's an image of frictionless choice. Channel-surfing is consequence-free; it flatters the viewer with control while keeping them passive. Steadman isn't claiming people can't tell right from wrong. He's saying the culture has made moral judgment feel like consumer preference: if it makes you uncomfortable, click away. It's a bleak diagnosis, but also a cartoonist's dare: if morality has been "laid to rest", who exactly is holding the shovel - and who's watching from the couch?