A witch hunt almost never begins with a verdict. It begins earlier, in the quiet instant when a society agrees that a certain kind of person already carries the outline of danger. Not an act, not a proven offense, not an established fact, but a visible trait becomes enough to disturb the ordinary peace of a body moving through public space.
That was the old logic of Salem. Suspicion attached itself to a figure before it attached itself to an action. In contemporary Ukraine, under wholly different historical conditions and at an altogether different human cost, one can still discern a subtler version of the same psychological mechanism: a man of a certain age increasingly experiences the city not as common space, but as a zone of possible interruption.
The analogy should not be made crudely. This is not a literal repetition of Salem, nor should history be used as a theatrical shortcut. The point is psychological rather than historical. A witch hunt begins wherever the presumption of human dignity is quietly replaced by the presumption of suspicion.
As Daycom’s earlier analysis suggested, the most dangerous shift lies not even in any single act of coercion, but in a change of social optics. The moment a man in the street ceases to be perceived first as a citizen and begins to be perceived as a case, a unit, a body to be intercepted, the moral grammar of the state itself begins to erode.
The deepest harm of such practices is not only legal. It is atmospheric. It produces a new everyday fear. The city changes its internal geography. A man no longer counts only hours and errands, but routes, crossings, pauses, corners, places where it is better not to linger, not to meet a gaze too directly, not to let one’s ordinary presence become too visible.
From this emerges a distinct form of humiliation. A person has said nothing, done nothing, been convicted of nothing, and yet he is already compelled to move through the day as though his mere presence requires explanation. This is the psychological core of every witch hunt: not punishment after guilt is proven, but the pressure of self-justification before any genuine conversation has even begun.
A society organized this way slowly loses its finer distinctions. First the line between verification and ambush begins to blur. Then the line between law and force of habit. Then the line between citizen and presumed suspect. At a certain point, the male body in urban space is no longer treated as the bearer of rights, but as a problem to be intercepted, managed, neutralized.
That is where the contemporary shadow of the witch hunt appears in Ukraine—not as historical repetition, but as a regime of emotional sorting. Not everyone, not everywhere, not at every moment. But often enough for the atmosphere itself to change. A witch hunt always works through selective uncertainty: not every person will be stopped, but every similar person must learn to live as though he might be next.
This uncertainty is often more powerful than an open ban. It does not merely restrict movement. It reorganizes the psyche. A person learns to be less visible, less direct, less trusting. He begins to exist not in the logic of belonging, but in the logic of quiet survival within the very society that still claims him as its own. In such an inner landscape, the state ceases to feel like a frame of safety and starts to resemble an unpredictable force best avoided at close range.
And that is the central injustice. Not only the isolated incident of harshness or excess, but the way such practices gradually rewrite the anthropology of public space itself. The street ceases to be neutral. The courtyard, the crossing, the station, the shopping center, the square—each acquires a second, hidden meaning. A space that formally belongs to everyone begins, in practice, to distribute safety unevenly.
Psychologically, the effect is severe. A man who only yesterday was an unremarkable part of the city’s daily landscape begins to experience his own visibility as risk. His age, his posture, his clothing, his very mode of being present begin to work almost against him. He does not disappear from society, but his place within society is altered: he is no longer simply one participant among others, but someone whose visibility may be turned into vulnerability.
This is how a new bodily discipline of fear is formed. Lowered eyes. Tensed shoulders. The habit of anticipating a stranger’s movement before it occurs. Shortened routes. The instinct not to remain anywhere longer than necessary. Such things seem minor until they become widespread. But it is from such minor adaptations that humiliation is built, and societies are often slow to recognize humiliation when it wears the face of routine.
More dangerous still is the secondary morality that begins to form around it. Some onlookers start to see such a man not as a person in a difficult position, but as a figure who should first be suspected. A tired society grows rougher. It begins to search for shortened moral formulas. And at that moment, the witch hunt receives its most reliable fuel: not formal decree, but socially approved indifference.
Salem taught that a witch hunt does not begin with the gallows. It begins in the imagination that has already divided people into the fully recognized and those who may be placed in brackets. Modern Ukraine risks reproducing that mechanism not literally, but psychologically—when a man in the city feels less and less like a person among people, and more and more like a moving target for someone else’s certainty.
This is precisely where simplification becomes dangerous. History can be brutal. Circumstances can leave no easy answers. A state may ask much of a society. But no large purpose grows stronger when an ordinary person learns to move through everyday space in a posture of quiet huntedness. Once dignity disappears from the method, it begins, sooner or later, to disappear from the aim as well.
That is why the modern witch hunt is not about mysticism and not about reenacting an old script. It is about the moment when male presence in public space begins to function as a sign of prior suspicion. And wherever suspicion moves ahead of the person, injustice has already begun—even if no one has yet chosen to call it by its name.
The most unsettling part of this mechanism is that it nearly always disguises itself as necessity. That is why it is so difficult to recognize in time. A society tells itself that this is only temporary severity, an unavoidable deviation, a tolerable hardening of normal life. But the human psyche feels the truth earlier than public formulas do. It knows when order has stopped protecting and started searching.
And when that happens, more changes than one’s relationship to the street. The very relationship to a shared future begins to fray. Wherever a person no longer feels like the bearer of rights, he gradually ceases to feel like a full bearer of common meaning as well. This is how a quiet internal rupture opens between society and those whom it simultaneously calls its own and teaches to live as though they were not.
That may be the subtlest and most dangerous form of contemporary injustice. Not the loud declaration, but the everyday conversion of a person into a sign. Not the official formula, but the habit of seeing not a face, but a category. And it is from that nearly invisible shift that everything history later learns to call a witch hunt first begins.
